Wednesday, September 2, 2009

One Bite At The Apple On Healh Care Reform

I keep hearing stupid ass pundits say that liberals and progressives should just settle for an incremental approach to health care and not fight for a public option. But history has shown that if a health care reform bill gets passed this year that will pretty much be it for the Democrats. Our party will either sink or swim with the bill that gets signed this year and we won't get another shot at anything comprehensive. Basically there will be two ways that things will go in the after math. Either health care reform works in terms of covering more people and costs are moderately lowered or without the public option we still don't come close to universal coverage and the cost curve continues to go up.

Now you might be saying that in the first instance everybody wins but the truth is all it will do is put off the inevitable for another day. We will not bend the cost curve with out a public option and all though the rate of it going up may slow down eventually those people who are having problems affording health care today will continue to have problems affording it in the future. That will end up causing everyone else to continue to subsidize emergency room care for people with no insurance. But the problem is the part that works will work just good enough that you will NEVER be able to convince a majority of people that reform is needed. if you think people are selfish now, just waiting until we spend close to a trillion dollars for health care reform and then come back asking for more.

On the other hand if the bill doesn't work then people are going to have amnesia. Nobody is going to remember that we were pushing for a public option and that if it had been included the outcomes would have been better. No, people will judge this health care reform bill as if it was the best we could have possibly put forth and its failure will "prove" to them that they never should have let Democrats reform health care in the first place. There won't be any opportunity to go back and try to change it. If you don't believe me just look at how the Republicans are now trying to call the stimulus bill a failure when they are the ones who negotiated the amount in the bill down in the first place. Same thing with Cash 4 Clunkers which was wildly successful but which FoxNews has labled a failure.

So for those who believe half a loaf is better than none, just understand that we will never see the other half of that loaf in our life time.

3 comments:

  1. Lets see "change" is a 9-10 trillion dollar deficit by 2012 (ap).......Osama says "no pork" then places over 8000 pork projects in place..... Osama says" no lobbests in my white house" and now he has hired over 40......Try smelling what your shoveling

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  2. *Yawn*

    Yeah I am sure you were out in the streets protesting Bush's Iraq war and all the debt it put on the books.

    I just know you were calling your Congressman when Bush pushed through more than 1 trillion dollars worth of tax cuts for the wealthy without any way to pay for them.

    Better yet I bet you were threating lawsuits over Bush's trillion dollar giveaway to big Pharma with Medicare Part D

    Spare me wingnut. You only noticed the debt after November of last year huh?

    Im sure it had nothing to do with a black man winning the Presidency.

    Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that so you can sleep at night fucktard.

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