Health Care Reform Passes House, Headed For President Obama’s Signature

Loud Cheers from Across the Pacific.

Welcome to the club of civilised nations

BTW Kudos to Nate Solver better more up to date live blogging than anyone here or at CNN

Oops Nate Silver

Michael, who on your team is at the House now? Is Jay still there? Or are all at home in their pj’s watching cspan?

Double check that with Gibbs – should have been a high four-and-a-half.

FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST THANK…

Oh, yeah, I forgot.

Copay at last copay at last thank…

Oh, it won’t be complete until 2014.

Copay by 2014! Copay by 2014…

You know, this sounds like a mid sized, not a huge victory to me.

patricksator

The remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all.

…recon changes passed.
.
Yeah, this is the beginning of reform, not the end. Lots of changes are needed, including those deadlines. Why 2014? Why not now? Or if there are legal reasons like contracts and working around grandfathering, etc., then ASAP. But not 2014. Find 50 weak-kneed Senators + Biden tiebreak + House and move the deadlines up already.

decon,
.
it shocks me that you seem just not to have gotten the message from all those posts you have been responding to — “reform” is code for Socialism = Communism = Naziism = Facism = Devil worship = Gay marriage = the end of heterosexuality = unilaterally forced abortion = zero population = the Amerindians get it all back and won’t need casinos anymore = the end of democracy and a free market as our puny little ignorant minds have always wanted us to believe that we have had.

patrick~
,
Who were you almost going to thank? Childhood myth imprinting dies hard, doesn’t it?

Video of JFK’s speech asking for health insurance reforem. I hope we are on the way to seeing the kind of reform that Roosevelt, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy were looking forward to. It may be a step.

Make that reform.

I was quoting the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. of course, but, it is so much a part of the vernacular to use quasi religious references that it would take work to remove all of it from one’s vocabulary.

Damn, for example. That is a religious term.

Fk is not, but you really shouldn’t say that in front of most people.

One high school history teacher explained this to us:
the founding fathers desperately feared two thing. One was dictatorship and the other was bad ideas becoming law. Everything has to pass two houses and, without both of them coming back to override a veto with a two thirds majority, the president’s signature. With a couple of exceptions, all of the states have two houses to pass everything as well. So our system far more than a single house of parliament as European (except England) an extra slow system.
We are, by far, a country least prone to dictatorship (which is wonderful) least prone to having bad ideas passed (although this has happened) but, unfortunately, the least prone to getting good ideas passed, either.
If we had a non-federal, single house parliament as France does, imagine how much larger the mess the Republicans left us would have been.
This bear does not like to dance – agreed.

Here is my line of thought:

Republicans pulled every possible scare tactic in their bag of tricks out. The brought in protecting capitalism, states rights,not knowing much about them, tossed our founding fathers at us, reached deep in their bag to find their old 1950s trick and threw communism at us and reached all the way down at the bottom back to the Salem Witch Trails and even threw Satan at us.

Over the next few months voters will discover that Mao’s cultural revolution will not be at their children’s high school. They will discover that the neighborhood gas station – nor any other business – will become a part of a government controlled monopoly. Then they notice that Satan does not arrive. Next they will realize that nobody is going to find a magic potion to turn them into gays and put it in the drinking water. Finally, they will notice that nobody stops them from having their church get togethers and the scares will slowly, slowly melt away.

The victory isn’t as much this bill. The victory is that for more and more of the public, health care and – my own issue – affordable higher education (eventually, not yet on the agenda) will have to be discussed on the merits of the legislation instead of having Hitler, Stalin, a crying George Washington and Satan being thrown around.

Bring to people the concept of “wouldn’t it be good if the sick get to doctors good and early before they cost us a fortune at the emergency rooms?” and we will have more and more yes answers than ever before coming from people who are now against everything government.

What I am seeing now is the Republicans in their trench and completely out of ammunition.

From 1929 through until 1980 the Republicans had to move further and further to the left (reaching the center) just to get votes.

The 1980 through 2010 Republican insurgency has been beaten down.

Progress may now, very slowly, continue.

Maybe affordable education will be a reality by the time my children go to college. Since I have no idea who I am going to marry, that seems probable to me now. (Hence 20 to 25 years from now).

KT — Well, you’ve ridden this horse across the finish line, and I at least am grateful to you for the light you have shed on the topic during the long, agonizing struggle to get there. (I’m so ecstatic I’m even mixing metaphors.) But what do you do for an encore?