If the bill is as bad as Howard Dean tells us – and I think Dean has some credibility on this issue – then the right thing to do would be to kill the bill. It would be interesting to see if Obama would be willing to veto it if it passed. That would be interesting theater, but I suppose everyone in the Democratic Party would prefer to not pass anything than for that to happen. But intelligent criticism of the bill appears to indicate that it might make things worse rather than better.
My inclination would be to attempt to go back to the November elections and get the few more votes that were needed. And of course, being a pamphleteer at heart, I would turn this into a moral issue and go for the throat, as I hear people are now doing with Joe Lieberman, saying he will be personally “causing” thousands of deaths. For me the unacceptable cases are the medically related bankruptcies. If I were Obama I’d round up a stadium-full of people who have been through this, and unleash them on every Republican senator. Surely some Republican voters are Christians? Who don’t believe that men should have to sell their children’s home to pay for their wife’s cancer hospitalization? Who know that greed is a sin and not a virtue?
But if it’s merely about making us all sign up with another corporation, it’s useless to me. What will happen to a person like myself who had an income of about $1000 in 2009? What does a mandate to buy insurance mean to such person?
3 Comments