Dennis Kucinich, allegedly liberal congressman and confirmed weirdo, is planning on voting against the health care bill because it lacks a public option plan. He represents a noisy but fringe element who believes that anything short of a single-payer system is selling out to insurance companies. Never mind that the Senate bill would give millions of people access to Medicaid, a public health care program. Never mind that the vast majority of MoveOn members (hardly a bastion of moderate centrism) support the bill’s passage.
Kucinich is free to vote his conscience, but most of us progressives are interested in, you know, making some actual progress on the issue. Thumbing one’s nose at a sensible solution for the sake of making a dubious ideological point is the worst kind of egotism. I found it repulsive when Lieberman did it and I’m not any more sympathetic to Kucinich.
I respect Kucinich for sticking to his guns. To a point this bill does kind of sell the American people out to the insurance companies. So I don’t know. I find myself wavering between wanting SOMETHING to pass right now and wanting to wait until Congress can do it correctly. I don’t think this bill is a sensible solution. It may be a start but it’s sure not that sensible. There’s still nothing in the bill that will control costs. That being said I’m not exactly opposed to the health-care bill passing, but I’m not really all that wild about it.
Laws and sausages, people – neither are pretty in the making. Most major federal legislation isn’t near perfect in its first incarnation, but the first step is the most critical. Subsequent congresses can and will improve it over time. The danger is in not passing it at the ONLY time in probably the next five years that we might have the votes. I can see it now: the Dems cave and don’t pass anything out of fear for Fall elections, only to get tossed out anyway with nothing to show. Ugh.