"This is the beginning of health reform, not the end of health reform."
- Tom Harkin, on on the health reform bill
Hey folks, it might not be the bill we all wanted, but there are cost savings for our families.
Also, as Senator Harkin says, we've got our foot in the door. Republicans will find it nigh impossible to remove the concept of government involvement in health care. This idea will grow and we will hopefully have some form of government health care in the future, because, ironically, the people who may most benefit from it are the angry treasonous teabaggers who are currently conned into being against it so fervently.
And to put it all in perspective, here is Ezra Klein's take:
Imagine telling a Democrat in the days after the 2004 election that the 2006 election would end Republican control of Congress, the 2008 election would return a Democrat to the White House, and by the 2010 election, Democrats would have passed a bill extending health-care coverage to 94 percent of Americans, securing trillions of dollars in subsidies for low-income Americans (the bill's $900 billion cost is calculated over 10 years, but the subsidies continue indefinitely into the future), and imposing a raft of new regulations on private insurers. It is, without doubt or competition, the single largest social policy advance since the Great Society.
In my lifetime, we've only had one Democratic president before Barack Obama and that was Jimmy Carter. I really couldn't tell you what the hell Clinton was. So, considering the ever-growing track record of presidential warmongering and reckless deficit spending by Reagan, the Bushes, et al, this actually really is a surprise. It isn't the perfect outcome by a long shot, but really, given the odds, let's take what we've got and build a foundation out of it.
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