Well, Georgetown has already choked again, but it's still a pretty big weekend here in the nation's capitol. With 100,000 plus marching for immigration reform and the big House health care vote tomorrow, there's definitely some stuff going on here.
One of the things I do love is that our side is really getting into the idea that this is a battle, that you don't win progress by just making some calls to congress, finding the money for a few TV ads, and cutting some insider deals: you have to fight for it. Let me take this opportunity to once again pull out the best quote of all time (if you read me regularly, you've probably seen this one before):
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation...want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
People are finally getting that. So thousands showed up where the insurance industry was meeting a couple of weeks ago to disrupt their meeting, and scores risked arrest. 100,000 are showing up this weekend to demand that politicians finally address the twisted up system that constitutes our immigration policy. Thousands more will be demonstrating on Wall Street in April and K Street in May to protest the big banks wrecking our economy. And on the health care vote, primaries are being launched; a 3rd party campaign in New York on the Working Families party line is being planned; labor endorsements are being pulled from the no votes; the Steelworkers are running robo calls against Jason Altmire, the Pittsburgh area congressman who announced his no vote yesterday, and local demonstrators are doing sit-ins in his offices.
You know, for all the compromises we have had to make, for all the serious flaws in this bill we will have to fix in the coming years, I think most of the progressive community has begun to come to the common understanding that the stakes are too high to say no to this moment. I understand why not all progressives have decided to support this bill, and respect that decision -- a lot of these compromises have been really difficult to take. But if we get this done tomorrow, for the first time health care coverage will be considered a right. There will be limits on health insurance companies power -- not as many as there should be, but clear limits with the chance to roll their back their power some more. And we will, for the first time since the 1960s, have passed really big, important legislation that moves in the direction and philosophy of progress and helping people.
That's why such hard ball is being played by progressive groups and activists. That's why the entire progressive caucus in the House, and progressives like Bernie Sanders in the Senate, said yes in spite of the flaws in this bill. This moves the country's orientation more toward community, more toward taking care of everyone. Rather than failing one more time when this issue, or any other big issue, gets pushed forward; rather than giving up when tough things like Scott Brown winning happened, and pulling back to pass one more small reform that wouldn't do much, progressives and Democrats are uniting to push this across the finish line. Names are being taken, and asses are being kicked -- and I think health care reform will finally make it across the finish line.
We do not get all we pay for in this world, but we are certainly paying for everything we get. We have paid an incredibly heavy price to get to this moment on health care: now is not the time to falter.
Now comes the part that is most difficult for those who are not just political junkies but those who are falling into the abyss. We've been fighting for this everyday for a year and we hoped we'd be prepared, but I doubt you can ever be prepared to be left behind. This is not the time when anyone wants to talk about those who won't be physically or financially viable by the time any possibility of help kicks in. Some say 10,000 a day are losing their insurance. After the President signs this bill, 10,000 a day (or more) will lose their insurance. Real people with real needs who are really desperate will only be a shift in statistics in 4 years. The ranks of those in crisis will rise for 4 years. Now, the anger of the fight abates and we're left with the reality. For some, far more than others, it really is 'the last stand'. They just took it for someone else.
No single-payer, no public option, back-door dealing with pharms, IRS-enforced insurance MANDATES and STILL no vehicle to control costs?
The trumpeted features of this bill are an individual requirement to buy a commercial product, and a prohibition on cutting people with pre-existing conditions. You can legislate that in two sentences, or more realistically, two thousand words. This document is two thousand PAGES. That's a whole lot of nothing in the bill.
If you're going to preach from the mountaintops that you fought for a generation to be more like the bankrupt state of Massachusetts or the high-cost state of Maine despite their quasi-public option, and beat back common-sense alternatives and cost controls to get there, then by all means, enjoy your day in the sun. It strikes me as absurdity.
Another real smart idea that benefits society.
"NOT PERFECT BUT BETTER THAN NO REFORM"
"OUR LAST CHANCE FOR A GENERATION"
"YOU MUST DO THIS IN BABY STEPS"
This is a GIANT STEP BACKWARDS, much worse than no bill at all because it strengthens rather than loosens the chokehold of the very profiteers who have plundered the system into chaos and dysfunction.
The benefits for the insurance industry are numerous and ironclad: a conscripted “market” of tens of millions of Americans who are now forced to buy their extortionate, gap-filled, lousy policies—the kind that drive so many families into bankruptcy with their deductibles, copays, and coverage gaps—all with no limits on price gouging .
There is not one “benefit” of this bill for ordinary Americans that is not riddled with loopholes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/fact-sheet-the-truth-abou_b_506026.htmll).
SYSTEMWIDE health-care costs, already bleeding the economy white, will continue to skyrocket--the CBO estimates apply only to costs to the federal government, not the costs to consumers and to the economy as a whole. The estimated savings of $13 billion a year are a droplet when you consider that Medicare for ll would save $400 billion per year--$4 TRILLION over ten years!
20 million Americans will be left with zero coverage.
This bill is a reactionary horror.
See this Bill Moyers interview with Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03052010/watch3.html
MEDICARE FOR ALL NOW
While this bill is far from perfect, it is a step in the right direction that will get the ball rolling so that with continued pressure on congress from the voting public, will hopefully end up with a better health care system than the one that we have now.
It should be pointed out that the best health care in the world at this time is the French model, which still includes the insurance companies in the system.
"IT IS A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION"
Thanks for adding two more cliches to the apologists glossary.
This bill is not only not perfect--it is an atrocity.
As I documented above, it is NOT any kind of step forward--it is a step BACKWARD because the individual mandates minus effective price or coverage controls equal REINFORCED control of the system by the profiteers who have brought American health care to chaos and dysfunction.
You are wrong about France. The main funding of French health care--about 75 percent--is provided by quasi-public funds that are 100 PERCENT NONPROFIT. More than 90 percent of French people carry some sort of supplemental insurance sold by private companies, but those are mostly nonprofit as well and very tightly regulated on rates and coverage, unlike any American company.
In fact, the United States is the ONLY industrialized democracy that allows mostly unregulated profiteering in the main sources of health care funding. The resulting cost bloating explains our ranking as dead last among industrialized nations in health care, according to WHO.
You need to get your facts straight and stop rationalizing this disaster of a bill.