Personally, I don't like this health bill in a lot of ways. It's too half-assed. I don't mean in the way that the people that are against universal health care do either. I don't like it because too many compromises were made and it doesn't go far enough. The fact there is no public option is the absolute worst among them. I bet every health insurance executive is doing a dance considering they will have millions of more people that are forced to buy their services, without the government as a check against them. Thinking the free market is going to regulate things fairly it is laughable. What's really needed is not only to have national health care, but to have the government totally regulate all things closely involved with medicine, or to just take it completely over. I will also say I wasn't a fan of the way it was passed. I will readily admit, it was kind of shady,....but then again it would have never of gotten to this point in the first place if it wasn't for the treats of a filibusters, which I find not only worse but, very constitutionally questionable.
I guess in the sense that the bill is a lot better than nothing, especially for those that were uninsured, or had bad insurance before. (Which I'm among them.) That's a step in the right direction of if nothing else, but like said I'm also not a fan of half-assed measures and this is one. Sometimes if you compromise you get something that's just equally unacceptable to everybody. I don't know. Is a half-assed job better than nothing? It depends, but that doesn't change what it is. Worse it might made getting it right harder latter on because people will settle for the half-assed measure.
Health care should never be treated as a normal business. It should never have been either. A long time ago this country screwed up big time. For some nonsensical reason it was set up so any health care people would receive would come through ones employer. Maybe that appealed to the heartless capitalistic sense about us, but that was a monumentally stupid thing to do and we have been ending up paying for it for the better part of a century now. We were so entrenched in the system we couldn't get out. The problem is that like I said health care can't be treated as a normal business. It's a human right, not something that should be a function of the market. Why it has taken America so long to come to grips with that is shameful. You can't treat something like that in the same way as other things. This isn't like somebody selling paper, DVD, or tacky commemorative dinner plates. Yet that just what we have been doing for a long time.
What also needs to be kept in mind is that despite what some people would want to believe there are certain things, certain industries, where the need is so large and/or the services so vitally important that the only possible way that it can be done in a fair and ethical manner, the only thing big enough and with enough control, the only thing where normal people have a least a miniscule amount of control in it is the government. While I would want the government out of people's lives as much as reasonably possible, I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and deny there are some things that the government is the only one that can even have a chance of fairly doing it for everybody. In those situations it's okay for the government to get involved or even take over. Too many people are against the government to a mindless degree. A vast and healthy skepticism and wariness has morphed into blind illogical despising for too many.
While I don't trust the government in a lot of stuff, I also recognize that corporations are even worse, and despite all the people that like to claim the government is inefficient (which is sometimes true) or incompetent (again also sometimes true), they actually do better than most of those people will admit. It's a good think NASA or the military isn't run by corporations. It's a good thing are mail service isn't either or even our school system as underfunded and messed up as it is. As much as people malign it I bet people would think differently about Social Security if it didn’t exist, or if it was just got it from a corporation. I don't want to depend on a corporate run fire or police department, and I would much rather not have to rely on health care run by a corporation. I will take it's occasional inefficiencies and try to fix it's corruption over those things in system where are even worse because profit is the ultimate goal any day.
Just to ligthen up the mood, I thought this was a bit appropriate
http://comixed.com/2010/03/22/4-koma-comic-strip-opposition/
But, yes, the prick's got to go in 2012. Whatever happened to the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? This abomination of a health care plan is an outright tax on being alive. Therefore, life is no longer a right but a privilege. The founding principles of America as we know them are agonizing.
Please, just roll that statement around in your head a little bit, think about things logically for a change and realize just how dumb the above is. I can't even say that's a gross exaggeration, because at least enormous exaggerations have the tiniest kernels of truth about them. How agonizing, we are finally getting to the point of recognizing a basic human right and acting upon it,...you know only after more than half of century after the rest of the civilized Western world did. I know this is probably a hard concept for people like you to grasp, but contributing back to the society that helped bring you about and even paying for things that don't directly benefit you when it's important to civilization and the well being of everybody in it as a whole isn't a violation of your fundamental rights. That only exist in some darwinistic anarcho fantasy land. Nobody here has gotten any property or made any wealth without the help of others and society in one form or another.
