Within the disability community, we’re all being very quiet and polite right now about health care reform. I don’t know if you noticed, but there haven’t been any big action alerts, rallies or even publicized meetings among our activists about the issue in quite a while.

It’s like this whole process is a soufflé of sorts and we don’t want it to implode. Well, when I say “we,” I mean generally those of us who see ourselves as left of center, politically. Partisans on the right are jumping up and down and doing all they can to get that soufflé to collapse in a gooey mess. Those far on the left are just as bad, threatening to shut off the oven since they might not get all the ingredients they want, such as public option, and one ingredient they don’t want, the anti-abortion amendment. That leaves us left-of-centers stuck guarding the kitchen, saying, “shhh … let it cook.”

I have no respect or patience or even good will toward those trying to kill the bill for any reason. The right had Congress and the White House all to itself for six whole years and squandered so much, including a chance to do something meaningful on health care. Now many of them are touting their plans, and they’re just nonsense, nothing meaningful or helpful. Really, these folks are trying to break into the kitchen so they can make some noise, destroy the cooking process.

The conservatives almost got their way, they almost destroyed the bill by inserting an amendment that was sure to rile up every progressive in the nation — the Stupak-Pitts amendment, of course, that would make it damn near impossible for anyone to obtain an abortion through any plan. It’s sick that this amendment passed, since it sets a precedent that Congress can vote on which legal medical procedures it thinks a person’s health care provider should or should not be able to offer. Note: It’s the anti-big government folks that want to invest Congress with this power.

But it would be worse, so much worse, if that controversy eventually killed a bill that would finally free us of the preexisting condition clause that traps many of us into whatever existing job covers us, or helps to keep us in thrall to Social Security.

The bill is not perfect. But it’s the best health care reform in my lifetime. Actually, if passed, it will be the only sweeping health care reform in my lifetime, since Medicare and Medicaid became law a year before I was born. There will be flaws in the new bill that we cannot live with — such as, possibly, how certain types of DME are paid for under Medicare — but I am convinced that we can fix these flaws with patch legislation and proper regulations.

Like many, I am also convinced that if it doesn’t pass, we won’t get another chance until my daughter’s daughter grows up.

So if you live in reddish districts, or have friends so true-blue that they would rather kill this bill than figure out how to fix what they don’t like once it passes, ask them to shush, please. Keep it down. We don’t want this reform to flop, like so many before it.

On abortion: http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_wilding_of_sarah_palin.html

I do not think that the abortion issue is trivial and should be compromised. As a moderate-pro-choice-Republican, I am very uncomfortable with this deal being included in health care reform. I know of a woman in her early 70s that had an illegal abortion many years ago. Nearly 50 years later the terror of what she went through back then is very real. Under no circumstances should we be visit those days again! T.K. Small

I say keep abortions in the bill and and make it easier and mor available than ever. After all, the majority of abortions are for the psycho leftist/democrats anyway. So let them eat their young!

It is frustrating that because I am anti health care reform as it stands, that I am somehow a horrible conservative or an obstructionist. None of these are true. My issue is the speed and lack of thoughtful discourse that is healthcare reform. I have Obamaites to say that healthcare reform has been fifty years in the making. The concept of healthcare reform is fifty years old, but the actual bill has been quickly put together. That is my issue. The idea that we can't challenge healthcare reform is unamerican. We must be as certain as we can about the longterm impact of this legislation. Put agreed upon parts into play and see how it goes. Do not reform the whole system based on untried assumptions. I just wish the name calling would stop. Disagreement is wonderfully american.

Unfortunately your daughter's daughter's daughter will be paying for your crappy "free" insurance. Now that it has passed (although NO ONE really knows what it says, including those that voted for it) it's pretty clear that the only cooking will be our gooses. P/w/d are on the short end of the stick. Let's see if people remember in 2012.

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