VICKI KENNEDY SPEAKS OUT - Pens WaPo OpEd - Endorsing "Imperfect" Health Care Bill

[kpete]

The moment Ted Kennedy would not want to lose

By Victoria Reggie Kennedy
Sunday, December 20, 2009

My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars -- and competing interests -- were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole.


Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have been done a long time ago. He predicted that as the Senate got closer to a vote, compromises would be necessary, coalitions would falter and many ardent supporters of reform would want to walk away. He hoped that they wouldn't do so. He knew from experience, he told me, that this kind of opportunity to enact health-care reform wouldn't arise again for a generation.

In the early 1970s, Ted worked with the Nixon administration to find consensus on health-care reform. Those efforts broke down in part because the compromise wasn't ideologically pure enough for some constituency groups. More than 20 years passed before there was another real opportunity for reform, years during which human suffering only increased. Even with the committed leadership of then-President Bill Clinton and his wife, reform was thwarted in the 1990s. As Ted wrote in his memoir, he was deeply disappointed that the Clinton health-care bill did not come to a vote in the full Senate. He believed that senators should have gone on the record, up or down.

Ted often said that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He also said that it was better to get half a loaf than no loaf at all, especially with so many lives at stake. That's why, even as he never stopped fighting for comprehensive health-care reform, he also championed incremental but effective reforms such as a Patients' Bill of Rights, the Children's Health Insurance Program and COBRA continuation of health coverage.

more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121803506.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/vicki-kennedy-backs-health-care-bill-finish-the-work-of-his-life.php?ref=fpb

[saracat]

1. I don't care. It is still a bad bill and yes, Vicki, some things are worse than nothing.

[lapfog_1]

2. It won't be another 20 years to do real health care reform

We were just told the other night by the President that if we don't enact this bad bill, the country will go "bankrupt".

So... if the status quo makes us go bankrupt, then we will, out of necessity, revisit this again, and in much less than 20 years. The only way we won't revisit it again for 20 years is if there really isn't a crises.

I submit that there IS a crises, and that this bill does nothing to fix the real problem, which is AFFORDABLE health care for all. We, as a nation, cannot afford this bill.

So, instead of this band-aid that gets us a few more years of complacent ignorance ("We DID health care reform, don't have to look at the problem again!), let's let it die and revisit next year or, at most, two years. And then the crises will be even more evident and even the repukes will say "Something got to be done". And then maybe we will do the right thing.

But, unless the President is lying about there being a crises or that the country will go bankrupt under the present system, we WILL revisit this issue again, and not very long from now.

[ConsAreLiars]

3. rec'ing, not because it is terrribly important, but just because the jackass brigade

is still active with their unrec poo-tossing self masturbatory thrillings.

(edit to add: and also kicked because its worth knowing about.)

[EFerrari]

4. This is the third time this has been posted, iirc.

And to what end?

[Wardoc]

5. Frankly, I wouldn't give a damn if TK came back from beyond and endorsed it. Endorsements...

don't mean shit. Substance does. This is total and unabridged failure.

[murphyj87]

6. The bill is a failure because:

Because it doesn't break up the insurance monopoly, contain a public option or anything else to control costs, allows insurance companies to raise premiums as much as they want, as fast as they like, and, as such, gives insurance companies a blank check for government subsidies. In addition, while insurance companies can't DENY coverage for age or pre-existing conditions, but it DOES allow insurance companies to charge older people up to FIVE times what younger people pay, and people with pre-existing conditions to pay TWICE what others pay. That automatically raises government subsidies by two and five times respectively at the whim of the insurance companies, hence a blank check.

[mmonk]

7. With respect to Vicki whom I respect, I have too much difficulty with this one.

Today, we have the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. It shouldn't be as difficult as it was under an opposition Presidency. This ISN'T about ideolgy as much it is about an attempt at health care from the insurers' perspective as first priority, not cost and benefit to the insured. In fact, we lose a lot of regulatory control. The only power will be some help on margin (about 5% but WITHOUT cost containment).

[WI_DEM]

8. I don't see how we get health care reform that is better than even this in 2011 when the GOP

wins several congressional races and there are fewer democrats (and probably more liberal dems, for instance, polls in CT show that Dodd is running behind (oh, and Lieberman is more popular in CT than Dodd!). If health care goes down we will probably have a GOP president in 2013, too, so there we go.