You’re probably getting tired of reading about Mitt Romney’s distortions on health care. I’m certainly getting tired of writing about them.

We should be having a serious discussion about health care policy. And that discussion ought to include the very real flaws of the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will provide financial security to tens of millions of Americans, while pushing the providers and financiers of medical care to operate in a more efficient way. Still, the law is far from perfect. We should be talking about why and what to do about it, so that someday every single American truly has access to quality, affordable medical care. But that's not a goal Romney wants to pursue and it shows in the arguments he keeps making.

A case in point is the press release from Romney headquarters that arrived via e-mail on Sunday: “Another Obamacare Failure.” The release recycles some familiar pieces of Republican propaganda, but the lead item this time is a New York Times editorial about a very real problem in the health care law.

As readers of this space know, the Affordable Care Act is complicated in part because because, rather than blowing up the whole health insurance system, the law’s architects decided to keep existing arrangements largely in place. That meant providing new insurance, directly through Medicaid or indirectly through subsidized private coverage, only to people who couldn’t otherwise get affordable health benefits from an employer.

But how do you define “affordable”? That’s where it gets complicated. The law says health insurance is affordable if you can pay the premiums for less than 9.5 percent of your household income. But the law doesn’t specify whether the premiums are for individual coverage or for family coverage. For some families, that's going to be a big difference.