It's Official - Reconciliation It Is

Mr. Blue Sky said

this bill will get passed, but it won't matter because it's watered down and isn't nearly as revolutionary as it needed to be... we should've never gone away from the idea of a single-payer system.. when the bill passes, it will be a win for the Republicans because insurance companies will still be in control.. this is a a lose/lose proposition because the Pleading the Fif types won't be happy, and neither will the Liberals... absolute garbage bill IMO.

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It's pretty hard to disagree. If this is victory, how ugly could defeat have been?

As recently as a month ago, I was willing to throw this piece of crap out and start over, but I finally bit the bullet and decided we may be slightly better off passing this horrible monstrosity and fixing it later than starting over from scratch and letting another million Americans die from lack of proper health care while we fight it out for another 20 years. The only way this bill makes any sense at all is as a starting point, not an end result. If 10 years from now we can look back and point to it as a meaningful first step toward a civilized single payer system, it'll be a Good Thing. If, however, we look back at it as the dead end that did nothing but strand our souls in a health care "Tartarus" from which no progress has yet been made, cementing in place everything that's bad about our health care system, it'll be seen as a disaster.

I don't know which way it's going to wind up, but my gut tells me the former is at least slightly more probable than the latter. I hope to god I'm right, because right or wring that's the road we're taking.