House Passes Healthcare Reform

By 219 votes to 212, and not a single Republican vote among them.  NYT:

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work. . . .  In 1966, celebrating the creation of the first Medicare rolls that covered 20 million Americans, President Johnson recalled the complaints three decades earlier that Social Security “would destroy this country,” and noted “there is not one out of 100 who would think of repealing it.” . . .

Mr. Obama’s gamble is that what worked for Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt will ultimately work for him. Once Americans discover that they can no longer be rejected for insurance for pre-existing conditions, he is betting, or that they can keep their children on their own insurance plans longer, the more they will come to appreciate the effect of the changes on their day-to-day lives.

L.A. Times:

The House vote Sunday to send a comprehensive healthcare reform bill to President Obama's desk put the United States on a path toward universal health insurance, a goal that had eluded reformers since then-presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt called for all workers to have coverage in 1912. It may prove to be the signal accomplishment of Obama's administration, even though the controversy surrounding it threatens to end his party's majority in Congress. Rarely has such a good thing for Americans been perceived by so many as a threat to their livelihood and liberty.

There's wide agreement in the healthcare industry and across the political spectrum that the system is in dire need of repair. But while liberals called for government to eliminate the insurance middleman and act as the single source of coverage, conservatives sought to reduce the government's presence in the market and give consumers more responsibility.

The measure that emerged from the Senate, HR 3590, pursues a course between those two extremes. It augments the existing system with a new marketplace for individuals and small groups to shop for insurance, a mandate that everyone buy coverage, insurance subsidies for the working class and rules limiting insurers' freedom to design, price and market their policies. It won't bring coverage to everyone -- the Congressional Budget Office estimated that HR 3590 would leave about 6% of Americans uninsured in 10 years. But that's a significant improvement over the situation today, when an estimated 17% have no insurance and thousands lose their coverage daily.

Well, finally a victory after a hundred years of struggle on this issue:  Obama has done what FDR, Truman, Nixon, and Clinton could not.  For an enlightening history of the long, drawn-out fight for healthcare reform, see this excellent summary (PDF) by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What this bill ended up being is a mishmash and doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion; I would like to see a single-payer nationwide system, which this is not.  But at least, thank God, it's a start on something that could eventually be a decent program.

If the fascist fundamentalist know-nothing crowd doesn't overthrow the government, that is.  Note this very interesting map I swiped from Sullivan's blog, and the overwhelming Baptist population of my tragic, benighted Southern homeland:  notice that the green area is practically identical with the boundaries of the Confederacy, even 150 years later.  Nothing wrong with being a Baptist per se, but so very often that kind of believing is allied with ignorance, arrogance, and a hatred of everything and everyone who isn't a straight white Bible-believing Anglo-Saxon Republican.  And then there are plenty of people in this region who never show up in church and don't much miss it, but still retain the prejudices of the culture they grew up in.

Compare that with the NYT's interactive map of the geography of tonight's House vote here.