After two feet of snow in yesterday’s blizzard, my head is spinning from the concomitant stresses of the weather–I hate being snowed in—and the endless health care reform debacle.
It’s hard to know what to say at this point about health care reform. As a progressive I want it and as a person with serious health issues, I also need it. But the bill as it is currently presented is missing so many key elements that I really don’t know that this is the bill any of us wants.
And yet…is some bill better than no bill at all? Or is this a case of nothing being better than just anything?
Paul Krugman, who all along has asserted that health care reform will be a Rubican of sorts for Obama, is now saying
Pass the Bill
by PAUL KRUGMAN
Al Franken (D-MN), the Senate’s most recent member and one of its most progressive, is saying much the same thing, arguing for the goodness of the Senate bill in its current state.
A Historic Step Forward: Why I’m Supporting The Senate Health Reform Bill
by Al Franken
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had promised to vote against the bill if it didn’t include a public option. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) said he wouldn’t vote for it without stricter abortion penalties.
Both Sanders and Nelson caved to pressure from Harry Reid and others. Joe Lieberman, who had been the central target of progressives, was nowhere to be seen this week: having hijacked the Medicare buy-in option, his work was done.
But whether or not the Senate passes the waterered down bill before it, that’s just one more step. Then the hard part begins: reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bill.
That presents even more difficulties. The House version has a public option; the Senate version does not. The House version has Stupak-Pitts, the biggest end-run around Roe v. Wade imaginable. There are tax differences between the two bills as well. And those are just the most major differences.
Meanwhile, the Senate bill is not yet a done deal, despite Reid finally having a seeming lock on the majority. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has promised to drag out readings from the bill until Christmas in an effort to delay a vote.
It’s difficult to know what to think or what to predict at this juncture with so much contradictory discourse flying around, both from people we respect and people we don’t.
If health care reform does go down, however, it’s squarely on Obama . He let the conservatives—Republicans and Democrats—hijack the conversation in the summer when it should have been Obama setting the tone of the discussion all along. And that deification of Olympia Snowe (R-ME)–where did that get Obama? She said she couldn’t vote for the bill if the public option were included. Well, it’s out of the Senate bill. So where’s her vote?
The fact is, Obama got cuckholded in the whole health care debate much the way Bill and Hillary Clinton did. The difference is that Obama had the historical reference point of the Clintons’ experience.
The buck does and will stop somewhere. Right now it seems to be heading into the coffers of the insurance companies, but the game isn’t over yet. Maybe Santa will bring us health care reform for Christmas. —VAB
