| I don't know about you, but I am not accustomed to getting everything I want. If I did, I would live in a high-rise penthouse in a doorman building in Midtown Manhattan instead of a brick walk-up in Midtown KC. Global poverty and hunger would be eradicated, universal suffrage would be a reality, education would be a human right, cancer would be cured, AIDS would be wiped out, chocolate would be a miracle diet and we would all get ponies and donuts. Also.
Here in the real world, however, you pays your money and you takes your choices and the world is far from idyllic.
So I do what sane people do. I play the cards I'm dealt.
If I were designing a healthcare system, it would look nothing like what we are going to end up with. For starters, if I were designing it, insurance companies would be obliterated and we would all be going into a single payer system on 1 January.
But that damned, pesky reality keeps rearing it's ugly head.
If we did what I want, that imaginary magic wand would have to be capable of conjuring a couple of million nurses and allied health professionals as well as a few hundred thousand physicians. That was one of my concerns from the get-go and I brought it up in conference calls with the White House and I have discussed it face-to-face with Claire McCaskill.
Realistically, we don't have the providers to deliver universal coverage overnight. In fact, if we went that direction, the fears that the right have been projecting about waiting times and delays would be a stark reality and yes, the quality of care we currently have would suffer immensely.
There is also another reality to consider...those on our side actually care. The fact that 44,000 people die for lack of insurance every year matters to us. To the psychopaths in opposition, they don't. They could not care less about the poor people in need that will be helped by ANY reform because they don't write checks, neither to candidates nor to insurance companies who write checks to campaign coffers, so as far as the republicans are concerned, they can fuck off and die. Literally. They are already dead weight, so they might as well be dead.
The bottom line is that the current incarnation of the GOP is not an entity that can be negotiated with in good faith. But unlike them, we are not all hot to fight our battles with bullets instead of ballots.
Instead of looking at this as an epic fail on the part of the Democrats, I am looking at it as laying the cornerstone for a magnificent structure that will take time to complete. If anyone thinks passing the legislation currently being deliberated held hostage in the Senate will be the end of healthcare reform, I have a bridge in lower Manhattan to sell you.
Instead of quitting - which is what the anti-reform idiots want us to do - we pass this less-than-perfect bill, and we immediately start working on the next phase of reform in earnest, which will of necessity need to include training programs for new providers.
Here is my idea. Go ahead and vent. Scream. Make that voice heard. Yell as long and as loud as you want. That is how they know that what they have done so far ain't nowhere near enough. Get behind primary challengers for Blue Dogs. But for gods sake, don't abandon the process and stop voting. That is just stupid and makes you at least as significant a part of the problem as the teabagger morons. |
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