I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill

An incredibly hostile FAQ about healthcare reform (aka, HCR):

What is the key issue to remember when discussing HCR? That Congress is broken, and to the extent it works, it's generally to funnel money to the lawmakers themselves.

Wait, what about HCR? We're getting there, hold on a sec...

OK, why is Congress so broken? Well, one party acts like we have a parliamentary system, where party discipline is king and there is no need to negotiate across the aisle, whereas the other is famously disorganized, full of corporate sellouts, and actually does take no steps to maintain party discipline, as Chairman Lieberman can attest. The House passes stuff, but is full of idiots from both parties who don't even understand the work of the committee they chair, speak loudly without saying anything, and needless to say the one nuclear scientist in the room must often feel like he's talking to the furniture.

Wait, if they are so useless how do they pass stuff? Two answers: Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists. In Pelosi's defense, her job is to pass decent legislation, and the house does do so. To go into more depth, congresspeople don't write legislation, they put their names on lobbyists' legislation. Their job is to choose which lobbyists get to write it. I'm pretty convinced lobbyists earn their money not by being evil, but rather by appealing in broad ways to the interests of sitting legislators and then working in sweet deals fro their clients at the margins of bills. I can say for darn sure that the average house member has no concept whatsoever of the content of an average bill, even if they wrote it. Think of it like a university research time. The legislator (professor) is busy with meetings and other important functions, so they hire a team of aides (postdocs) who do know their stuff, but can't handle all the volume of what they have to do, so much of the grunt work is done by lobbyists (grad students), who work for peanuts (large comissions) and scrape by (live comfortably) based on leftover free food (hefty payments by their clients). See, it's a nearly perfect analogy (not a perfect analogy).

Anyway, what about the Senate. How does it work? Bribery. Mary Landrieu was bought off for $100 million, which is pretty cheap considering that they really needed her vote. Ben Nelson got such a sweet deal that he's now actually embarassed by it. Lieberman is just a prick.

So the bill is a product of corruption and idiocy? Yes.

So we should hope it goes down to defeat, right? WRONG!

We should support it, because it is a product of corruption and idiocy? No, as we established, all Congressional bills are like this, but this one happens to help millions of Americans get health insurance.

Why shouldn't they blow up the current bill and start from scratch on a better one? Naive sucker, Congress. Congress, naive sucker. It never gets better, it's Congress. It only gets worse over time. To draw a historical analogy of which my wife is fond, Lincoln was attacked viciously during the civil war because the Emancipation Proclamation was seen as overly compromised, not freeing all slaves in the country. I think his judgment looks OK in hindsight, because it was better than not doing anything.

Why should we make people buy insurance with an individual mandate? Because that's how social contracts work, people. The whole point of insurance is to have the healthy pay for the sick, otherwise, we wouldn't need it. Something has to make the healthy overpay, on the chance they might become sick, or otherwise the sick have to pay the full amount, and that's really not a good thing.

What about the increase in the stock prices for the health insurance companies? They think it's a great deal for them... The stock market is driven by people not much more accurate than Jim Cramer over the long run. They basically put a finger to the wind and then say to buy if some idiot on CNBC says he has a hunch. It's also been pointed out that food stamps are a great boon to supermarket chains and the tycoons of companies like ADM, who are hardly liberal heroes, but that doesn't argue for cutting off food stamps.

I still want Medicare for all. Why can't I have it? Congress! How many times now? It takes $100 million to bribe a powerful senator, and much less for the average congresscritter. For any issue that could cost an industry more than several billion dollars, they will generally be able to bribe their way into getting what they want, since it is in their economic interest to act that way.

Medicare-for-all pretty please? Look, I agree with you, which is why they should have pushed for lowering the eligibility age over time down to 55, maybe by 1 year per year or two. They didn't, and instead the public option was basically stripped of all its power in the house, then killed completely by jackass centrists in the Senate, and then Lieberman poked a stick in everyone's eyeby pushing for, then against, the Medicare buy-in option.

I'm depressed, we should blow up the whole system and rebuild something better from the ashes... This was actually the argument of a popular post at Daily Kos, arguing that the "technocrats" like Ezra Klein (who along with Jon Cohn and Nate Silver are the three people everyone should consult on this issue on a daily basis) were wrong about Iraq, while the Dirty F'in Hippies were right, and the same split is playing out on the left over Health Care reform. Unfortunately, the argument is backwards. As a general rule, it is very worrisome when people agree to risk immediate harm to others in return for some greater good in the future. In Iraq, we were fighting for some sense of security in the future (read: oil profits) that was never really at risk (read: oil profits going to other countries instead!). Those many deaths were traded for the broken and illusory promise of a brighter future, which remains a moral stain on our nation and will continue to do so long into the future.

With healthcare, we have the chance to make a tangible gain now, admittedly one that falls far short of what many of us would have liked to see. Blowing that chance up for some possible future healthcare panacea is just as immoral in a priori terms, as there are real people who will suffer while we place our trust in the American healthcare system to break down and then Congress to step in and fix it. Needless to say, while the former is certainly decent bet, the latter is pure fantasy. While imperfect, the current bill helps a great number of people, an that is the true standard on which it needs to be judged.