Obama's health care overhaul

I support the passage in the United States of the recent health care overhaul. Of course I believe it doesn’t go nearly far enough. But it was hard enough to pass the bill as it was. They had to get every single Democratic Senator to vote for it. One notable Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, would not vote for a health care bill that had a public option. Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman also refused to support a public option. I fully support the public option concept and found it unfortunate that it wouldn’t have taken effect until 2013. Universal public health care is always the ideal. Republicans rail against government takeover of health care. Yet that’s a concept I support, and even the American population supports that concept to some extent. As much as Republicans claim that Americans oppose “government takeover” of health care many polls have shown a majority of Americans support the public option, something that Republicans would indeed classify as a “government takeover.” In my view individual states that have Democratic legislatures ought to pass a single payer system for their own state and go beyond the new federal law. California is attempting to do just that right now. However California has a Republican governor, famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has promised to veto a single payer bill. Democrats do not have the votes to override a veto. Also passing budgets and budget related items is so difficult under California’s constitution that the single payer bill would actually need voter approval in a referendum. Voter passage in a referendum is no guarantee when the anti-single payer groups would inundate the state with misinformation in an attempt to defeat a single payer system. There is also no guarantee that a single payer system could be passed into law next year. The open California governor’s race is an exact dead heat between the leading Republican and Democratic candidates at the moment and if a Republican wins, they too would surely veto a single payer bill. As for New York, although New York has a Democratic governor, this Democratic governor is badly embattled and is not running for re-election. New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is expected to seek the Democratic nomination for governor but has yet to announce his candidacy. But even if Cuomo becomes governor, a single payer bill is unlikely to pass unless the Democrats majority in the Senate is expanded. At the moment there is a very narrow Democratic majority in the Senate in which the balance of power is held by socially conservative Democrats. With this narrow majority, it is not clear to me whether a single payer bill could pass. Sadly it also seems difficult for states to implement a single payer system with the constant thorn of budget deficits that is affecting every single jurisdiction in both Canada and the United States. Nevertheless in my view this federal health care bill in the US is only the beginning of the long fight to ensure that the under privileged have complete and total health care coverage in all of the USA.