Ezra Klein: A bill becomes a law

[cal04]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/a_bill_becomes_a_law.html

Almost, anyway. According to Rep. Henry Waxman, Barack Obama will sign the Senate bill within the next two days. At that point, the decades-long struggle to pass a universal health-care system into law will finish, and the decades-long work of building and improving our system will begin.

The politics of health-care reform have gotten enough attention in recent weeks, and I don't mean to give them much more. Minority leader John Boehner's closing scold was an angry, divisive capstone; his shouts of "hell no" on the floor of Congress were far more inappropriate, and far more embarrassing, than any yelp that ever escaped Howard Dean's mouth. The presiding officer's admonishment "to remember the dignity of the House" was a sad commentary on how much of it had already been lost. But he represented his members fairly: Earlier in the evening, Rep. Devin Nunes exhorted his colleagues to say "no to socialism, no to totalitarianism, and no to this bill."

It was a reminder of how far our politics have strayed, and how much more extreme our rhetoric has become, than the underlying legislation warrants. The deafening volume of the debate long ago drowned out its subject. Sadly, the Senate bill remains a careful contradiction that most people still don't understand. It is a comprehensive reform with an incremental soul, but neither side has done enough to explain it that way.

The legislation builds a near-universal health-care system, but it only uses the materials that our system has laying around. It leaves private insurers as the first line of coverage provision, but imposes a new set of rules so that we can live with -- and maybe even benefit from -- their competition. It spends $940 billion in the first 10 years and more than $2 trillion in the second decade, but its mixture of revenues, spending reductions, and cost-controlling reforms are projected to save even more than that. It is the most sweeping piece of legislation Congress has passed in recent memory, but it is much less ambitious than the solutions that past presidents have proposed. It is routinely lambasted for being too big and comprehensive, but compared to the problems it faces, it is too small and too incrementalist.

(snip)
What I ask of you is to send me your questions on the bill, or leave them in the comment section. I won't be able to answer all of them. But I'll do my best to answer the most common among them. All posts will be filed under the category "Explaining health-care reform," so people can find them later. Let's begin.

[FrenchieCat]

1. Bookmarked!

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Bzzzt!

At that point, the decades-long struggle to pass a universal health-care system into law will finish, and the decades-long work of building and improving our system will begin.


There is NOTHING "universal" about this bill, and there will HAVE to be IMMENSE effort to 'build and improve' it because the is diddly to start with. I doubt there will be ANY improvement, and the benefits will be found to be wiil-o-the-wisps within 4 years.

Klein needs to grow up a little, get some perspective.