A Thimble Full of Reform

It's hard to say much positive about the House health care bill. It's a step in the right direction, sort of. But, to be honest, it's not going to work very well: the costs of the mandate will be exorbitant for the middle class; coverage through a weak "public option" will be problematic; and one can only wonder about how many give-aways to industry might be stuffed into 1,990 pages. Far superior — infinitely superior — would have been one or two dozen pages that mandated coverage with a Medicare buy-in. So it's a tough call whether progressives in the House should vote this proposed bill down. At a minimum, as progressive caucus Co-Chair Raúl M. Grijalva wants, Speaker Pelosi should allow an up or down vote on a more robust approach, so that the public can identify, and then appropriately punish, those Democrats who are against real reform. The difference, I guess, is between trying to achieve a real health care result or trying to get "free-market" based health insurance reform. The latter being an oxymoron. I predict that those who seek to "compromise" with a fictive marketplace will crash and burn.