I think that the people here who are criticizing the health reform bill and the process for writing it are often correct, and often making the criticisms that you yourself would be making if you were still a senator.
But I also think that a vote for passing a big health reform bill -- even a flawed bill -- is a vote for a bill that contains plenty of good things, a vote to boost your congressional mojo, and a vote to boost Democratic leaders' congressional mojo.
I don't stand for everything that's in (or missing from) the Senate and House health bills, but I stand with Nancy Pelosi, I stand with Harry Reid, and I stand with you.
Obviously, you and your allies have had to make a lot of compromises, and it looks as if the final bill will probably be good for older, sicker people with low or moderate incomes who qualify for subsidies; mediocre for people like me who already have group health coverage in states with strong consumer protection laws; and somewhat bad for people in high-cost states like California or New York who have to buy their own health insurance without help from a subsidy.
And the bill probably won't do enough to bring overall costs down. Congress would soon have to come back and do something about costs.
But, the bill WOULD do a lot to make health insurance more accessible for older, lower income people, and for people with chronic health problems, and that's really important. If a bill like one of the bills in Congress becomes law, I'd see fewer stories in the paper about nice, dying people who've worked hard all their lives and now have to rely on bake sales to pay for their morphine drips, because they have no health insurance and no possible way to buy any.
If the final bill saved dying people age 19 to 64 (too old for CHIP, too young for Medicare) from spending their last, uninsured days terrified about medical bills, and then pounded someone or something else -- well, that's legislation. At least maybe the people who faced the new problems would be healthy enough to walk into constituent services offices to complain.
Anyhow: these days, it seems as if I'm in the minority among the participants here at Daily Kos, and there are a lot of purists here, but I think that, among, the total population of people who voted for you, there are a lot of us who understand that health care was a hard issue for Bill Clinton in 1992, that it would be hard for you this year, and that there would be a lot of anger and controversy no matter what approach you took.
To be president (or House speaker, or Senate majority leader) and to try to do things is to have people mad at you. That's politics. You work till you're hoarse, and you lose 50 pounds from not having time to eat, and you can barely see your kids, because you are putting every breath in your body into doing what you think are the best things you can do that are actually possible to do, and it must then seem as if everyone hates you. Because the things that are possible to do are not necessarily the ideal things to do.
But that mass hysteria hate is as transitory as the mass hysteria adulation that followed the election. What matters is what you try to do to help reduce the number of uninsured people dying in a state of sheer financial terror.
This week, people who are Jewish celebrate Hannukah. The little candles in the menorah can't light up the world. They can't light up anything for very long. All they can do is to do what they can do -- cast a little light on a gloomy December. And that's something. And you can't do everything, you can't make everything better, you can't even do all that much of what you'd describe in a position paper if you were still a candidate. But you can help cast some light in a dark world, and that's something.
And I think that plenty of us here see that you're doing what you can, and we stand with you.