Thursday’s anxiously awaited ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on the 2010 health care reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, briefly focused the nation’s attention on health care. That attention on health care reform should not end with the court’s decision.

The court’s ruling that the individual mandate element of the ACA does not violate the Constitution because it is essentially a tax will continue to be debated.

Foes of Obamacare, mostly Republicans, will continue to criticize the law, vowing to repeal all or parts of it. But repeal is not enough; they have an obligation to explain what their alternative plans look like. The current system is broken and unsustainable because of skyrocketing costs.

The renewed attention on the health care law is welcome, because, as the Chicago Tribune wrote recently, “Healthcare reform is America’s unfinished business.”

The Tribune editorial also noted that recent public opinion polls show that 68 percent of Americans have problems with the law, or at least parts of it, and believed that the Supreme Court should have rejected all or parts of it. Given the general unpopularity of the law, the Tribune was correct in noting, “Those are not statistics of a law built to last.”

The law was passed with little or no bipartisan cooperation. To gain the political support of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, the Obama administration cut deals that look very much like giveaways to big business. If President Bush had cut a deal like the one Obama did, Democrats would be complaining about corporate influence.

When Bush pushed through Medicare Part D expanding prescription drug coverage, the law prohibited Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. Critics painted that as an industry giveaway — and it was. Obama did something similar to blunt criticism of his reform plan from the drug industry and the private health insurers.

All of these issues should be re-examined. There is much in the 2,700 pages of the ACA that Americans, as well as most members of Congress, don’t understand. That’s a reason for suspicion of insider influence and re-examination.

The Tribune suggested that Congress should revisit health care reform, but this time craft a bipartisan alternative. Given the highly partisan character of this Congress, that seems unlikely. But it is what should be done.

Americans need to be reminded that the United States spends about twice as much, per capita, on health care as most other advanced countries. Why?

Americans should not accept spending twice as much for health care, with arguably inferior outcomes.

Many of the provisions of Obamacare do not take effect until 2014. As they do, Americans will be — and should be — paying attention to what is happening to health care costs. The cost of health care has not come down since the passage of Obamacare. In fact, it’s been rising.

For a while, fallout from the court ruling will be political rhetoric and campaign sound bites. But the American public should expect an explanation of what the health care reform law actually does and how it will be paid for. Most Americans, including many businesses large and small, are seeing health care costs increase. What role does the Affordable Care Act have in this trend making health care increasingly unaffordable.

Americans should understand how the law will pay for the cost of the addition of 30 million previously uninsured gaining coverage. Seniors should understand the impact of the law’s plan to extract hundreds of millions of dollars of savings from Medicare.

The benefits of the law are clear — prohibiting the insurance companies from rejecting those with a pre-existing condition, letting young adults remain on their parents’ health insurance until they are 26, and providing coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. But the costs are so far either hidden or not yet imposed.

Congress designed the law so that the benefits of expanded coverage took effect before the measure kicked in to pay for that expanded coverage.

The Tribune’s core conclusion is true: “Health care reform is America’s unfinished business.” And Americans should not let Congress or Obama pretend otherwise.