The process is not complete until the Senate passes the Reconciliation bill and the President signs both measures, but with 50 Senators having signed a letter promising to vote for the Reconciliation bill. However, once I watched the yea count reach 216, and then 219, it was clear we’d overcome the highest hurdle.
This was enabled via a face saving executive order where the President reaffirmed that the bill would not pay for abortion. That was already the compromise, so reaffirming it to gain votes is a good deal. As I said yesterday, my thanks go out to all the leadership and rank and file members of Congress that voted for the bill.
First and foremost though, credit goes to Speaker Pelosi. Her silence in the frightening period after the Democrats lost the 60 vote margin appears to have been holding back until the path forward was clear. I still don’t think that period was handled well, but at that point I had thought the Senate bill was the best we could hope for, the Speaker’s maneuverings on the balance improved upon it. Meanwhile, the President appears to be growing nicely into the office, as much as we admire past greats now it is worth remembering that they often slowly came around to what we laud them for.
Just for a quick reminder as to what’s this about, here’s Ezra Klein’s answer to ‘Who does health-care reform help?’
Health-care reform is focused on another group: the working class. People with jobs, but not jobs that are good enough to offer them health-care benefits. People with paychecks, but who aren't making quite enough money to bear the cost of insurance. People who're buying insurance on their own, which means they don't get the good deals that big employers get, and they don't get a giant tax break to help them out. But these aren't lazy people, or layabouts. These are people who've been left behind in the system. We spend a lot more money to give a lot more help to a lot of folks who need it less than this group does.
That accounts, at least, for the spending side of health-care reform. The new rules on insurers go to help another group: People with bad luck. A preexisting condition is not the fault of the individual. What it means is that they got sick or injured at some point in the past, they get their insurance on their own rather than as part of a bigger group (like an employer's pool, or Medicare), and they're not being fraudulent in their dealings with the insurer. When someone who has coverage and then gets sick finds their policy rescinded, that's also usually not their fault. They had the bad luck to get sick, and the bad luck to have an insurer looking for a loophole to deny them coverage, and then the bad luck to have their insurer actually find one.
For the fiscal details, here’s the CBO summary.
Recent Comments