Vicki Kennedy Backs Health Care Bill: 'Finish The Work Of His Life'

It seems that Vicki Kennedy isn't the only one who says this. It comes from Paul Krugman too (last time I checked he was hardly one to blindly follow Obama).

Pass the Bill
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

All of this would be paid for in large part with the first serious effort ever to rein in rising health care costs.

The result would be a huge increase in the availability and affordability of health insurance, with more than 30 million Americans gaining coverage, and premiums for lower-income and lower-middle-income Americans falling dramatically. That’s an immense change from where we were just a few years ago: remember, not long ago the Bush administration and its allies in Congress successfully blocked even a modest expansion of health care for children.

Bear in mind also the lessons of history: social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage — and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans.

Look, I understand the anger here: supporting this weakened bill feels like giving in to blackmail — because it is. Or to use an even more accurate metaphor suggested by Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, we’re paying a ransom to hostage-takers. Some of us, including a majority of senators, really, really want to cover the uninsured; but to make that happen we need the votes of a handful of senators who see failure of reform as an acceptable outcome, and demand a steep price for their support.

The question, then, is whether to pay the ransom by giving in to the demands of those senators, accepting a flawed bill, or hang tough and let the hostage — that is, health reform — die.

Again, history suggests the answer. Whereas flawed social insurance programs have tended to get better over time, the story of health reform suggests that rejecting an imperfect deal in the hope of eventually getting something better is a recipe for getting nothing at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, America would be in much better shape today if Democrats had cut a deal on health care with Richard Nixon, or if Bill Clinton had cut a deal with moderate Republicans back when they still existed.

But won’t paying the ransom now encourage more hostage-taking in the future? Maybe. But the next big fight, over the future of the financial system, will be very different. If the usual suspects try to water down financial reform, I say call their bluff: there’s not much to lose, since a merely cosmetic reform, by creating a false sense of security, could well end up being worse than nothing.

Beyond that, we need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. They’re a Senate tradition, and that same tradition said that the threat of filibusters should be used sparingly. Well, Republicans have already trashed the second part of the tradition: look at a list of cloture motions over time, and you’ll see that since the G.O.P. lost control of Congress it has pursued obstructionism on a literally unprecedented scale. So it’s time to revise the rules.

But that’s for later. Right now, let’s pass the bill that’s on the table.

Yeah, that would have have been a big help to her stated goal of getting the thing past. That's certainly what I've found. Whenever I'm writing a brief, I alway make sure I inclued a part where I call the judge "scum" in as many words. They love that.

This isn't the Nixon deal. Darn, I'm not only nostalgic for Bobby, I'm getting nostalgic for Nixon.

Says the guy who thinks $100 per month for a family of four is too expensive. LOL.

But then again, why should we listen to his wife or the letter he wrote when we have Indie Pro to tell us what Kennedy wanted.

Keep dreaming

Dude I know EXACTLY how you feel. I wish I had had the mind to establish Canadian residency a long long time ago. Now it is next to impossible. My Canadian friends think we are just greedy pigs and barbarians. How do we let so many around us suffer and die for corporate profits I do not know. I feel like some poor cow marching to the slaughter house of corporate profit. My insurance premium went up 30% last year and then 28% this year ...... I was just floored by the greed and indifference on the phone." Sorry Mr. blah blah but OUR COSTS have risen this year and we are doing everything we can to ..... blah blah blah ....." I had panic sweats when it really just sunk in that they will keep doing this until I am broke or dead. What is going to stop this madness? I really am starting to see America for the sick disfunctional society it really is.

Let's review shall we?
During Bush - remember Terry Schiavo? How much more of an governmental invasion could there be? How about the complete disregard for constitutional protections from illegal searches - gone. The largest expansion of the federal government since Roosevelt was during Bush. So when you use your usual talking points, it just shows either you can't read or you're a troll.

Neither do I.

“Every time they’ve gotten close to the deal, they’ve passed up the opportunity and chosen to walk away from a particular where they’ve lost the forest for the trees,” Emanuel said.

What is not true about that? We are where we are now, fighting for less than we could have gotten at any of the times in the past when health care's been on the agenda, because each time, the left decided that if they couldn't get eveything they wanted in one shot, it wasn't worth doing.

If the people trying to get something done, and those who support them, sound impatient and annoyed and dismissive, it's because caving to the stident insistance upon perfection or nothing from the left in the past is what got us into the mess we're in now. Every single time, we've ended up starting out fighting for less than we could have gotten last time. Every time, when we've been at the brink of getting something done, the left has brought down the effort because the compromises necessary to do it were deemed ideologically unacceptable. Every time, the left has insisted we can get more later if we just let whatever hoplessly compromised effort before us now die and start over.

This is our fifth attempt at this. And every time, we start from a worse position that we were in before because, counter-intuitive though it may seem to the strategic genuiuses of the left, it turns out killing a health care reform bill makes the foes of reform stronger rather than weaker. Turns out that each time they kill a bill, they learn more about what they have to do to kill it next time and, knowing there will be a next time, spend the years their victory bought them getting richer, gathering power, embedding themselves deeper still into the political system, running new PR campaigns to poison public opinion against reform, creating alliances and front groups in preparation for the next battle. Turns out that losing a health care fight results in the defeated proponents laying around wounded and bleeding and indulging in their customary post-defeat round of acrimony and blame-casting and finger pointing and, of course, dodging of any personal responsibility for the defeat.

You can't ever get all you want in one shot in a democracy. In a democracy, people who disagree with what you're doing have the ability to translate their disagreement into political action, just like you do, and there will ALWAYS be people who disagree with you, no matter how right and rightous your cause, because that's how people are. Rather than acknowledge this reality, the left attacks those who have to deal with the consequences of democracy's messiness as appeasers and sell-outs and traitors, undermines their efforts to get something done to advance their agenda and insists that if we just stop the appeasement, we'll do better next time.

Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result isn't the definition of insanity. It's the defintion of stupidity.

We, all of us, those I am castigating here and those who agree with me, are at war with the right, with the entrenched forces of corporate greed allied to those who profit politically and financially from propagating ignorance, superstition and fear. It is one we are blessed to be able to fight without resort to violence because of our form of government. For a long time, we've been getting our asses kicked in that war. We at last have an opportunity to get off the defensive, turn it around and take back some of the ground we lost, maybe eventually push the enemy back to where they started decades ago. But it's going to be a war of attrition, not of manuever. Our enemies are rich, powerful, well equipped, and they are heavily dug in on on the ground they took from us over the preceding decades while we bickered among ourselves.

If we're going to turn it around, we're not going to do it in one fell swoop. It's going to be one squalid bloodbath at a time. In each battle, we'll win back less ground than we'd hoped, pay more than we wanted to pay and after each battle won, we'll be left feeling sick and empty rather than exhalted and triumphant. Many will decry them a pyrrhic. But as those inadequate victories accumulate, one day, we'll look around and realize we've been winning the war.

That's the way it is. If you think you've got a better way, you're free to speak up, but if all you've got is "we must win the war in one battle and if that's not going to happen give up and start over" we've run that experiment. Four times. No more.