Senator Patrick Leahy on health care reform

[ProSense]

My Turn: We can break health care gridlock

By Patrick Leahy • Sunday, March 7, 2010

A year of drafting and negotiating and debating has been poured into shaping a health reform plan. Soon, Congress will render a verdict that can put some long-overdue reforms in action. Or reform will be sidelined yet again, for another day or another generation -- maybe for another 45 years. We owe it to our families, our businesses and to our nation's economic vitality to end the procrastination -- and to get it done by simple majority votes in the House and Senate, if necessary.

The building blocks of health reform are more popular than the sum of the plan's parts. Polls show public unease about the hazy concept of "comprehensive health reform," but solid support for what's in the plan.

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Some may think that doing nothing is the "safe," option, but it is anything but that. Health policy experts and economists across the political spectrum agree that we are on a glide path to unending escalation of health costs that will hurt everyone -- costing us more, driving up Medicare's budget, cutting back coverage and preventing businesses from being able to afford offering insurance to their workers. Without reform, in the next decade half of all non-elderly adults at some point will find themselves without coverage. If we do nothing, the same insurance coverage a family had in 2008 will nearly double in cost to $24,291 by 2016, soaking up a whopping 45 percent of median family incomes.

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Wherever I travel across our state, Vermonters tell me their personal experiences with a national health system that needs fixing. Doing nothing may seem the safe course, but it is a course fraught with danger for Vermonters and millions of other Americans. The hefty bipartisan vote to repeal insurance companies' antitrust exemption shows that on many of the ingredients of health reform, gridlock may be a mile wide, but it's really only an inch deep. I continue to believe in reform, and I will continue to fight for reform.

[Edweird]

1. Gotta catapult the propaganda.

[ProSense]

2. Is it possible that he genuinely supports the bill? n/t

[dkf]

3. Democrats wasted too much time formulating this crappy bill.

Now they need to pass it to prove they weren't wasting our time. It's such a shame. Howard Deans plans would have been so much easier to explain and to support. It is so upsetting.

[NJmaverick]

4. K&R