US Senate Passes Obama health bill

[Mr Khan]

Sqrl said:

mrstickball said:

Jackson5050 said:

The conference committee will adopt the Senate's excise tax and there will be no PO. Hopefully, and I think this will occur, the conference committee will adopt the House's national insurance exchange-this is the key provision. Yes, it is an imperfect bill, but it is preferable to the status quo.

If this is in imperfect bill, then they need to make it perfect - after all, isn't it our senators jobs to make good bills law?

The way they passed this - by giving out favors to those that questioned the bill - is horrible. As much as I would like to say the current administration has some iota of worthiness to it, I do not believe it does. We do need healthcare reform, but this kind of 'reform' is a sham - we're funding a bad system for more people, rather than passing laws to make the system better, THEN looking into giving it to everyone.

While I agree with the majority of what you're saying I don't think perfection is a reasonable requirement for legislation (or really even defineable).  I do agree however, and I think you probably meant this, that they should be striving for perfection when crafting their legislation.

That's the mess of politics, when one side or the other (or both) are determined to not really do anything but try and spite the other side, you have to fight like hell for all but the most basic stuff, and it still ends up coming out lopsided

 

which means that yes, the Republicans are largely to blame for this, as are the Blue Dog democrats (who are going to get broiled in the upcoming primary elections for this, i think). But it isn't a quality endemic to Republicans or lacking in Democrats, that's just the nature of a disgruntled opposition party in general, and it's a decent tactic politically. Do the most you can to upset the other side's efforts, and then claim that the other side has been failing to act