WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The central provision of Obamacare — the new health-insurance marketplaces — is scheduled to debut in less than a week. Yet after four years of debate and discussion about the Affordable Care Act, many Americans have little idea about what the new health-care law does.

It’s not surprising that many people would be confused about it. Most of us don’t quite understand how our current health-care insurance system works . Obamacare is new, and it’s complicated. And conservative groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past four years spreading misinformation and lies about it. Read more from The Wall Street Journal: The Health Law: Separating Fact From Fiction.

Here are five things you may not know about Obamacare, even if you’ve heard the disinformation campaign loud and clear:

It’s not really ‘Obamacare’: The law doesn’t reform health care as much as it reforms health insurance. That is, it doesn’t change health care; it changes the way it’s paid for. The law’s nickname really should be “Obama Insurance.”

You’ve seen the ads that portray Barack Obama — or a creepy Uncle Sam — as a doctor. That’s a lie. Under Obamacare, doctors, nurses and other trained professionals will do their jobs pretty much as they do now. Decisions about medical treatment will be between you and your provider, and bureaucrats will have less say over your care than they do now. Learn more about the Health Exchange on MarketWatch.

Health insurers misleading customers on rates?

But neither is it true, as Obama has said, that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Maybe you can, and maybe you can’t — it will depend on which doctors are covered under your insurance policy, and whether your doctor will take your insurance. You don’t have a guarantee now that your employer won’t change or abolish your insurance plan, and that won’t change under Obamacare.

But here’s the big change: If you lose your job, or if your employer does get rid of your insurance, you’ll be able to buy another policy on the new health-insurance exchanges.

It’ll be affordable: One of the biggest concerns about Obamacare was the worry that insurance premiums would go through the roof. It now looks as if those fears were overblown.

Despite giving as many as 30 million Americans access to health insurance, Obamacare is expected to increase total national health-care spending by just 0.1% per year, according to the actuaries at Medicare.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums in the health-insurance exchanges will be lower than expected when the law was written, ranging from $97 a month for a 40-year-old in Hartford, Conn., to $168 in Sioux Falls, S.D., after tax credits and subsidies.

In some states, premiums for policies purchased through the exchanges will be much more expensive than individual coverage is now, in part because the law requires insurance policies to offer better benefits, including coverage for pre-existing medical conditions and more comprehensive preventive care.

And some people who get their insurance through their job will pay more because their policy will be better. You’ll get more for your money.

It’s not a train wreck: The rollout of Obamacare hasn’t exactly been smooth. But it’s not the disaster that many on the right are praying for.

On Oct. 1, the health-insurances exchanges will be open for business, signing people up for 2014 insurance. Because many states refused to create their own exchanges (out of opposition to Obamacare), the federal government had to step in, and there’s a good chance the exchanges won’t be working perfectly on Oct. 1.

You can be sure that we’ll hear a lot about every horror story and every glitch. That’s as it should be, but we shouldn’t be surprised that a complicated technology doesn’t work perfectly right out of the box. Even Apple can’t always get it right the first time.

The important thing to remember is that Oct. 1 is a soft deadline. That’s when people can begin to sign up for 2014 coverage, and they’ll have until the end of March to do that. Six months is a long time to work the kinks out of the system.

All that scary stuff isn’t true: Death panels? Nope. Coverage for undocumented immigrants? Nada. Exemptions for Congress and government workers? No way. A job killer? The impact is vastly overstated.

Republicans are scared that Obamacare will be a huge success: The Republican Party has staked everything on the failure of Obamacare. Even though most of the ideas at the foundation of Obamacare are conservative ones (the individual mandate, the insurance exchanges), the party has turned its back on that history.

The Republicans have done everything they can to make Obamacare fail. They refused to negotiate with the Democrats when it was being debated in Congress. They took Obamacare all the way to the Supreme Court. They’ve blocked the expansion of Medicaid in many states. They’ve refused to set up health-insurance exchanges in many states. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to persuade the people that it’s tyranny.

And they are threatening to default on the public debt and besmirch the credit of the United States if Democrats don’t agree to kill the health-care law.

If Republicans were so certain that Obamacare will be a failure, why don’t they just sit back and let it implode? If the voters do come to hate Obamacare once it’s in place, then they’ll throw out the Democrats and put the Republicans back in charge with orders to replace it.

They’re still fighting Obamacare tooth and claw because they are afraid it will be a resounding success, not because they think it’ll be a failure.

I think they are right.