Will The Healthcare Reform Bill Get Better From Here? Don't Be Silly

Last night-- technically this morning at 1:08AM-- although for me it was just after 7AM and I was traipsing around down the Apian Way north of Rome and visiting the Catacombs of San Callisto, a place of burial for 500,000 early Christians, including martyrs and popes some of whose deaths bore witness to a previous time when State and Church were united, Harry Reid's cloture motion to shut down the Republican filibuster of the healthcare bill came up for a vote. Cloture passed 60-40, every single Democrat voting yes (along with the two Independents, progressive Bernie Sanders and reactionary Joe Lieberman) and every single Republican (including faux moderates Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) voted no.

This morning's NY Times says the procedural victory proves Harry Reid has the votes he needs to pass the badly flawed, ultra-compromised legislation. But with not a single Republican willing to vote for it, one has to ask if all those compromises-- compromises which took a mediocre bill and made it abysmal and barely worth passage-- were just quid pro quo for all the billions of dollars in thinly veiled bribes the Insurance and Medical-Industrial Complex have pumped into federal politics.

The vote was 60 to 40 — a tally that is expected to be repeated four times as further procedural hurdles are cleared in the days ahead, and then once more in a dramatic, if predictable, finale tentatively scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Both parties hailed the vote as seismic.

Democrats said it showed them poised to reshape the health system after decades of failed attempts.

“Health care in America ought to be a right, not a privilege,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. “Since the time of Harry Truman, every Congress, Republican and Democrat, every president, Democrat and Republican, have at least thought about doing this. Some actually tried.”

Republicans said that the bill was fatally flawed and that voters would retaliate against Democrats at the polls in November.

Voters will decide if they want to reward knee-jerk obstructionism from corrupt Republicans who detest democracy and detest working families or if they want to reward pusillanimous Democrats who are basically as corrupt as the Republicans and only tangentially more concerned about working families. What an ugly choice! And the only hope for anything better comes from the House Democrats, who may not be quite as bad as the senators but... well, they might actually be just as bad; watch and see. ("Well," I expect to hear, "we want to give everyone a fair shake but we can't control those mean old Republicans and you know how those Blue Dogs are... but vote for them anyway next year or the Republicans will even be meaner and worser.")

The Senate bill, once completed, must be reconciled with the bill adopted by the House last month, and there are substantial differences between the two. The House measure, for instance, includes a government-run health insurance plan, or public option, that was dropped from the Senate bill.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said the House would not just accept the Senate bill. And some Senate Democrats have warned that they could turn against the bill if changes made during negotiations with the House are not to their liking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... whole lotta nothin'. Russ Feingold comes right out and says it was Obama's crappy leadership that caused the bill to go from bad to worse, while Paul Krugman says the bill, though flawed, is an awesome achievement. He predicts "we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward." Howard Dean said he won't be campaigning for Obama in 2012; he's not the only one.