Always looking for ways to get young people engaged in progressive politics, my colleagues over at Campus Progress Action teamed up with the Young Invincibles project to produce this ad touting how health reform would cover young Americans:

This strikes me as a fairly clever effort to remind people that the law does a lot of good for younger people. Under the current system, some 30% of young people are uninsured because, as a group, they have higher rates of unemployment, earn less than older Americans, or feel like they don’t need insurance. The healthy among them may be sucked into cheaper subprime coverage on the individual market — that’s a desirable group from the insurers’ perspectives — but that coverage will not work if they become sick and need actual care.

Under reform, not only are young people going to benefit from the early provisions in the Patients’ Bill of Rights (as the video points out), but they’ll also have coverage options in the exchanges and could even enroll in a more affordable (but less comprehensive) young invincibles insurance plan. Interestingly, that last option was included at the behest of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) but all of these early provisions — like much of the health care law — have a lot of bipartisan support, despite the GOP’s repeal rhetoric. Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle even proposed legislation that “would have gone a step further than the Democrats’ new health care law by requiring the coverage of adult children up to age 30.”

You can take the Getting Covered pledge by clicking over here.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD)’s new book Getting It Done: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate To Make Way for Health Care Reform comes out next week, but this morning he spoke to me about some of the concessions the administration made to pass reform and the shortcomings in the Affordable Care Act.

In his book, Daschle reveals that after the Senate Finance Committee and the White House convinced hospitals to to accept $155 billion in payment reductions over ten years on July 8, the hospitals and Democrats operated under two “working assumptions.” “One was that the Senate would aim for health coverage of at least 94 percent of Americans,” Daschle writes. “The other was that it would contain no public health plan,” which would have reimbursed hospitals at a lower rate than private insurers.

I asked Daschle if the White House had taken the option off the table in July 2009 and if all future efforts to resuscitate the provision were destined to fail:

DASCHLE: I don’t think it was taken off the table completely. It was taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others. I mean I think that part of the whole effort was based on a premise. That premise was, you had to have the stakeholders in the room and at the table. Lessons learned in past efforts is that without the stakeholders’ active support rather than active opposition, it’s almost impossible to get this job done. They wanted to keep those stakeholders in the room and this was the price some thought they had to pay. Now, it’s debatable about whether all of these assertions and promises are accurate, but that was the calculation. I think there is probably a good deal of truth to it. You look at past efforts and the doctors and the hospitals, and the insurance companies all opposed health care reform. This time, in various degrees of enthusiasm, they supported it. And if I had to point out some of the key differences between then and now, it would be the most important examples of the difference.

Despite being “taken off the table” as a result of the “understanding,” the White House continued to publicly deny claims that it was backing away from the provision even as it tried to focus on other aspects of the bill. “Nothing has changed,” said Linda Douglass, then communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform in August of 2009 and many times thereafter. “The president has always said that what is essential is that health insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals.”

Daschle also said that he was disappointed that the law did not include greater specificity about ways to control health care spending and reform the delivery system. “I’m concerned that we are going to do potentially not achieve all that we might have achieved had we been more specific,” he said. “We lay out a very clear 10-year schedule, with great specificity about how insurance reform is going to work…[but] we don’t do that nearly as much with cost-containment and with delivery reforms.” “I think we could have put into the legislation specific targets and actions that would be required have to do with unnecessary care, in terms of primary care, transparency and even a more ambitious and delineated schedule for HIT, moving away from fee-for-service.”

Asked about the future of health reform, Daschle said he was “reasonably confident” that the government would prevail in the state legal challenges to the individual mandate, although admitted that “given the unpredictability of the Supreme Court as well as other appeals courts, it’s not as much of a closed case as I think as it should be.” He also expressed concern that newly elected Republican governors would refuse to implement the law, but said he had “two sources of general confidence building” about the GOP promise to defund the law, should they regain control of the House.

“A lot of what we did in health care reform has more of an entitlement than a discretionary funding base. So as an entitlement, they would really have to change the law rather than simply not fund in order for it to be effected. The entitlement sections of the legislation are going to be fairly immune from defunding,” Daschle predicted. He also added that approval will likely increase as different benefits become available.

Daschle’s book, published by St. Martin’s Press, comes out next Tuesday, October 12th. To read more of my interview with Daschle, including his response to whether or not Obama advocated for progressive ideas, click here. Read more

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) — who was actually an early skeptic of the law and is in some serious trouble this election year — is at least the third Democrat to campaign on his support for the Affordable Care Act. Pomeroy is running an ad accusing challenger Rick Berg (R), of putting “big insurance first” and “voting to make it easier for insurers to deny coverage” and like Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) before him, touting the more popular elements of reform in the hope that Americans will remember why they thought they needed reform in the first place.

Watch all 3 pro-reform adds:

It’s unclear how successful any of this will be, but Democrats can take solace in the fact that pieces of reform are still popular and the opposition may actually be overstated. As CAP’s Ruy Teixeira points out, while 40% of Americans said they had an unfavorable view of the Affordable Care Act in the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, about one-third of those with an unfavorable view think it should still be given a chance to work and a relatively small percentage is actually as “angry” about the law as Republicans would have you believe.

The larger point is, that by running on reform (rather than running away for it) Democrats can keep GOP’s misconceptions about the law from hardening into conventional wisdom. As E.J. Dionne put it yesterday, “If Democrats say nothing about what the actual health-care law does, the parody is all that will stick in voters’ minds. Its champions rarely talk about the measure as a whole because it will take longer than a brief election campaign to clean off all the mud that’s been splattered on this baby, which is still tainted by the ugly, drawn-out process that produced it.”