skippy the bush kangaroo: yes we did

Sunday, March 21, 2010

yes we did

we passed health care 219-212

here's some tweets sent to us by our good friend the brad blog:

thebradblog bush speechwriter: "cons & reps today suffered most crushing defeat since 1960s." http://bit.ly/9fxtjg

thebradblog bush speechwriter: "we went for all the marbles, we ended with none." http://bit.ly/9fxtjg

thebradblog bush speechwriter: "we followed most radical voices in party & they led us to abject defeat" http://bit.ly/9fxtjg

thebradblog bush speechwriter: "it’s waterloo all right: ours." http://bit.ly/9fxtjg

may we take a moment on this historic occasion to remind us all to give ourselves a big collective pat on the back...everyone, from the silent lurker to the most prolific blogger, from ultra-progressive firedoglakers to the left of center balloon juicers...this could not, nay, would not have been done w/o all of us constantly holding our elected officials' feets to the fire.

we have made history.

posted by skippy at 8:20 PM |

5 Comments:

IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME.

commented by

Jim Yeager, 8:33 PM PDT

Never thought I'd take so much pleasure in the simple past tense: "Yes we *did.*"

commented by

Sungold, 8:37 PM PDT

It's not a great bill, but it is a step in the right direction. That the victory serves to give the extreme right-wingers a much-deserved hiding is a bonus.

commented by

Don Durito, 10:49 PM PDT

Congratulations on throwing the Republicans and insurance companies into the briar patch.

commented by

Anonymous, 4:46 AM PDT

I wish I could be happier about this, but it is such a bad bill that I can't be that happy. The fact is that there are excellent functioning models of universal single payer from which we could have picked and then made adjustments. Instead, Congress had to reinvent a wheel and, largely because it has been paid tens of millions of dollars to do so, it made a square wheel and now it is celebrating the square wheel that it invented all on its own with its own pointy little head.

It's hard to be happy about them doing something this badly. Mandatory insurance, women's right strampled yet again with the awful Hyde Amendment remaining in effect, no half a loaf, i.e., the public option, and so on. The only thing we got was pre-existing conditions being covered. I have no idea what effect the insurance exchanges will have. The pretense is that they will increase competition on price, but as Anthony Wiener points out, when you break your leg, you aren't going to start shopping on the internet to see where you can get the best price for fixing it. You're going to get to the hospital and pay what it costs. And I don't know what the Medicare bundling program is going to do for costs. It doesn't sound like it will do a lot. It might control costs and then again it might not. That one is a darkshot, as we say in poker. We know exactly what universal single payer would have done, though, because it has been done already.

commented by

DBK, 10:27 AM PDT

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