Vicki Kennedy wrote an op-ed for the Sunday Washington Post backing the senate healthcare bill.
The most notable part for me was her admission that the late Sen Kennedy would have made concessions.
What Ted Kennedy would say about health-care reform By Victoria Reggie Kennedy
My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars -- and competing interests -- were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole.
Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have been done a long time ago. He predicted that as the Senate got closer to a vote, compromises would be necessary, coalitions would falter and many ardent supporters of reform would want to walk away. He hoped that they wouldn't do so. He knew from experience, he told me, that this kind opportunity to enact health-care reform wouldn't arise again for a generation.
More here.
Many folks who do not want this bill killed, including my wife have made similar arguments like this.
In the early 1970s, Ted worked with the Nixon administration to find consensus on health-care reform. Those efforts broke down in part because the compromise wasn't ideologically pure enough for some constituency groups. More than 20 years passed before there was another real opportunity for reform, years during which human suffering only increased. Even with the committed leadership of then-President Bill Clinton and his wife, reform was thwarted in the 1990s. As Ted wrote in his memoir, he was deeply disappointed that the Clinton health-care bill did not come to a vote in the full Senate. He believed that senators should have gone on the record, up or down.
I am in the "kill the bill" camp because i feel the American people deserve better, but i must say after reading this op-ed i had second thoughts and doubts about my position.
Whatever your position is, I hope we use this forum to have a civil discussion about the merits and demerits of this bill and accommodate those who have a different opinion.
Vicki went on to urge the senate to "finish the work of his life".