Now that the 116th Congress has been elected and 80 new members are headed to Washington, new legislative bodies in states across the country could help governors move forward with the some of the health care decisions they’ve been putting off.

In Colorado, for example, the new Democrat-controlled House hopes to pressure Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) to officially accept Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid program, which could benefit an additional 200,000 Colorado residents. Some governors, including Hickenlooper, have been dragging their feet on deciding whether to participate in the expansion — even though expanding Medicaid would help extend coverage to millions of additional low-income Americans who currently can’t afford health insurance. The governor has yet to take a position on the issue, but the new legislature wants to change that:

Tuesday’s election results ensure that implementation of Obamacare will proceed on a fast track in Colorado and Democratic lawmakers want to move ahead with Medicaid expansion that could bring health coverage to nearly a quarter million low-income Coloradans.

“We would like to push to get health care to as many people as possible because that’s going to reduce the costs for everyone,” said Rep. Mark Ferrandino, D-Denver, who is expected to take the reins of the Colorado House in January after Democrats recaptured control of it on Tuesday. [...]

“With the feds picking up 100 percent in the beginning…I think there’s a great opportunity for innovative solutions to make sure we can fund the health care expansion,” Ferrandino said. “I feel pretty confident we’ll be able to do it.”

If governors like Hickenlooper fail to expand Medicaid, some studies warn that they will compromise the work of safety-net hospitals — which tend to serve the most vulnerable populations of Americans, like the poor and the underinsured — by costing them billions of dollars of funding. The Colorado Hospital Association has already come out in favor of the expansion in the state.

Nevertheless, GOP governors in states with some of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation are refusing to participate in the expansion, denying millions of low-income Americans access to the critical health coverage they need. If the new Colorado congress members have anything to say about it, though, their own state won’t follow down that path.

As ABC News reports, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has confirmed that the House GOP will no longer attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When asked about the future of the health care reform law, Boehner said “the election changes that” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

During President Obama’s first term, House Republicans spent over 80 hours and $50 million dollars on more than 30 failed attempts to repeal Obamacare.

Boehner did suggest that some parts of the law — presumably the Independent Payment Advisory Board — could “be on the table as lawmakers work toward a balanced budget.”

The Board, or IPAB, is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. Some Democrats have joined Republicans in opposing the provision.

A new study shows that women rely heavily on publicly-funded women’s health clinics — such as Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country — not just for contraception care, but also for their general health care needs.

The Guttmacher Institute reports that 40 percent of American women seek primary care at a women’s clinic, while 60 percent rely on them specifically for their contraception needs. The study also finds that these clinics prove more effective for women; eighty percent reporting seeking care there because of “respectful staff, confidential care, free or low cost services, and staff who are knowledgeable about women’s health.”

Clinics like Planned Parenthood offer abortion as part of a broader range of health care services, and this study underlines exactly how the state initiatives to defund abortion services would have the unintended effect of undermining women’s health care as a whole.

In fact, the negative effects of defunding women’s clinics are already evident. In Texas, where the Governor moved to block funding to any clinic that had any affiliation with abortion, over 100 clinics have been forced to close due to a lack of funding, and 160,000 women are forgoing care because of budget cuts.

President Obama’s re-election this week solidified the fact that his landmark health care reform law will be sticking around. Even conservative health policy analysts are beginning to admit defeat, acknowledging that their long fight to repeal Obamacare is certainly a losing battle. But when it comes to effectively implementing Obamacare across states to ensure that 30 million previously uninsured Americans have access to health care by 2014, intransigent Republican governors could still stall the process by continuing to resist key pieces of the health care law.

Over the past year, GOP lawmakers have continually resisted two of Obamacare’s important state-level provisions: setting up state-run health insurance exchanges and expanding the eligibility threshold for the Medicaid program. At least eight governors insisted on putting off their decisions about implementing Obamacare after the presidential election, just in case a Romney win would have eliminated the need for them to cooperate with the health law. But as Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff notes, that excuse has run out and those lawmakers now need to take a different approach:

In the wake of President Obama’s reelection, and with the Affordable Care Act’s future secured, Republican-led states are scrambling to figure out what comes next for the law they squarely oppose.

“The folks who need to restrategize at this point are going to be the Republican governors, for the most part,” says Cheryl Smith, a director at Leavitt Partners, the health consulting firm founded by former Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.

“They can’t just say no anymore. They have to accept that the Supreme Court ruling was what it was, and that the status quo is not sustainable.”

Nonetheless, some Republican governors are already digging in their heels. Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) — one of Obamacare’s most vocal critics, despite the fact that his state has some of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation — has already said that Obama’s re-election doesn’t change anything for him. Scott will not change his decision to reject the Medicaid expansion, denying health coverage to 1 million low-income Floridians who could have otherwise accessed the program, and he plans to continue avoiding setting up a federal exchange.

On Tuesday, voters in Florida actually rejected a meaningless anti-Obamacare ballot initiative that would have attempted to prohibit individuals and employers from participating in a health exchange under the law. And when it comes to Medicaid, nearly two-thirds of white Southerners in states like Florida actually support expanding the program. But for stubborn GOP lawmakers like Scott, resisting Obamacare is a matter of partisan principle rather than following through with the policies that voters support. In the upcoming weeks, Scott’s fellow Republican governors will need to decide where they fall.

Now that President Obama has secured reelection, his landmark health care reform law is here to stay. But that doesn’t stop Republican leaders in Congress from continuing their crusade against Obamacare, which they have already wasted over 80 hours and more than $50 million dollars trying to repeal.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is already looking ahead to 2013 and the so-called “fiscal cliff,” when House Republicans will likely continue to resist any revenue increases in favor of deep cuts to the social programs that protect the most vulnerable Americans. And Cantor is making it clear that includes slashing funding for critical health care programs like Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid:

While it is unrealistic for us to expect the President to embrace our vision of Medicare reform or Obamacare repeal, it is equally unrealistic for the President to continue to insist that Obamacare is off the table, or that Medicare and Medicaid require nothing more than some additional provider cuts. We will measure entitlement savings on the basis of whether they are sustainable and whether they actually bend down the cost curve.

But Cantor’s position is not actually in line with the majority of Americans’ preferences for the future of their health care programs. The majority of Americans would choose to raise revenue, particularly by increasing taxes on the rich, rather than slashing health care programs like Medicare. A full 90 percent of seniors are satisfied with their current Medicare plans, and majorities of American voters supported President Obama’s policies on Medicare in the lead-up to the election.

And while Cantor acknowledges that Obama himself likely won’t embrace the Republican vision of Obamacare repeal, that’s true for the rest of the country as well — voters have largely disagreed with the GOP push to repeal Obamacare, and would much rather keep the law in place and change it as necessary. Obamacare’s provisions have consistently enjoyed broad support, particularly the parts of the law that prevent discriminating against Americans with pre-existing conditions and allow young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26. In the lead up to the election, seven in ten Americans already thought Obamacare was here to stay.

The House GOP held 30 times more votes on repealing Obamacare than on creating jobs in the past year — revealing their unrelenting focus on fighting against Obamacare at the expense of the rest of their party platform — and they remain insistent on undermining Obama’s health care reform law rather than working toward real economic solutions.

Throughout President Obama’s first term, House Republicans spent over 80 hours on more than 30 different votes attempting to repeal health care reform. Altogether, GOP lawmakers wasted over $50 million on their repeated failed attempts to take away health care from 30 million additional Americans — and that trend continued during this year’s campaign season, as Republican candidates poured over $20 million into advertisement campaigns against Obamacare.

But candidates on the other side of the aisle actually saw more success with the opposite approach. The Democratic National Convention, when many Democrats finally started touting Obama’s landmark health reform law, kicked off a season of politicians campaigning on the strength of Obamacare’s merits — and ultimately winning their races. The following candidates successfully ran on their support for Obamacare:

Bill Nelson (D-FL)

Outside groups spent about $10 million targeting incumbent Sen. Nelson for supporting Obamacare, but he didn’t back down from his vocal support of health care reform. On the stump, Nelson often recounted a story of defending the health law to a critical constituent at a town hall who demanded that Nelson work to repeal Obamacare. According to Nelson, he responded, “Would you like me to repeal the part where you can keep your kid on your family policy until age 26? Would you like me to repeal that part that says that the insurance company can’t cancel you when you’re in the middle of treatment? What about the part that says… if you have a large group health insurance policy that the insurance company now, in law, is going to have to give you 85 cents of health care for your premium dollar?”

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

In a tight race against incumbent Scott Brown (R), Warren repeatedly criticized her opponent for pledging to repeal Obamacare to slash the deficit. Warren also hit Brown for repeating the false GOP talking point that the health reform law “robs” $716 billion from the Medicare program, when the Medicare savings under Obamacare will actually help slow the growth and extend the solvency of the program. In the debates leading up to the election, Warren pointed out, “[Brown] raises the same old argument that there will be $700 billion taken out of Medicare. That’s the same playbook Mitt Romney used a week ago tonight. It was wrong then, it’s wrong tonight.”

Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)

Although Heitkamp ran in a largely conservative state where many politicians may have shied away from ever mentioning the word “Obamacare,” she was actually the first candidate in a competitive Senate race to cut an ad in support of it. She acknowledges she doesn’t agree with everything in the health reform law, but her ad harshly critiqued her opponent for voting to repeal it. “Rick Berg voted to go back to letting insurance companies deny coverage to kids,” she says in the ad. “Or for pre-existing conditions… I don’t ever want to go back to those days.”

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)

Baldwin was repeatedly attacked in her campaign against Tommy Thompson not only for supporting Obamacare, but also for her push for a single-payer system before Obama’s health reform was passed. Baldwin continued to champion the health reform law, maintaining that she is committed to helping implement it because it is an important step forward for Americans. “Voters have a choice of moving forward with the Affordable Care Act and its implementation or electing a candidate who would rip it up and start all over again from scratch,” she said in the week before the election.

Mazie Hirono (D-HI)

During her bid for a Senate seat in Hawaii, Rep. Hirono didn’t hold back from attacking her GOP opponent Linda Lingle for opposing Obamacare. In an email blast to her supporters over the summer, she criticized Lingle for supporting a full repeal of the law, and pledged to hold her accountable for her position: “Linda Lingle wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act — President Obama’s landmark health care reform legislation!… We can’t let her get away with it.”

Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

Running against Josh Mandel for his Senate seat, incumbent Sen. Brown didn’t hesitate to point out that he feels proud that he voted for Obamacare, presenting a stark contrast to Mandel’s opposition to so-called “government-run health care.” Brown often touted the law’s popular provisions, such as lowering prescription costs for seniors and ensuring affordable preventative care like annual check-ups.