When the Affordable Care Act became law, nearly four years ago, it was easy to imagine that the political debate would basically end on January 1, 2014. The law would be taking full effect, with millions finally getting insurance either through Medicaid or subsidized private insurance. There would still be talk of how to fix the law’s flaws and how to fine-tune its strengths. But the debate over whether Obamacare was a fundamentally sound concept would be over.

Now that assumption seems hopelessly naïve. Yes, the Affordable Care Act is settled law. The Supreme Court and the electorate saw to that in 2012. Even most Republicans acknowledge they cannot dislodge the program, although conservatives continue to stir passions—and donations—by vowing to pursue total repeal. But the debate over the law’s merits will continue, at least through the midterm elections and perhaps beyond.

And the debate will probably look a lot like it has for the past few months, with proponents and critics arguing not just about priorities but also basic facts. How many people are getting insurance? Who’s paying more for coverage and who’s paying less? Is access better or worse? Are costs going up or down? The arguments, however familiar and tedious, aren’t going away.

But if we’re destined to keep having these same fights over and over again, maybe can learn to have them more intelligently. With that in mind, here are five rules for thinking about Obamacare and its impact. It’s based loosely on a speech I gave a few months ago, at the University of Michigan, during a conference on Obamacare and journalism. (You can watch it here.) I had addressed my presentation to the media, but the rules below should apply to everybody talking and thinking about health care in the months and years to come.

Rule #1: Don't ignore the obvious.

When the stories about higher premiums and plan cancellations first began appearing in October, my first reaction was “This is news?” People who follow health policy understood, from the beginning, that reform had to reorganize the market for people buying on their own—and that, as a result, some small portion of Americans would not be able to buy the same policies for the same prices. Many of us first wrote about this in 2009, when the Congressional Budget Office made its first official estimate of how health legislation would affect premiums for people with private insurance. Earlier this year, blogs were full of arguments over exactly how many people would feel this impact. When the NBC News “investigations” unit reported this as a major scoop, I noted with a little snark that the article’s source was a set of regulations published years before in the Federal Register—in other words, hardly the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein.