The Weight Challenged Person is About to Sing

Please forgive me while I vent my frustration with the apparent end state of the senate version of the health care bill. There isn’t much, if anything, about the bill that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance. If I were a senator I would probably have to hold my nose and vote for the bill even though it looks like a meatless chicken- all bones. Or maybe I would become an Independent and threaten to filibuster unless I got the public option and a few other meaningful reforms.

Disappointed progressives like Bernie Sanders and Jay Rockefeller have agreed to hold their noses and vote for it so how can I possibly be more pious than them? Liberals are searching their weegie boards looking for a rationale to defend the sorry state of the bill after being the target of multiple hijackings, or maybe I should I say extortions.

The Republicans all hate it and many liberal Democrats do to. So we really have a minority of senators who are feeling good about what came out of so many months of negotiations and debate. One view says we now have a toehold on medical reform, traction so to speak, to amend and improve the bill in the future. When I get gum stuck on the bottom of my shoe I have traction too, but picking at it doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse.

We talk a lot about infrastructure improvements and modernization, and building on a framework of basic agreements, much like the wishy-washy language countries agreed to in Copenhagen this weekend to fight climate change.

The climate accord and the health care bill suffer from the same problem- they’re politically expedient agreements to allow the Administration to claim some measure of progress and success to an agenda that screams out for real changes, while in reality they don’t change anything. The health insurance industry is the big winner with 30 million new customers to sell profitable insurance to. The climate accord saves face for the President, but China and India flexed their muscles and kept quantitative verifiable agreements off the table.

Good foundations are critical to everything and anything that expects to carry a heavy load, last a long time and support additions and changes in the future. One might say the US Constitution has faired well in that regard. However, neither the accord that came out of Copenhagen nor the health reform bill have any hope of providing any such foundation from which great outcomes can be expected in the future. If anything, they will both be high value fodder for the Republicans in the 2010 elections and beyond.

I close with a quote from Will Rogers, “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat”. How right he was!