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March 24, 2010
Historic Health Care Reform
Editorial
Spring Hope Enterprise
History was made this week as President Obama signed into law the Senate health care bill that was approved by the House largely along party lines Sunday. Thanks to the Democrats, and no thanks to the Republicans, almost all Americans will eventually be able to enjoy the security of knowing they have access to affordable health care.
The new health care law is not perfect, but it is not "fatally flawed" as the Republicans have tried to convince the American people. It does not have the true efficiency, simplicity, and comprehensiveness of a single-payer system. It does not go far enough in slowing health care costs, as experts recommend, by changing the way medicine is practiced. Its full impact, and various provisions, will take up to eight years to kick in. But lawmakers over future decades will inevitably and undoubtedly make improvements as needed and as circumstances evolve. It's just a start.
What the Democrats have done, however, is monumental. Not only does the new law eliminate or reduce the worse health insurance abuses, more importantly it creates a true national health care system where no system, only a jumbled private mess, has previously existed. It establishes a framework in which all Americans and all health care providers can work together to make quality health care even more accessible, more efficient, more effective, and less costly. And it does so without a hint of real socialism, a charge that has always been absurd, because it simply regulates private health insurance companies and health care providers in ways that benefit the public.
In fact, the biggest irony of the vicious Republican opposition is that the new law is really bipartisan at its core. Its overall approach and many of its specific provisions were previously proposed and supported by Republicans as well as Democrats. But since the Republican partisans chose obstructionism over participation, history will give the Democrats credit for making sure 95 percent of all Americans have and can keep affordable health insurance, including 32 million currently uninsured, while cutting the federal budget deficit by $138 billion over the next ten years and $1.2 trillion the following ten years.
Without health care reform, none of this would be possible and millions of American would still be at risk. Republicans trying to block or repeal the law have the burden of showing why a broken system was better than what Americans will now enjoy. And rather than punishing the Democrats, including our own courageous Bob Etheridge, voters who see what the new law really does for them should show their gratitude at the polls. |
