Watched Rep. Steny Hoyer on C-Span, managing a town hall. I am not a constituent of his, but I was proud as a Democrat that he managed to stay calm and professional in the midst of such craziness. 28 years of this and the man still smiles politely as a Korean war veteran says he wants the "Gummint" out of his health care. Rep. Hoyer expressed support for the Public Option but did not promise that he would vote against a Bill that does not include it. That is the only sensible stand a Democratic Representative can take at this point.
Which is why I found it strange to find a Diary some days ago here asking us to "Bring The Hammer down on Steny Hoyer." I want the public option. I applaud those who fight for it. But let us remember that in the end, we are on the same side as other Democrats. We probably will have to pass this Bill entirely on Democratic votes. We do not need to bring down the hammer on any one whose support we need. The damage is minimal so far. Hoyer is a seasoned pol. He knows to ignore the outrage of lobbyists paid to push one cause or other. But the intolerance is a worrisome trend.
We do not need to become a mirror image of the Republican Party, which has been damaged by organizations like Americans for Tax Reform. The reason they are a Minority Party now is that their base has hounded out of the GOP everyone who shows the slightest departure from orthodoxy. If we adopt the blistering, take-no-prisoners mentality of Grover Norquist and Tony Perkins, we will be a Minority Party also soon.
The Public Option is important. I support it. I would rather have had Medicare For All: a single payer system. But we are not in a position to get it now. A Public Option in which people who can voluntarily sign up for Government run health insurance is the way to go for now. And then we continue to work towards Medicare For All, a true National Health Service.
But even more important is the goal of insuring everyone. What if we find in a few weeks that the votes just are not there for a Public Option? Do we walk away from the bill and waste the best opportunity for reform since the early nineties? Why not do what we can do now and keep pushing for a better solution? If the best we can do now is that the Government will pay a private insurance company to cover people who cannot get insurance through an employer, why not take it? Or do we want to tell the several million affected that our need for ideological purity is greater than their need for health care?
My point is not that we should capitulate to the Republicans. They are a lost cause. The GOP has nothing to gain by compromising with us. The compromise we need to seek is with other Democrats.Luckily we don't need them if we stick together. We are in the majority because we are not the Party of ideological purity. We must find a common minimum program to agree on in Health Care and simply go ahead and enact it.
I hope President Obama will call on all Democratic legislators to vote for a Public Option. I hope he will not repeat the mistake that Pres. Clinton made, and threaten to veto a Bill unless it has X or Y. The truth is any Bill we can pass now is a vast improvement on the existing system. There are people who need an imperfect solution now, and not the perfect system fifteen years from now.
While we support activists fighting for the Public Option, let us also remember not to close out negotiating options for the President and Democratic Leaders. To pass major legislation purely along Party lines is OK: as long as the Party can hold itself together. This is not the time to bring down the Hammer on any one.
A Moving Comment
Everyone has different skin in the game
I want Medicare for all. I want government run health care. I want what they have in France. Get it?
But I have another issue that overwhelms what I want. My son has a brain tumor that was discovered when he was 19. It is important that he gets an MRI and MRA every year for the rest of his life. His last one had a bill for over $10,000. Now I have been lucky. I have been able to keep him covered under my policy at work even though he is past the normal cut off date. But I have been told by Aetna that he will be dropped in less then 2 years and they would not cover him again for this condition. Under the present system we have, no one will ever cover him. So when you ask me if I am willing to accept a less then a perfect bill without a public option if it includes no refusal of coverage for pre-existing conditions, or no dropping of coverage when you get sick, yes I am.
I don't like it. But what we have now can end up sending my son to an early death. So the idea of not accepting a flawed bill just to prove how dedicated I am to the cause, at the price of my son's life is a non-starter.
So because of this I stance I guess I'm the enemy to a lot of you people. So be it. I want something better then we have now. I have to have something better then we have now. My son's life depends on it.
Waitress bring me some garlic bread, and a baked potato 'cause its good for my head
by Borg Warner
And Another
Because I don't have time left for your purity.
I want Medicare for All, and I say so every time I call or write some congresscritter or the White House. But as a self-employed uninsurable 59 year old, I don't have any sympathy for your purity. I will be blind without the cataract surgery I need because of steroid use for 28 years to control my asthma. I am one accident away from losing everything I've worked my entire life for. I paid for insurance until I could no longer afford to do so while paying all my medical expenses out of pocket, and now I can't get it at any price.
A bill that just mandates insurance, does nothing to control costs and leaves it up to the insurance companies to fix it -- I honestly don't believe, even now, that that's the bill we will get.
Maybe if we had done less calling Obama another corporate shill or all the other names we gleefully called him and said to the wing nuts: This is our President. We believe in the agenda he proposed during the campaign and we believe he believes it, too. How DARE you threaten his life, how DARE you spread lies about him and his agenda, and in every breath remind this country that it was Republicans who broke it. Every Democratic congressperson should have screamed outrage at every attack, every lie. We should have been outraged and drowned them out, in support of the President and the agenda that we worked for and voted for.
Instead we called him names before anyone else did, something Republicans would never do. We helped weaken him, and if health care fails, we must take some of the responsibility.
by 57andFemale
As the purists talk among each other about what they will or won't allow the rest of us to have, real life goes on.