Yesterday morning I was at the office, crawling under a desk to connect a telephone wire, when Partner called me. “The Supreme Court upheld health care!” he crowed. “Roberts voted with the liberals!”
I was so excited that I got up too quickly and bumped my head.
Seriously: I’m delighted. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was a landmark piece of legislation, which finally put health care into the same category as education: everyone should have access to it, in the same way. No more marching poor people off to emergency rooms, where they can wait patiently like the paupers they are. No more hospitals amortizing the money they lose on emergency-room care by charging more for standard services. No more insurance companies charging inflated premiums because hospitals charge inflated rates.
Well, maybe not all at once. But a huge step in the right direction: the biggest step since Medicare.
The Right’s attempt to overturn the health care act was, for me, sick-making. They couched it as a moral and political issue: how dare the government tell us what to do?
Honey, they do it all the time: law enforcement, income tax. Get used to it. And this is for something good and well-intentioned.
I have seen, just last evening online, images of Obama burning the Constution. I also read online that a number of angry conservatives are Tweeting about moving to Canada, to escape the communist tyrant Obama. (Canada, get it? That place with free health care?) When it was pointed out to them that this made no sense, they claimed it was a joke. Really? “I’m moving to Canada” means, to me, “I like the idea of free health care.” One said: “At least in Canada they’re openly socialist, unlike Obama who pretends to be a democratic leader.”
Yikes yikes yikes.
And here’s the best part: even if the Mayans are right and Romney becomes President, he will have a hell of a time overturning Obama’s legislation; he will never have a supermajority in either house, and Democrats will filibuster him to death on the issue.
And the American people, in the meantime, will discover that it’s nice to have health care, and the polls will turn in favor of health care.
And you know how Mitt Romney feels about polls, and about agreeing with the majority.
I got up yesterday morning thinking it was going to be a sucky day. And it turned out to be a great day for America.
Who knew?
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