President Barack Obama signed historic health care reform legislation on Tuesday morning. But anyone who thought that would quiet the rancorous debate quickly was disabused of that notion.

Just seven minutes after he signed the bill, a group of 13 state attorneys general filed a constitutional challenge. Virginia officials didn't wait even that long to file their separate suit.

What the challenges have in common — besides long odds of success — is that they were brought by a mostly Republican group of officeholders.

In Congress, meanwhile, the tsunami of spin from Republican leaders continues. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, warned that the "government takeover" of health care will result in "fewer freedoms" for Americans.

He apparently was referring to the freedom to die from lack of health insurance, as about 45,000 people did last year.

We've been hearing about a "government takeover" of health care for months. It is time for perspective.

The Congressional Budget Office says that in 2019, health care reform will add $175 billion in direct federal government health spending.

Forget, for a moment, that it would be offset by $187 billion in new revenue and savings. Let's just focus on that $175 billion.

U.S. health care spending in 2019 is expected to reach $4.5 trillion. The sum total of new, reform-related spending during 2019 — the much-lamented "government takeover" of health care — amounts to a whopping 3.8 percent of overall national health care spending.

It will be slightly more than the $173 billion spent this year on insurance company overhead and profits. By 2019, insurance company overhead will exceed $320 billion.

It gets even better.

The CBO estimates that new spending under health care reform will total $940 billion over the next 10 years. As health care economist Uwe Reinhardt has pointed out, Americans will spend $34 trillion on health care over that period. New health care reform-related government spending will amount to 2.76 percent of overall health care spending.

Here's what that new spending will buy: It will extend coverage to 32 million people who otherwise would be uninsured in 2019, end insurance company abuses that keep sick children from obtaining coverage and provide security to millions of middle-class families who no longer will face the loss of their insurance if they lose their job or change jobs.

Congressional Republicans justify their opposition by pointing to a poll that showed that 59 percent of Americans opposed health care reform.

But there's another side to polling, as illustrated in a survey released last week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser's poll showed an evenly divided electorate with no statistically significant edge to either side.

More important, though, were their answers to questions about specific details about health care reform.

More than 40 percent of the survey participants with employer-provided coverage told Kaiser surveyors that they believed that if the reform bill passed, they would have to change where they get insurance. That simply is not true.

That misperception was most common among people who opposed health care reform; 56 percent of them said reform would mean they could no longer get insurance from their employer.

After a year of misinformation, misstatements and outright lies, many people just now are discovering what health care reform really means: No death panels. No government takeovers. No change in the way most Americans get health insurance.

And once Americans see it for themselves, no more credibility for the Party of No.