The bill has to pass. It must pass. What's at stake? Over 150,000 lives. Millions of uninsured. Small businesses whose premiums are skyrocketing. Our long term economic health. Democratic leadership and the chance to do more. Morally, economically and pragmatically, we must pass this bill. We will not get a second chance for decades. We won't.
The bill has 85% of what we need. There's 900 billion dollars of health care in it that will help millions of Americans. Please don't destroy this opportunity. At the risk of pissing off many here, I would urge that you get on board - and please call your Senators and Representative and ask them to support its passage. Call now.
The Senate version of the health care bill is currently under serious attack from both the right and the left. Although the arguments on the right are inflammatory and misleading, there is a very meaningful debate among progressives on the left about whether the plan is worth passing or if it should be defeated.
It is fair to say that Organizing for America's volunteers (and I am one) are being asked to support Barack Obama and help get this bill passed through the Senate. I am squarely on the side of passing this legislation, even though it isn't perfect. I know it is a compromised bill. But read on..
Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com, in a column today yesterday said this:
The bill comes very close, indeed, to establishing what might be thought of as a right to access to health care: once it's been determined that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied health care coverage, and that working class people ought to receive assistance so that they can afford health care coverage, it will be very hard to remove those benefits. It's the sort of opportunity that comes around rarely -- and one that liberals will greatly regret if they turn down.
The bill expands coverage and control costs for individuals getting subsidies. And, as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post pointed out a few days ago here, the bill will save lives - at least 150,000 over ten years:
But it is very, very hard to imagine a cost-benefit analysis in which small policies operating on the margins and promising to save small-but-measurable amounts of money are worth more, in either direction, than the hundreds of thousands of people who will be saved -- not to mention spared bankruptcy, and lifted from chronic pain or impairment -- by the rest of the bill. The areas of controversy have become very slight given the magnitude of the underlying bill.
Morally, I don't think that Congress can afford to not pass this bill. We are thisclose to passing significant health care legislation. Please help. Call Congress.