With Saturday night’s historic vote to allow Senate debate on their health care reform bill, it’s a good time to look back on how we got here, and think about the path forward.
The New York Times published a great interactive chart showing the history of health care reform:
A History of Health Care Reform - For almost a century, presidents and members of Congress have tried and failed to provide universal health benefits to Americans.
It reminds us that for almost 100 years, we’ve been trying to get this done. It also makes us think of all those people who went wanting when their lives could have been so different. But past is past, and while the bill taking shape in Washington will not accomplish everything we had hoped, it will represent a vast improvement over the status quo. (I know the final bill has not taken final shape yet, but general framework of making health care available to more people and starting to reign in the unsustainable cost increases is clear.)
There is so much that can still go wrong given the poisonous partisan atmosphere in Washington. Extremists on both sides of the aisle will claim that the bad things in the bill outweigh the good (and if you’ve watched TV in the past few days you’ve seen commercials hammering home their points). But we can’t fail again! Just because the bill doesn’t help everyone and fix everything, does not mean it’s not worth passing.
We must pass a bill this session. The time is now. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a step forward.
