FDL Statement on the Passage of the Health Care Bill
By: Jane Hamsher Monday March 22, 2010 9:10 am
The country turned an important corner last night when Congress affirmed the moral imperative of providing quality health care to more Americans and passed the President’s sweeping health insurance reform bill. It is to President Obama’s credit that he was willing to commit his office to such a challenge when others before him had failed.
But this is not health care reform, and the task of providing health care that Americans can afford is still before us. Too much was sacrificed to corporate interests in the sausage-making process. Rather than address the fundamental flaws in our health care system, we applied a giant band-aid. This health care bill does not come close to doing all that needs to be done to meet the needs of our citizens and our businesses as we retool our economy for the 21st century.
There are many good and praise-worthy things in this health care bill: help for those with pre-existing conditions, guaranteed coverage for children, money for community health centers, and expansion of Medicaid and SCHIP. But there is also cause for serious concern. Never before has the government mandated that its citizens pay directly to private corporations almost as much as they do in federal taxes, especially when those corporations have been granted unregulated monopolies.
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But it is a national shame that a Democratic President who pledged the repeal of the Hyde Amendment would proudly issue an executive order affirming it. How far we’ve come since 2007, when Barack Obama swore that his first act in office would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.
And finally, most of all, we hope that members of both parties find the courage to stand up to the corporate lobbyists who dominated this process–because if left unchecked, their pernicious influence will continue to infect every aspect of our government to the detriment of its citizens. We who are voters must clearly communicate in November that we will accept nothing less because the fight cannot end until we as a nation decide to take on the corporate interests that are corrupting our political institutions and strangling their ability to provide affordable healthcare to everyone.
The problem is that voting doesn't do any good. The media will be paid by the lobbyists to control the message so we'll vote the "right" people into office so that this can all continue. Democracy doesn't work when the voters are so ill informed that they don't have a clue that they are often voting against their own best interests. This seems to have happened to those of us who voted for Obama.
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