TO follow what’s happening with the new health care law right now, you have to understand that for all the deep divisions on the issue, there’s actually a real bipartisan consensus about how the American health care system ought to be reformed.

Or rather, there are two of them — a dishonest consensus among politicians and an honest consensus among people who study public policy for a living.

The politicians’ consensus is that health care reform shouldn’t alter or disrupt the way the majority of Americans get their insurance today. This is President Obama’s official position on the issue: again and again throughout the fraught 2009 debate, he reassured voters that if they liked their existing health care plan, his bill wouldn’t prevent them from keeping it. It’s also the official position of his Republican critics, who have consistently attacked Obamacare for undercutting that presidential promise — for slashing Medicare, for driving up premiums and for threatening the employer-provided insurance status quo.

The policy consensus, though, is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.