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

I acknowledge being a strident optimist. I don’t know how cynics get by in life and don’t especially want to know. That said, I’m increasingly cynical about the current administration and its apologists.

Remember when we progressives were against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan? Remember when we thought the refutation of the rule of law under the Bush Administration was tantamount to if not an outright war crime? Remember when the Abu Ghraib photos first appeared in The New Yorker  and how shocked we were?

Cut to election night and the throngs in Grant Park and the tears and the cheering and the not having to wait for three days or three months to find out who was going to be the next president. Even if you weren’t a big fan of Barack Obama (I was a stalwart Hillary Clinton supporter, but voted for Obama in the general), you had to feel relief.

The enthusiasm and yes, hope, of that night is long gone. Now we are sitting right where we were a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, eight years ago—listening to excuses for things that are inexcusable, listening to the Democrats explain yet again why they have no spine (not all of them, but certainly well more than a quorum), listening to a President explain how a troop surge (what else do you call 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan?) will “finish the job,” listening to what we found loathesome under George W. Bush and making excuses for why it is okay under Barack H. Obama.

It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. Anyone who twists their integrity and logic around to excuse these inexcusable crimes—war, torture, recision of the rule of law, indefinite detenti0n—is simply lying:  to themselves, to the country, to the world.

This is not change. This is the status quo we have been listening to for nearly a decade. It’s what we spent years defending against under Bush.

I voted for change. I didn’t expect all the change that was promised. But I did expect some modicum of difference. I did expect that I would be able to discern at least a subtle if not tectonic shift in the political status quo. But instead I have been seeing a Democrat in Republican clothing where a progressive was supposed to have been elected. And almost everything I read in the left-leaning blogosphere keeps saying it’s all the Republicans’ fault.

How? Since they’re not in power, I mean?  

I have come to disbelieve that this President wants change. He keeps saying change is hard. But how would he know? He hasn’t effected any. Listening to this mantra of Obama’s that change is hard just sounds so very…Bush.

I don’t want another president deluded by his own power into believing that he  is the answer. Obama isn’t the answer in Afghanistan. You can ask “how many Afghanis does it take to change a lightbulb?” again and again but the answer will be the same–the Afghanis have to really want to change the lightbulb and move from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the present. 35,000 more American troops will not force that change. Cannot force that change. We need to leave. We need to let these people fail or rise on their own. We can’t give them a pill to end corruption, we can’t change their deep desire to entrust their futures to war lords and corruption and repressive religious theocratic dictatorships. We can’t force democracy. We can’t even force it in our own Congress.

I feel we are back to the shell-game politics of the Bush Administration: look over here! No–look over here! First it was health care reform, then a jobs summit, now Afghanistan. No one is saying these aren’t all pressing issues. They are. Nevertheless, it seems as if there is just an endless stop/start routine between the President and the Democrats in Congress that stymies any and all actual progress.

It’s depressing. It’s not hopeful. And it’s definitely not the change most of us who voted for Obama were expecting. Stasis is not change. Someone as smart as Obama has to know that. And if he doesn’t, someone smart who is close to him should tell him. Before it’s too late and his one-term presidency is sealed.—VAB

We see a lot of news reports of people who are angry with the idea of health care reform (although they are obviously really just angry that Obama is president). I’ve only met three of those people in real life. Each one of  them–surprise!–is on Medicare.

What we don’t see are the millions of people like myself  nowhere near Medicare age who are desperate for health care reform. Media bias? Or is it just that the supporters of health care reform are too sick to go to protest marches? Or both?

This morning moveon.org  sent me an email with their latest poll results.

Member Vote Results: 

93% Agree

We should refuse to support senators who help Republicans block health care reform.

 

I’ve written a lot about the one Republican bipartisan response to health care reform. I’ve also hammered home why we need not just the public option but also caps on premiums (my own monthly premium for an HMO is $900, double what it was five years ago). And why we should vote every Democrat who tries to block the public option (Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu) out of the Senate.

The moveon poll signals that this is a view most progressives share.

Still, this morning newsmax.org had this to trumpet:

Lieberman Will Back GOP Filibuster Opposing Public Option
Sen. Joe Lieberman says he will back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s healthcare reform bill because of its inclusion of a “public option” — a devastating blow to the Obama administration’s hopes of unified Democratic support for a healthcare bill with a government-run insurance program.

Harry Reid should be kicking himself for no stripping Lieberman of his power after Lieberman campaigned with John McCain, but as my friend DP notes, “He’s congratulating himself on maintaining that all important senate collegiality that the Democrats are so proud of.”

And therein lies the problem. Because DP is right. The idea of bipartisanship overwhelms everything else for the Democrats. It overwhelms fealty to their constituents most of all. And it’s not just the Senate. When Harry Reid announced that he was putting forward the public option in the Senate bill, CNN reported this:

An administration official went so far as to call Reid’s move “dangerous” but quickly followed by saying Reid knows his caucus better than anyone and will therefore have the support of the White House.

 Well which is it? Is the White House (i.e., President Obama, for those who still can’t bring themselves to criticize him and attribute all his egregious acts of undercutting his base–like filing briefs against DADT and allowing Olympia Snowe to hijack health care reform) supporting Reid or is Obama undercutting the public option as the White House has been doing all along?

We think the latter. We think, as DP noted so succinctly, that this distorted and unreciprocated bipartisan yearning has been crashing and burning the Democrats for as long as we can remember. Listen to the tone of the newsmax squib–it’s crowing, chest-pumping, in-your-face, gotcha commentary. (Of course they are wrong that the Obama Administration is behind the public option, but then it is newsmax.)

Throughout the presidential campaign, Obama supporters argued–and many actually believed—that somehow he would be the magic that would make Republicans turn into “Obamacans” and we would all have a big buy-the-world-a-coke moment.

It never happened. It certainly has not happened in the Senate. The outrage among the strident Republican base is at a fever pitch. The Senate’s most “moderate” Republican, Arlen Specter, switched parties back in April and has been campaigning for health care reform ever since–cancer and brain tumor survivor that he is as well as being a long-time proponent of stem-cell research. Oh–and wanting to be re-elected.

I happen to think that “moderate” and “Republican” are oxymoronic and nothing the so-called moderates have done has disabused me of that notion, most especially Snowe’s hijakcing of the entire health care reform bill with the President’s approval and support. 

The reality is, bipartisanship died during the Reagan years and anyone who thinks that the Republicans have any desire to make nicey-nice with the progressive side of the aisle haven’t read the decades-old writing on the wall. These are people who can’t even vote for an amendment protecting American victims of gang rape. Why woud they want to protect the concept of bipartisanship? Or give anyone else what they have?

We have to ditch the idea that we can bring Republicans along for the ride. We also have to grab the so-called Blue Dogs by the lapels and make them understand that if they don’t toe the party line, they will be knocked off committees, lose any bargaining power and ultimately get no support for re-election.  Period. Hard line.

Moveon may not be the voice of America, but it definitely is a voice of progressive America. It’s a group that gets fealty from its base and its base is pretty clear: block senators who block reform.

Many of us voted for Obama because we could not imagine being on the wrong side of history–nor did we want to be.  But with regard to the public option and other measures of true health care reform, it is Obama and others jonesing for bipartisanship who are on the wrong side of history. The only way to keep this from being 1993 all over again is to keep it from being 1993 all over again. Either you’re with us or you’re against us. And if you are against us, why should we let you play in our sandbox ever again?—-VAB

i signed, of course, but i just wonder: why are we still having this same argument and why is obama so lacking in clarity on this issue?

sen. olympia snowe (R-ME) doesn’t want the public option. she wants the trigger to the public option, which basically means if the planets align and the world is coming to an end and capitalism dies, we’ll get the public option, and she’s the only republican who has signed on to health care reform.

so what? why is the president–the democratic president who was elected by mostly democrats being held hostage by a republican from maine where, i will add, there is 16 percent unemployment and some of the worst health care in the country.

obviously i am not the only progressive getting mad as the proverbial hatter over this nonsense on the public option or i wouldn’t be getting emails about it first thing on a saturday morning.

that said, where is the progressive outcry and why are we allowing obama to shunt us and the public option aside for one republican from maine?

i live in the fifth most populous state and fifth most populous city in america. philadelphia is also, regrettably, the poorest of the top ten most populous cities in the country and our citizens have the least access to affordable health care as a consequence. i personally have to pay $900 a month for my HMO from blue cross and it is much more than i can afford. but i have pesky pre-existing conditions and so have never been able to allow my heath coverage to lapse for a second over the past 25 years since i first had cancer surgery in my 20s.

i want the president to understand that health care reform as it is currently written does not help most of us. not one whit. we not only need the public option, we need caps on premiums (my premium has doubled in five years–doubled).  we need the closest thing to universal health care that we can get and we need to stop caring about the republicans who won’t vote for it regardless calling it socialized medicine. the majority of them are on medicare anyway. which is, thank you FDR, socialized medicine.

most of us want what congress has. we want what keith olbermann has been calling “medicare for everyone.” i know i do.

explain to me who deserves not to have health care coverage and why?

there’s no excuse for us being stymied in the same way we were 16 years ago when hillary clinton was attempting to get these very same reforms through congress. it’s 2009. in a society where the majority of americans claim to be moral at their core, how do we justify not taking care of everyone equally?

right–we can’t. let obama and your congresspeople know, today.—vab