The historic bill has passed the House, but its trials aren’t over yet.

President Barack Obama, on the phone with a member of Congress ahead of the vote. Official photo by Pete Souza

Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal today noted that Americans are experiencing a crisis of faith in their government; the real challenge of the health care bill isn’t in its passing, but in its succeeding. “Can confidence in government be turned around? Perhaps; it seemed to rise briefly in those feel-good moments after President Obama’s 2008 election victory,” he wrote. “That’s why the Obama administration’s ability to competently put health legislation into practice, assuming it becomes law, is so crucial.”

Ross Douthat in The New York Times took a similar tack yesterday, writing ahead of the passing, “We’ve been arguing about the health care bill, in all its many iterations, for more than a year. Along the way, liberals have made a lot of predictions about what its passage will mean for America — for our health care system and our health, our economy and our long-term solvency. It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to see if they end up coming true.”

But it’s not only liberals who have made predictions about healthcare reform. Republicans, whose opposition to the bill bordered on rabid, are ramping up their efforts to repeal the bill – something they had been working on even before the bill passed – based on forecasts of a bleak, penniless future for Americans. Conservatives, like Fox News’ Andrea Tantaros, argue that hardworking Americans will be forced to pay for “freeloaders” and welfare recipients with money they don’t have; that the quality of health care will dramatically plummet; and that the promised reduction in the deficit, a claim made by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office last week, is a “hoax.”

Dana Milbank, writing in the Sunday Washington Post ahead of the bill’s passing, noted that Republicans are likely to campaign for the November mid-term elections on their efforts to repeal the legislation, putting them in the position of having to explain how terrible the reform supposedly is. And that, he wrote, is likely a losing game: “These modest changes to the health system probably wouldn’t be widespread and noticeable enough to limit Democratic losses at a time of 10 percent unemployment. But, at the very least, voters would see nothing to justify the Republicans’ apocalyptic predictions.”

With the mid-term elections fast approaching, the American people will have the opportunity to pass their judgment on the bill, or at least on those who voted for or against it. In the mean time, Democrats are savouring the victory and, as some pundits have pointed out, the fiery injection of spirit and momentum that this bill’s passing represents for Obama’s presidency.