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seems to me that alot of the question of what folk think copasetic or the contrary about this bill comes down to a matter of framing.
in the rest of the world one or another form of universal health care was instituted as an aspect of the construction of the welfare state after world war 2, typically during periods of left political ascendancy. the main arguments in favor of it were:
access to basic health care is a fundamental human right. this is an ethical argument, both in itself (everyone should be treated with dignity) and in relative terms (capitalism produces enough material benefits such that they can and should be allocated to accord this dignity to everyone...and it empirically produces inequalities and worse, which the system can and should be called upon to address.)
it makes sense from a political and business viewpoint as well; it addresses an important political question because it extends the legitimacy of the existing order by incorporating people that capitalism tends to exclude. it allows for a smoother reproduction of the labor pool and for treating health insurance costs as an externality.
this decision to make health care available is poses a resource allocation question, but this should have been posed as also political, because it bloody well is political: the united states wastes more money on military expenditures than the next 10 countries behind it on the list put together. the united states obviously has the resources to do this; it simply up to now has chosen to emphasize death (military expenditures can be reduced to that, yes?) rather than quality of life as an overall political objective.
there were other arguments of course, but these are the main types that were advanced.
i will never understand why the obama administration was not more aggressive about making its case on ethical and political grounds. doing it would have pushed the ultra-right, which seem to be all that remains of the right now that the republican party is essentially in bed with the militia movement across the tea bagger coalition, into making arguments that would be crazy for them to make---like the uninsured should not be treated with the same dignity as others, that dignity correlates with income, that there are no human rights. and you've seen it---that asshat glenn beck and others arguing that social justice is code for communism, etc.
the constitutional questions are subsidiary to political questions, and even those quaint strict construction folk know this given that strict construction is itself a politics in which it is politically acceptable to toss around quaint outmoded terms like "objectivity" which of course means really "written from a viewpoint sympathetic to mine"---which is what "objectivity" has always meant--a rhetoric of neutrality masking political positions built into the arguments or viewpoint of a piece---which is why the notion is quaint.
so alot of this chaos, this noise from the right is an effect of there simply not having been adequately clear ethical and political arguments made from the outset. it think it's a problem. i never believed personally that the right was going to work in good faith to do something about health care---particularly not once they started acting as a tick sucking the money from the insurance industry et. al.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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