Politico’s Sarah Kliff points out that conservative efforts to repeal health care reform through lawsuit or state referendum — you can see who’s doing what here — are running into roadblocks, as voters are quickly turning against the idea. “By a slight majority, likely voters tend to oppose the health care reform law. But they also tend to oppose the repeal lawsuits as a ‘bad idea’ that would, for a sizeable portion of voters, make them ‘less likely’ to support a given candidate. In short, voters simultaneously don’t want to health care reform but don’t want to challenge it either,” Kliff notes:

The findings are particularly pertinent in Florida, where the Republican candidate for governor, state attorney general Bill McCollum, has been a leader in repeal movement. McCollum lead a coalition of 12 states in filing health care reform repeal lawsuits the day after the bill passed in the House.

The Quinnipiac poll found that the majority of Florida voters (54 percent) say it’s a “bad idea” for McCollum to file a lawsuit challenging health care reform; 38 percent say it makes them less likely to support his gubernatorial bid. Among independents the lawsuit is particularly disliked: 41 percent oppose the lawsuit challenge, while 27 percent support it.

Florida voters generally disapprove of health care reform, by about 48 to 44 percent but trying to stop it in court “is probably not going to help McCollum at this point,” says Brown.

Indeed earlier this week, Bryant Furlow reported that residents in New Mexico are actually discouraging their attorney general from joining the constitutional lawsuit challenging reform. “So far there are more than 750 comments,” AG Spokesman Phil Sisneros said. “Early on, most were clearly for joining the other states’ lawsuit but in the last few days many are urging the AG not to join.” Meanwhile, the efforts of states to pass legislation nullification the law may also be waning. As the Progressive States Network details, of the 40 something states that have introduced nullification legislation, 22 have failed to pass their bills and only 3 have succeeded. Look:

So not surprisingly, taking stuff away from people isn’t very popular. But the failure of these frivolous measures doesn’t mean that Republicans won’t keep on trying or that the public will embrace health care reform. The success of the law will likely depend on the effectiveness of implementation and the very fact that states are resisting the reform and using its unpopularity as a campaign wedge issue, suggests that the road to 2014 and beyond will be a bumpy one.

Americans are still not convinced that the health care law will lower costs — Gallup just found that individuals are no less concerned about paying the costs of a serious illness or accident, or normal healthcare costs, than they were last year — and state and federal regulators will have to work very hard to prove them wrong.

Yesterday, the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee held a hearing on health care transparency and considered several bills that would require “providers, payers and vendors to publicly disclose the cost of their services.” Instinctively, more transparency sounds like a good thing and Republicans are always claiming that empowering consumers will significantly lower health care spending. But over at the WSJ Health Blog, Katherine Hobson points out that too much transparency could actually increase health care spending. Why? Peter Orszag explains:

On the provider side, more transparency would make information about the prices that hospitals, physicians, and drug companies charge insurers more visible, but whether such disclosure would lead to higher or lower prices for consumers on average is unclear and depends on the nature of competition in the relevant market. The markets for some health care services are highly concentrated, so increasing transparency in such markets could lead to higher, rather than lower, prices because higher prices are easier to maintain when the prices charged by each provider involved can be observed by all of the others. However, aggregated information or information on average prices would make it more difficult for providers to coordinate higher prices because individual providers’ prices would not be obvious. Whatever the effect on average prices, more transparent prices would probably reduce the range of prices.

If we’re going to drag Orszag to the hill to explain how greater transparency will affect health care spending, we should probably mention that posting the prices of essential services could also discourage patients from investing in needed care, leading them to allude the kind of preventive services that would prevent more expensive chronic conditions.

But generally, the back and forth about transparency misses the forest for the trees. If we’re really trying to lower health care spending, then we should stop looking at care in pieces — this service costs this, and that service costs that — and think about treating the patient more holistically through care coordination, accountable care organizations, medical homes and the like. The new health law will invest in these kinds of reforms, but lawmakers will have to stop believing that transparency is some kind of silver bullet — after all, other countries don’t have transparent systems and their prices are lower — before we can see real delivery reform and lower costs.

Yesterday, lawmakers in Kansas proposed a new way to stigmatize abortion and place it out of reach of even more lower income women: taxing it. David Klepper of the Kansas Star reports that State Sen. Mary Pilcher (R) proposed the measure as an alternative revenue raiser:

Lawmakers anxious to avoid a general tax increase have offered several creative alternatives raising revenue. Some say the state could sell some of its buildings and land. Others suggest going after tax cheats and Medicaid fraudsters, privatizing services, or raising the court fees for criminals.

But Sen. Mary Pilcher Cook may have just offered the most unique idea so far: impose a sales tax on abortion. Pilcher Cook, a Shawnee Republican, offered the idea as an amendment today as the Senate debates a 1-cent sales tax increase. Her amendment would also decrease the proposed sales tax hike to .9 cents.

She noted that governments routinely use tax policy to effect behavior – cigarette and liquor taxes, for example, or tax breaks designed to spur economic activity. “If you want less of something, you tax it,” Pilcher Cook said.

Several Senators liked the idea. Sen. Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, said it would not only reduce abortions, it might also convince another late-term abortion provider from setting up shop in Kansas now that George Tiller’s clinic is closed. Most resisted the idea, though no critics voiced opposition to the abortion tax. Instead, they argued against reducing the overall sales tax increase.

The amendment ultimately failed 17-22 and the legislature opted for a 1-cent sales tax increase to preserve “spending for schools and social services.” Piltcher offered her amendment just days after a new report from the Guttmacher Institute concluded that the stigma surrounding abortion coverage is already pushing insured women to pay for the procedure out of their own pockets. The report also suggested that poor women are obtaining abortions in greater numbers than women from other income brackets, as women find it more difficult to access affordable birth control during an economic recession.

This is the second setback in a week for anti-abortion activists in Kansas. Earlier this week, the Kansas legislature failed to overrule Gov. Mark Parkinson’s veto of a late-term abortion bill that would have “require physicians to give the medical diagnosis that prompted them to authorize the abortion. State law prohibits abortions during or after the 22nd week of pregnancy, unless a doctor determines that the pregnancy constitutes a serious health threat