Health Care Reform!

Con­gress has passed it. The Pres­i­dent signed it. It is law. We still need the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion to be passed, but I am con­fi­dent that it will get done (may take more effort than one would think, but it will get done).

Seems like a com­mon theme I was hear­ing in recent weeks was how Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy was a fail­ure (from con­ser­v­a­tives). Now I hear that the Oba­ma pres­i­den­cy is an his­toric suc­cess (from lib­er­als). In both cas­es it is a bit soon to judge. It is still too soon to judge George W. Bush’s presidency.

This was not rammed through against the wish­es of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. It was passed by nor­mal leg­isla­tive pro­ce­dures against the wish­es of a minor­i­ty of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. 53% of vot­ers vot­ed for Oba­ma. Any­one who vot­ed for Oba­ma and did not know he or she was vot­ing for health care reform was not pay­ing atten­tion. Although there were recent polls show­ing that a major­i­ty were against the health care reform bill, those polls actu­al­ly showed that a lot of peo­ple were against what they believed the health care bill to be, not what it was. And a few were against it because it was not lib­er­al enough.

Don’t believe it when Repub­li­cans claim they had no choice but to oppose the bill at all costs since the Democ­rats refused to nego­ti­ate in good faith. It was the oth­er way around. In par­tic­u­lar, Sen­a­tor Bau­cus spent weeks try­ing to get a com­pro­mise that would gar­ner some Repub­li­can sup­port. Lat­er, the Democ­rats stug­gled to find the ground that would get both the con­ser­v­a­tive and the lib­er­al Democ­rats to vote for the bill. If there were some mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans there to stand in for the loss of the lib­er­al Democrats.….

This is not the sal­va­tion of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pary (though it does and will stand as an impor­tant achieve­ment). There are still seats to lose in November.

This is not the Water­loo of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. The Par­ty is not now exiled onto St. Hele­na to die six years hence. There are seats to win in November.

Now the law­suits begin. Under the head­ing of “be care­ful what you wish for”, if this bill gets thrown out as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al due to the indi­vid­ual man­date, then the next time around the bill that will be passed will be sin­gle pay­er. Yes, it might take a few years to get us back to such a point, but it will hap­pen if this gets tossed.

There are plen­ty of issues to occu­py Wash­ing­ton after health care, but my vote for most impor­tant issue is the deficit.