Support Health Care Reform!
Kevin Drum on how, living as we do not in Platonis politeia but instead in Romuli faece, it is time to close ranks and support health care reform:
Sleazy Sewers and Healthcare Reform | Mother Jones: Glenn Greenwald has this to say about the Senate healthcare bill now that the public option and the Medicare buy-in have been stripped out:
In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored [...] Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.
This is pretty much correct.... Any honest observer has to concede that all this makes it hard to defend the final product. Except for one thing: in 1994 Bill Clinton failed to get the support of these groups and healthcare reform died. If Obama had done the same, it would have died this year too. There's really just no question about this. It's ugly, but that's the real world.... From any kind of progressive point of view it's hard to see how you could seriously argue that the current bill is a net harm. Sure, it makes compromises to powerful interests that are hard to swallow. But that's why they're called powerful interests.... In return, though, the Senate bill brings down insurance rates, expands Medicaid, offers the prospect of moderately priced insurance to tens of millions of the uninsured, forces insurers to take you on even if you have a chronic pre-existing condition, mandates minimum levels of coverage, and takes several small but important steps toward reducing the future growth of healthcare costs. That's an enormous advance for the progressive agenda. There's an alternate universe out there in which you could get all this stuff without compromise based on the sheer force of progressive arguments. Sadly, it's not this universe. I sure hope we don't have to learn this the hard way yet again.
