I engage in occasional SHOUTING matches with my cousin, a die-hard conservative, over many things, among them health care reform. In all fairness to her, she does agree with me that there are inequities in the system. She is opposed to giving people quality health care even if they are able bodied and refuse to work, and she is vociferously opposed to any health care for illegal aliens. I don’t disagree with her feelings on this, but I point out that who we are as a people is defined by how well we are willing to treat others, no matter who they are or where they come from. I also point out that the most responsible people she knows are one medical disaster away from financial ruin.

There are severe inequities in American health care, and anybody who denies that has an interest in the status quo. One thing I am sick of, pardon the pun, is people who call themselves “conservatives” who are clearly nothing more than mouthpieces for big business. In case you have not noticed, big business is well into its second decade of attempting to buy the political dialog and sell it back to us as pure propaganda. And they do their best to put as many of their kind as possible on the bench, to protect them down the road.

I like to point out to my cousin that these are the people she implicitly defends.

However, we are both also afraid of big government, because that is a step toward state control. It is a step toward communism in its worst forms. It makes sense to acknowledge that governing a diverse collection of humans is unavoidably messy, and to simply embrace the mess. We get some things right, we get some things wrong, we go back and try again. That’s my “politics” in a nutshell.

So what she and I have been SHOUTING about is the “public option.” We both oppose it, so where we disagree is: Was it ever a serious proposal or was it always a bargaining chip? She says the “Liberals” were serious about it. I say she doesn’t understand politics. And she really doesn’t. She’s far too literal to understand politics.

Yes, “Liberals” wanted a public option. They truthfully want state-run health care. They want socialized medicine all the way. However, “Liberals” and “Democrats” are not the same thing. Yes all Liberals are Democrats, but not all Democrats are Liberals, most especially not the man in the White House. The main reason Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the Democratic primary was that he was, by far, the most centrist of them.

Yes, Obama pitched for it. Back in January. In the next breath he said it wasn’t etched in stone. From that moment I knew it would never be in the bill, but it would hang around as long as it was useful as a counterweight.

We are down to the final moments. The public option has been replaced with a government agency which will oversee “collective” plans using the same rules which govern congressional plans. This excites congressmen. They can sell this. Liberals insisted on a provision to allow 55 year olds to buy into Medicare. It made it into the latest Senate proposal.

Senator Lieberman said the bill is big enough without it. Tonight the Senate is preparing to drop it.

And so we will head into next week with 60 votes in the Senate, a government-regulated private collective and no public option, no expansion of government-run health care.

In other words, a CONSERVATIVE health care overhaul. Just like I told my cousin it would be.

I’ve been incredibly harsh in my assessment of the first year of the Obama presidency, but I now see the wisdom in his approach. He knows that the opposition is going to have its say, and in this era that means 24 hour cycles of pointed attack. He realizes that he must allow enough air into the process for there to be enough left after the fusillade to keep the bill from dying. He took his time with health care and he will end the year with majorities in both houses approving major reform. Reconciliation is yet to come and will certainly be a struggle, but to have come this far, ultimately this soon, is worthy of recognition and worthy of praise.

There just might be a method to this man’s madness after all.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.