Republicans Are Health Care Bill Scrooges

It looks like America will be getting a Christmas present of sorts: health care reform.

The Senate is set for a Christmas Eve vote on President Obama's top domestic priority. But like a kid who doesn't get the present she expected, the bill leaves a lot to be desired. The lack of a public option, which would prevent private insurers from gouging prices, is disconcerting.

But if health care reform is going to be a Christmas gift, then Republicans are surely acting like Scrooge. Better yet, the Grand Old Party is nothing more than a bunch of Grinches this year. Not a single Republican is likely to vote in favor of the bill. In fact, the Senate was split 60-40 on a bill about a vote to filibuster and add changes to the legislation. All 60 Democrats and two Independents have lined up to push this bill through, as they should. What's the use of having a supermajority if you are unable to use it? Americans voted for this type of reform.

But Republicans don't seem to get that. The fact that not one compromised on the bill that will provide 30 million uninsured Americans with health coverage, shows how out of touch they are with what Americans need. The bill also would actually pay for itself and help reduce the federal deficit. Republicans are sticking to an ideological script that no longer works, and they are accusing Democrats of exactly the thing they are guilty of.

According to the New York Times:

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who was one of Mr. Kennedy's closest friends in the Senate and who worked with him on many bipartisan health care bills over the years, said Democrats had failed to live up to Mr. Kennedy's spirit of cooperation. "The historic blizzard in Washington yesterday was a perfect symbol of the anger and frustration brewing," Mr. Hatch said. "I don't know of one Republican who is going to vote for this. If you can't get 75 to 80 votes on something that is this important for this much reform, we should start over and do it on a step-by-step basis."

That is ridiculous.

President Obama has practically invited Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine to be his BFF. She's had one-on-one meetings with him, and he has phoned her to speak about the issue. I don't believe Republicans were unable to negotiate additions to the bill in exchange for their votes, as some Democrats did. (That's a discussion for another day.)

Steve Marmel, a blogger at the Huffington Post, writes:

It's not a flaw in the Democratic party that they had to compromise to get 60 of their members to agree on a piece of legislation. That's what a big tent is about. I, nor should any American, want the important debates of our day to be dictated without debate and dissent. It is a flaw in the current version of the Republican Party that...everyone of these weak-willed individuals were in such fear of being lambasted -- by the tea party, by the conservative media, by idealogues in their own party -- that none of them had the courage. .... It's the Republicans, who are running the next election campaign on every bill that comes through the House and Senate, that were the biggest roadblocks to what it seems a majority of Americans wanted.

For African Americans, this bill is critical, Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, told Aol Black Voices in an interview.

The NAACP is pushing the 880 program, so named because 880,000 black deaths would have been prevented if African Americans had the same mortality rates as whites. Children born to black women are more than twice as likely to die in the first year of life, and African American death rates from diabetes, heart disease and cancer are public health crises.

"It's a very urgent life-and-death issue," Jealous said. "We are so accustomed to the reality that lack of coverage creates. People go off and take for granted that black people die younger."

The NAACP is shifting from traditional civil rights fights to human rights issues, of which Jealous believes health care is a priority:

Civil rights battles are about enforcing parts of the social contract that already exist, such as fighting discrimination. Human rights battles are about extending, amending or adding to the existing social contract. Insuring that all Americans have a right to high quality health care is a human rights battle because that right doesn't exist anywhere in our constitution and our laws.

Jealous has a personal experience with the situation. His sister, who transitioned jobs, was able to get her son on a health insurance plan but simply cannot afford to pay the premiums for herself.

"Literally, this country is playing Russian roulette with her life," Jealous said.

"The outrage can't be muted. We want to give people the permission to be as outraged as they should be until they call their senator. We literally cannot afford to have more people die, more families put in to bankruptcy, more children orphaned, because our country refuses to do what all of its peers do, which is to extend full health care coverage to its people," Jealous said.

I don't know about you, but I'll take this imperfect Christmas gift as a starting point.

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