House passes health care bill

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Summoned to success by President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress approved historic legislation Sunday night extending health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and cracking down on insurance company abuses, a climactic chapter in the century-long quest for near universal coverage.

“This is what change looks like,” Obama said a few moments later in televised remarks that stirred memories of his 2008 campaign promise of “change we can believe in.”

Widely viewed as dead two months ago, the Senate-passed bill cleared the House on a 219-212 vote. Republicans were unanimous in opposition, joined by 34 dissident Democrats.

And

For the first time, most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, and face penalties if they refused. Much of the money in the bill would be devoted to subsidies to help families at incomes of up to $88,000 a year pay their premiums.

And

The measure would also usher in a significant expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor. Coverage would be required for incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, $29,327 a year for a family of four. Childless adults would be covered for the first time, starting in 2014.

The insurance industry, which spent millions on advertising trying to block the bill, would come under new federal regulation. They would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies, from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing conditions and from canceling policies when a policyholder becomes ill.

Parents would be able to keep children up to age 26 on their family insurance plans, three years longer than is now the case.

A new high-risk pool would offer coverage to uninsured people with medical problems until 2014, when the coverage expansion would go into high gear.

More here.

This really is historic.

Health care reform has been shot down for decades every time it's been proposed. But more significantly, anti-reform power, which could have been used to shoot it down again, is much stronger than it has been in the past. Gotta give the President credit for sidelining much of that power months ago when he brought in the insurance industry and cut some deals. What a chess player.

Of course, the President's gotta take the blame, too, for cutting those deals. The national requirement to purchase insurance is the gift he offered the industry in exchange for accepting stronger regulation. Sure, pre-existing conditions, losing coverage when you get AIDS or cancer, and more evil weird shit, all that's gone now, and good riddance. But we're gonna pay for it. Now that everybody has to buy insurance, the industry is going to have an influx of hundreds of billions, and a lot of that will be tax dollars in the form of new subsidies. And this new law contains no cost controls on premiums. The so-called "public option," a government owned and operated health insurance plan, would have forced the industry to play fairly by way of the conservatives' favorite economic concept, good old fashioned market competition. But Obama gave all that away. The groundwork has now been laid for the health insurance industry to get fat at the trough called America.

I'm betting that premiums will skyrocket in the coming years, forcing yet another crisis, or rather, continuing the old one in a new way.

Really, the only way to go, in the long run, is to illegalize health insurance altogether, and go for the single payer plan they use in Canada and other civilized countries. I bet we'll have to be just about bankrupt, as a nation, before we start to consider such "socialism."

But still. This really is an enormous leap forward. Real people, many of them desperate, will get real help from this. I mean, it's all fucked up, too, but much much better than the current state of affairs. Further, passing this legislation, as pockmarked and pus-oozing as it is, makes further reform less unthinkable. That is, now that the cat's out of the bag, in terms of government meddling in the health care business, it's going to be easier to do some more meddling.

But what I like most about this is the cacophony of right-wing indignant squeals we're going to be hearing for the next few weeks. After eight years of Bush, after eight years before that of incessant Clinton bashing, which in retrospect is really weird because old Bill really was pretty conservative himself, and after the twelve years before that of Reagan/Bush, it's really fucking grand to take the outstretched middle finger of America and shove it hard right on the bridge of conservatives' collective nose:

FUCK YOU CONSERVATIVES, THEY JUST PASSED HEALTH CARE REFORM!!! HA!!!

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