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So as far as soft roll outs go I suppose this takes the cake. I've been spending a few weeks slowly building my title image and playing with the mechanics of the blog to make it ascetically pleasing (to me at least) and hadn't planned on writing much for a while but with a big news day like today I couldn't resist.
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A little background before I get started. I have, for a long time, been a proponent of single-payer healthcare. That long held progressive pipe dream, that I'm confident will eventually replace our current system. That being said I also supported the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare. Ironically one of the main reasons I supported President Obama in the 2008 primaries over Secretary Clinton was the issue of the minimum coverage mandate. Then candidate Obama spoke passionately about how ill conceived this idea was and I still maintain he was correct then. I however was not one of the many supporters of his that retconned his plan to a single payer plan (it never was) and having followed his career since his soaring speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 to today there was no doubt that he would take whichever approach was most pragmatic and got the job done as best as possible. That and the fact that I (sometimes alone it seemed) realized that Congress writes legislation, or should I say lobbyists write legislation and congress officially passes it. It was for that reason, among others I anticipated some maneuvering and position shifts when it came time to get to work on the actual bill. So while I continually advocated, through out the process, for a more progressive position I never fully felt that Obamacare was anything more then a good bill with provisions I didn't agree with but one that got the job closer to done. I never thought it unconstitutional, it was my understanding that through precedent and constitutional intent, the minimal coverage mandate was very clearly a legal provision. I simply always believed it to be bad policy and bad politics. I believed and continue to believe, with good cause, that it overshadows every other provision in the bill.
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With today's ruling by the Supreme Court that the minimal coverage mandate was in fact constitutional and that the bulk of the bill should remain as written we have taken a step, very near the end game. In the short term many lives will be saved and greatly improved due to the actual health care provisions and insurance reforms of this bill. The cry of socialism by the right falls on deaf ears to this writer, as I see it, this is precisely the purpose of government. While the mandate is a hand out to the insurance companies the rest of this bill is a level playing field for all of us who fear the specter of illness or accident. A correction in the integrity of our society that we will no longer say "Let them die" to the many who before this President and the Congress he was sworn in with all to often did die or go bankrupt avoiding death. We cannot in good conscience put political ideas and hard rhetoric over the lives of our community and I for one am damn proud of the banner before this post. I do heart Obamacare!
