Health Care

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I think Obama will get what he wants this year when it comes to a vote on health care, with some sort of public option.  I think the time is right, and that’s why I think this will happen.

My own feelings on this — well, I wish we had more aggressive leadership, I wish we were able to push for single-payer, I think this could have been done smarter and without the bogus push for “bipartisanship.”  I am not interested in the theories of Obama’s “long view,” because no matter what kind of changes he makes, they’ll only exist so long as he is in power.  Even if we end up with another Democrat in the Oval Office, they’ll change things to suit their own tastes.

But I think now is the time for change — even when it comes to the entrenched interests that drive our wretched health care system.

This is hardly a definitive essay on the health care legislation coming before Congress and the Senate.  One of the reasons I like Docudharma is that I can put unfinished thoughts out there and end up being more educated than I was before I wrote the essay.  This is one of those times.

To me, the bottom line is that if we even get a lousy public option, that would be a major change and would be the beginning of breaking the hold special interests have when it comes to health care.  We need to get this legislation passed, as unsatisfactory as it is, to get our foot in the door when it comes to breaking that hold.

I think that is going to happen.  I think the days of insurance company hegemony are at an end and that’s why they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fight this legislation by using delaying tactics.  But their time is over.

I am extremely weary of the conventional wisdom that this is the best Obama could do, that anything more aggressive would have doomed health care reform.  Incremental change is what we’re facing, whether we like it or not, and I don’t think that was an inherent aspect of this battle but one that the Obama Administration has chosen.

Given that, I’ll support passing the legislation — have contacted my representatives, signed every petition I received from my various email lists, I’ll support this incremental change because it’s better than the status quo.

And the most important thing is that if we get a public option, that will be a huge change that will also be the beginning of the end for the insurance companies.  It will cause a momentum, imo, a momentum towards single payer.  It’s not a guarantee, but it is, I believe, a movement in that direction.

Commenters are welcome to rip apart anything I’ve said in this essay — I am not emotionally invested in my own awkward reasoning, but I do feel strongly that there’s a reason the insurance companies are so threatened by a public option, that we will get that public option, and that will be the beginning of the battle for single payer health care in the USofA.