It’s Saturday and the United States Congress is about to vote on the Health Care Reform plan. It will pass. It doesn’t go far enough, but it will become law when the president signs it next week.
Steny Hoyer gave the best speech, quoting George H.W. Bush, as well as George W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Kennedy, Ike, Truman; all presidents who tried to pass healthcare legislation but were denied it due to the health care industry’s power and influence in Washington.
In his 1992 State of the Union Address, President George H.W. Bush (41) said reforming the health care system was an important component to economic growth and security. At the time the U.S. was spending 800 billion dollars a year on health care and President Bush predicted it would be 1.3 trillion by the end of the decade. His prediction was right on the money.
Everything Bush (41) outlined in his 1992 speech is part of this current health care bill. It builds on the existing private health care system. The plan that passed the in Congress gives security to people in that the healthcare companies cannot drop them when they get sick, can’t put caps on yearly or lifetime expenditures, can’t deny people because of pre-existing conditions — like a woman being pregnant.
Poor people are provided access to health care with tax credits and funding to buy health care and for all Americans, we now get the same opportunity Congress and federal workers get: a large pool of insurance carriers to choose from so costs will be lowered by competition. Choice will not only be preserved, it will be expanded. Most important: 32 million Americans who couldn’t get health care will now get it.
And still the Republicans said “No.”
The funniest part of the debate is when John Boehner got up to the podium and started bellowing. He hit all the Republican talking points during his rant, but when he started, he began by suggesting that Congress could have been joined in a bipartisan celebration of the bill, but instead, it was all one-sided, with the Democrats cutting out the Republicans.
This from the man and the party that has spent the last 14 months just saying “No” to everything. From the party that used reconciliation five times during the Bush 43 Administration to pass Bush’s budgets. The Democrats refused to vote Aye because the Republicans wouldn’t include the Iraq War in the budget, thereby running up the national debt without any notion to pay for it. The same party that passed the Medicare drug bill with reconciliation because they wouldn’t find a way to pay for it. They just put it on the backs of future taxpayers.
Actually, the hypocrisy was quite entertaining when Boehner got up and said the American people had told Congress “Not to spend money that we didn’t have.”
Like the Republicans did to fund Bush’s war in Iraq without paying for it.
Now all of a sudden, the Republicans are fiscal conservatives. Even the Congressional Budget Office says this bill will reduce the national debt by 138 billion dollars over the next ten years.
This is pretty funny: the number of opponents who claim this is “socialized” medicine! Several Republican representatives got up on the floor and hollered that charge into the microphones and we read it in the blogs and commentary on the Internet! Maybe Bush (41) was a closet socialist!
The truth is, there are over 200 Republican ideas drafted into the bill.
The big hero of this legislation isn’t the president. It isn’t Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The hero is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who, after this bill was declared “dead” before Christmas, pushed and prodded everyone involved — including the president — to get it done.
Even though the president gave a great speech from the White House shortly after the bill was passed, it was Speaker Pelosi who put this historic moment in its proper perspective: “We will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare and now, tonight, health care for all Americans.”
In the past generations Democrats faced stiff opposition from Republicans when it came time to pass Social Security and Medicare. It’s no surprise that 70 and 40 years after those landmark bills were passed respectively, Republicans are still trying to dismantle both — even while claiming to try and preserve Medicare for seniors! You gotta admire their chutzpah!
Sunday was an historic moment for America. President Obama and his allies in Congress accomplished something no president in over 100 years has been able to achieve.
The Senate has to approve it, vote on the reconciliation bill and Senator Reid has assured everyone they have the necessary 51 votes to get it done. The president will sign it into law either this week or next, but health care in America is changing. Personally, I would have preferred a single-payer system, nor do I like the mandate that forces Americans to buy health care coverage, but this change is better than the system we now have. It isn’t good enough to persuade me to give up the Veterans Administration, considered the best health care system in America, but this is a decent beginning to the process.
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