I wrote this as part of a discussion on a private discussion board on the subject of why we needed health care reform now. We were discussing the spiraling costs, the fact that health care costs have been skyrocketing at twice the rate of inflation for decades, how unsustainable this was, how half of all bankruptcies are filed by people who HAVE health insurance but still can’t afford the bills, yet we were discussing why doing this now might not have been the most urgent problem we needed to solve, given all the economic problems we face.
There’s a very good reason why health care reform was essential in 2010: because there’s no chance in hell it was going to happen anytime soon after 2010. We are clearly at a high water mark in terms of having a Democratic Congress for probably quite some time to come, and by the time the next heavily Democratic Congress comes rolling along (ten, 15, years from now?) the disaster our country would have been in would have been incredibly grave. Obama, being someone who actually cares about policy, not just politics, didn’t want to preside over that kind of dropping of the ball. Clinton dropped it, and we couldn’t afford another screwup like that. Obama wisely, I believe, focused on this issue and managed to get a surprisingly comprehensive bill through. And all I can say to that is:
Fucking A.
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