Thoughts on health care reform
On the verge of passing a ginormous health care bill in Congress, some folks online and off -- Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas among them -- have aligned themselves along a continuum of positions softly through firmly against the bill, as written.
Mostly this isn't for things the bill has, but for things the bill does not have. To drop a quote that's been dropped a lot lately, the good ought not be the enemy of the perfect. Who would get anything done? Sixty votes is quite a hurdle and I wish it weren't there, but as it is the bill should be good enough to pass. Simultaneously there should be efforts to dismantle this unprecedented obstructionism, and since it doesn't look like the Republican tent is getting any bigger, the only option remaining is to cripple the minority in the Senate. I'm fine with that, do or die, because a supermajority requirement made common cannot bode well for the republic.
I'm in favor of the bill, and the claims of the CBO and its proponents are enough to sway me. I'm insured right now only through my school, while I'm attending for another semester. I'd like fewer barriers to insurance, and that's what the bill affords.
A public option, expansion of Medicare, single payer, etc. would be great, and I hope that we could implement them one day. But to employ another saying, politics is the art of the possible. This appears to be what's possible. While there have been mistakes made, God knows, I'll agree with Ezra Klein and others -- Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias, among the folks I tend to read -- in supporting the bill's passage.