U.S. History in the Making (Health Care)

(Big3News)

My political predictions have once again proven true.

I predicted at the onset of the national and Congressional debate over health care coverage in the US that we would see a bill pass both House and Senate but that it would a "watered-down" bill that addressed preexisting conditions and state-to-state plan probability more than it addressed the larger problem of controlling costs.

This Senate bill hardly resembles what I would call "sweeping reform."

In the course of the debate over the past few months I was in the "incrementalism-reform camp" that was frustrating my fellow Democrats advocating for single-payer, but in the end this bill will fall into indeed too small a step. I was only saying along with others that we have studied government and nothing this big is done all at once. However, like I have heard many say, I would have liked to get a lot more out this process.

The last time I spoke of this I was urging Harry Reid for "reconciliation" in the Senate; without the civics lesson needed here it is quicker to say that once the public option was removed from the table, the process of reconciliation was removed as well.

To encapsulate what is going on this country: we are a constipated nation when it comes to social programs.

There is the very real ideological constipation against positive social reforms dating back to the days of FDR and further still. Then there is the constipation specific to this issue of the monopolistic health insurance companies spreading public disinformation like the stuff is on sale. This, and other factors like Sara "Death Panels" Palin and Glenn "Fearmonger-in-Chief" Beck, make this one of the most hostile environments one could possibly hope to create against pro-reform activities.

The entire experience feels like we pro-reformists have fallen flat on our face and bloodied our nose, which would be correct. But I remind everyone sharing with me in this feeling that we did just run head-first into a brick wall of highly funded anti-reformism.

We have made history in the US Congress in that we have finally cracked the brick wall against fixing a system that every informed person agrees desperately needs reform. To shatter this brick wall is a much larger task and the true importance of these recent national debates over health care coverage has been the value of flushing the wolves out into the open more than it was about the larger picture.