Looks like the Massachusetts election sent everybody scurrying for cover. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are retiring in droves, lest they lose an election and forego those pension benefits. Try to imagine how I feel about that cowardly behavior. First, Congress sabotages true reform, and then it heads for the hills.
The only one speaking out even a little is President Obama, who told Diane Sawyer that he’d rather be a one-term president who did the right thing than a two-term president who did nothing (exact words are mine, not his). However, today he said something about a “discretionary spending freeze” to attack the budget deficit, and that also means he has turned from wanting to be transformational to resigning himself to the usual battle about what’s discretionary, what’s necessary, and what’s pork. All of these, of course, are in the eye of the beholder.
And what of health care reform now? As evidenced by the performance of health care stocks, no one knows. As near as I can tell, Nancy Pelosi, who might have been the root cause of all our problems because she represents a very progressive district that doesn’t reflect the country, is wildly looking around for eighteen votes so she can pass the Senate bill and we will have something rather than nothing.
Go back to sleep. Nothing will happen today. Pre-existing conditions may end up being outlawed only for people under the age of nineteen. That will be hard to swallow. Formerly big issues like the right of a poor woman to an abortion (rather than being forced to have a child she can’t afford and will probably not be able to support in any sense of the word) have completely vanished. And the public option? Out the window, or under the bus, or both.
Ugh. We are not going to have real reform even though it is an economic necessity.
And the quality of our care isn’t even being addressed, even though my son-in-law’s dad had a stent put in last week and he got a hematoma from a supposedly routine procedure that was supposed to be performed by a surgeon and was instead performed by a resident. There are countless anecdotal data points about what happens in American hospitals, even though people in Haiti can be operated on in the open air with pen knives and still recover. The operative word isn’t money. It’s care. The doctors in Haiti are there because they care. In America, does anyone in health care still know why they are there?
