A good way to guard against an epidemic in America would be to extend the Affordable Care Act to all citizens, to make it truly universal. But Ebola has flipped the script at the midterm elections, with government-hating Republicans who fought Obamacare and planned to use it as a rallying cry despite its early successes, now decrying the government’s lack of intervention. From Gary Silverman at the Financial Times:

“Republicans are suddenly asking very Democratic questions about what federal government can do to improve public health. Bloomberg News even reported that members of the appropriations committees in the Republican House and Democratic Senate are working on ways to throw more money at the problem. This would be done by increasing anti-Ebola spending in a bill aimed at keeping the government operating after December 11.

Yet the newfound Republican faith in the federal solutions has been accompanied by a hardening of hearts when it comes to the man behind Obamacare.

Conservatives are seizing on the spread of Ebola as evidence of the president’s unreliability – linking it to the advances of Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, management deficiencies at the Secret Service and the arrival of illegal immigrants from Mexico.”