Okay, I said I would wait until the dust settles on health care before I wrote about it again, but I have gotten furious midnight emails and had heated cell phone arguments. This is from the progressives and democrats! I am as much in a quandary as many of my friends on future of health care reform and, gulp, the financial bailouts. I supported the President and I still support the President. With that said I want to remind everyone of the alternative.
What if McCain had won? Do you think that we would be having any debate on health care? No, we would be looking at some half-baked tax credits like Bush lite for buying our own coverage. Tax payers would get a quick fix for the pocketbooks, but no true reform. Remember that 10 page GOP insurance bill with no meat at all.
The alternate would look like…nothing for those with preexisting conditions, no attempt to insure the poor and children, no stem cell research, no Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, no Matthew Shepard Bill, and no attempt to rein in credit card companies in any form. And how about those windmills dotting our landscape? Instead of having a President flying to Copenhagen at the most opportune time to influence other countries, we would most likely not be attending just like Kyoto. Do you think that the folks that argue that global warming is a fairytale would be part of any discussion or change?
Remember like the blogger Ultrageek said today on the Kos that “the winners in war are not always known at the time.” Ultrageek makes the point that over a third of the country was “slave states” or supporting slavery before the civil war. Lincoln and the abolitions could have just given up. So do we quit supporting the President, the congress and senate that does want reform. Let the right take over. “Where would the 60% threshold be then? Who would the conservatives be then? Casey? Snowe?…And where would the middle ground be? Levin?”
Never in all my life have I seen such partisan attacks from the right and ultra conservatives. I thought that Bill Clinton had a tough time. Now the progressives are jumping up and down too. I think that it is time that critics on the far left of my party…to take a breath.
The news coming out of the Senate on health care is a two step forward, one step back kind of dance, but the best news for me is the guy that I respect the most on health care reform is on the bus. Howard Dean, the former Chair of the DNC, has been pushing for the expansion of Medicare even in his Presidential platform. His logic is “why have two bureaucracies, including one that hasn’t run this before like the Department of Health and Human Services.
I for one am excited about the decision to allow consumers between the ages of 55 and 64 to buy Medicare coverage. Maybe it is because I am 57 and it could be options for me and mine, but I agree with Dean about not creating a new bureaucracy. People are familiar with Medicare, it works well for the most part, and Dean went as far as to call it reform today. Would I have rather had single payer or a viable public option? Of course I would also have liked to seen Cheney up for war crime charges and an immediate pull out in Iraq.
To those of you that say, well we could have had Hillary. The same Hillary that her foes on the right were pillorying with a tell all movie soon after the inauguration, the same Hillary who sided against human rights sanctions for China, and the Hillary with all the insurance baggage from Clinton’s presidency. Then was Edwards who would have most likely been impeached after his dirty little secret came out.
No instead we have a man in office who the world has recognized with one of its highest honors in the Noble Peace Prize, a man who dared to reach out to the moderate Muslims in his Cairo speech, a man who is thoughtful and measured in his responses; the total opposite of Bush lite. A Republican friend and I were discussing church youth groups, the world , etc. He felt that the country and people had some how turned a corner and that the youth of tomorrow will be better stewards of the earth and less judgmental. I would like to think that the election of President Obama had something to do with that.
Yesterday there was a landmark decision in the Dawes Act that showcases the possibilities of this administration to do the right thing. In all fairness Senator McCain has been a central figure in settling the largest class action suit ever brought against the US government too. In a battle over compensation to American Indians for using their land for farming, grazing, timber cutting, and other activities the government finally settled up to a tune of $3 billions after a century of shamefully dragging its feet. This trust program had been mismanaged over three administrations and numerous Secretaries of the Interior. There have been charges of contempt for destroying documents leveled for the first time at past Interior officials in an effort to avoid payment.
This disgrace had spanned over three administrations and goes back to the late 19th century. Tuesday on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121216558 Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and a resident of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, said that she did not want the “case to drag on” and that “today we have an administration that is listening to us, an administration willing to admit the wrongdoings of the past and settle this matter to benefit those who had to do without access to their own money for way too long even though the settlement of came short of the one wanted.”
Not one of the left blogs that I read celebrated this. I agree with Shpilk again on the Kos http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/9/812597/-Navel-gazing,-self-defeatism,-hysteria,-asshattery. who writes “I expected some fallout from pushback, but what I’ve seen is like nothing I could have imagined these last few months. The nearly violent rhetoric of rejection approaches the same levels of poisoning I’ve seen from the right. It’s remarkably narrow minded, and it’s not what I can accept.”
Maybe this story on Dawes wasn’t the headline maker or even in most papers in the West, but it is the kind of stuff that is happening every day. Some are more worried that Obama will miss an activity in Oslo than looking at the progress we are making. I guess I am more concerned about what actually happens at the global summit. I just hope someone will report it.
