Sunday, March 21, 2010

Obamacare reader

Though I don't think Obamacare is perfect as is — it doesn't go far enough in some aspects and it inserts a few nods to "free markets" that health economists generally believe are detrimental to effective health care because the unique character of the good being provided typically leads to a "failed market" — I feel that it is good enough in its current form that it should be passed and then fine-tuned later.

In particular, I think the Democrats should go ahead with this good bill because I feel that the GOP (though maybe not all its members) are actually not interested in true healthcare reform at all (many feeling that the you don't fix what ain't broke because they don't see from their position that it is broken) and are only interested in again killing the prospect of universal healthcare, which is anathema to their political ideology.

Having said all that, I think that the political process itself is quite interesting, akin to when NAFTA was going through Congress and we had Vice President Al Gore debating H. Ross Perot on CNN and things like that, so I thought I would bring together a collection of links over the next few days until the vote comes down.
  • The NYT has an excellent interactive display of Democratic holdouts (as well as the rest of the Democratic members of the House), focusing on which members voted yes in November, which voted no, which ones are in Republican-leaning states, which are concerned about Federally funded abortion in the healthcare package, etc., etc. It doesn't focus on Republicans because it is assumed that all 178 of them are going to vote against the healthcare bill.
  • A Washington Times op-ed says that if the House had "deemed" the Senate bill passed, then the impeachment of Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should be a key issue in November elections. 

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