Obamacare continues to win

His win in North Carolina signals bigger changes.

Government benefits began their existence as objects of partisan rancor and harsh criticism. Eventually, however, they became so popular that politicians from both parties promised to protect them.

So did Social Security and Insurance -disease. And now the pattern seems to be repeating itself with Obamacare.

Consider what happened recently in North Carolina: just a decade after Republican politicians in the State have described the law as dangerous and refused to sign on for its Medicaid expansion, Republicans and Democrats have come together to enact such an expansion. North Carolina's Republican-controlled House passed the bill 87-24, while the Republican-controlled Senate passed it 44-2.

" Wow, things have changed," Jonathan Cohn wrote in a HuffPost article explaining how the turnaround came about.

Obamacare - the biggest expansion in nationwide health insurance since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 - still isn't as widely accepted as those programs. North Carolina became the 40th state to agree to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, meaning 10 states still haven't, including two of the largest, Texas and Florida. In these states, more than 3.5 million adults therefore do not have health insurance.

But the list of states that enroll in the program seems going in one direction: It keeps growing.

In its growing acceptance, Obamacare resembles other major elements of the federal safety net:

When Congress considered Social Security in 1935, conservatives and many business leaders bitterly criticized it. A Texas newspaper described Social Security as "a huge sales tax on everyone in the name of old people." A Wall Street Journal op-ed predicted the law would ultimately be cause for Congress to look back in "humiliation." Not exactly: Social Security is so popular that it's known as a third rail in American politics.

When Congress was debating Medicare in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan, then an actor with a growing political profile – attacked the program as a step towards socialism. If he passed, Reagan warned, "We're going to spend our last years telling our children, and our children's children, what America once looked like when men were free." As president, Reagan praised and supported the program.

After Congress created Medicaid - a health insurance program primarily for low-income households - in 1965, some states did not initially join. Arizona became the last to do so, in 1982.

In the early years after Obamacare passed in 2010, the division was similar. Blue states embraced it, while many red states rejected its voluntary Medicaid expansion. In Washington, Congressional Republicans and Donald Trump tried to repeal it. Some Republican-appointed judges struck down parts of it, and every Republican appointee on...