Health care reform has me dejected, but this bill needs to pass. We can’t “kill the bill.”

I’m annoyed at Obama for not risking political capital to fight for what he believes in. More importantly, I have nothing but contempt for Harry Reid. I blame Reid for this fiasco more than Obama. If not for this ridiculous notion that any bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, we would have a much better health care bill today. The idea that Democrats are being allowed to threaten to filibuster their own party’s legislation is absurd. Are you kidding me? The way I see it: you want to filibuster your own party’s legislation? You want to pull that kind of shit? Fine, then you’re getting stripped of all your committee chairmanships and any other special perks you get from being a member of the majority party. I’d rather have 53 Democratic senators led by the ass-kicking Lyndon Johnson than a 60-member majority led by Harry Reid, that milquetoast fuckwad. Any time Reid opens his mouth I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake. He practically whispers in front of the microphone. He barely looks at the camera. He’d lose a fight against a ham sandwich. You could run him over with a tricycle. The guy has less charisma than John Kerry. He has negative charisma.

Fortunately, he’s up for re-election next year and he’ll probably lose. Since it’s unlikely the Democrats will lose their majority next year, we’ll probably have a new Democratic majority leader in the next Congress. But by that point it will be too late to put together a better health care plan.

Which is why, as disappointed I am in the Senate bill as it now stands, I’m more annoyed with people on the left who say we need to “kill the bill.” If we don’t pass a bill now, we won’t have this chance for another 15-20 years. And there are some great things in this bill. For starters, under this bill, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance. Some people on the left are saying that because there’s no public option, it will be a windfall to the insurance companies. Um, no it won’t. In return for being paid premiums, the insurance companies will have to provide health insurance to people. It seems like many lefties aren’t thinking clearly — they’re beholden to the notion that anything corporate is evil, that health insurance companies are the spawn of hell. They’re more interested in punishing insurance companies than in helping millions of Americans get health insurance. They think that if insurance companies benefit, that must mean that everyone else loses. But be real. Just because you hate insurance companies, doesn’t mean they are evil. The world is not in line with your emotional reality. It’s really immature to see the world through the eyes of Michael Moore. I don’t like it when right-wingers see the world as black and white, and I don’t like it when left-wingers do so either.

It’s the Nader voters all over again.

Furthermore, one of the problems with our health insurance system is that lots of healthy people don’t buy insurance, meaning that the risk pool is smaller and somewhat skewed toward the unhealthy. A bigger risk pool is better, because it results in lower premiums for everyone. And the risk pools will increase by 30 million people.

Even if these numbers are off and it’s just 20 million more people with health insurance, that’s still phenomenal, and it’s the greatest progress in health care that we’ve had in more than 40 years.

I also read something that said under the current bill, insurance companies will be able to charge older people three times as much as younger people, and OMG how horrible that would be. Um, as opposed to now, when there is no limit on what they can charge?

So, yes, this bill could have been a lot better, and it’s Obama’s fault as well as Reid’s, as well as the fault of every senator who opposes a public option and a Medicare buy-in. (It’s also the Republicans’ fault, of course, but that goes without saying.)

But there’s lots of great stuff in this bill. It needs to pass. In the early 1970s, the Democrats scrapped a health care deal with Richard Nixon because it wasn’t good enough for them, and what did they get for it? Nothing.

If they don’t pass this bill now, there won’t be another chance for years.

“It’s times like these when the difference between political activism and self-expression and primal scream therapy become really apparent. Politics isn’t easy. Political change isn’t easy. It includes tons of reverses and inevitably involves not getting a lot of what you wanted, at least not at first. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to agree on policy or priorities. People don’t agree on things. That’s life. But that’s different from cashing out of the process if you don’t get just what you want.”

— Josh Marshall

I’m really annoyed by people who say Obama is “just like Bush” or isn’t the leftist we elected. That’s an incredibly naive and simplistic view. First of all, Obama never put himself forth as a leftist. But more importantly, being president of the United States is really an impossible job. The public expects you to change the world with a wave of your hand, but the only real power the Constitution gives you is the power of persuasion. You have no concrete way to make Congress pass laws; you can only try and convince them to do it. (This list of presidential paradoxes is worth reading.) Granted, if you are talented enough a populist, you have more leverage, but even so, there’s no guarantee that this will work.

The Constitution discusses the Congress before it discusses the presidency. (Literally, Congress had to come first; the first act after the Constitution was ratified was for Americans to elect a Congress, because Washington couldn’t assume the presidency until after Congress had certified his election.) Not only that, but it divides Congress into two bodies. Not only that, but one of those bodies isn’t even apportioned democratically. So right off the bat, even if everything is working well, our system of government is constitutionally set up to make change difficult. Throw in the spineless Harry Reid, the incorrect notion that the Constitution requires a 60-vote majority to pass legislation, and the cult the Republican party has become, and it’s a miracle that health care legislation has gotten as far as it has.

The problem is that if Obama tries to explain this to the American people, he’ll come off looking weak, because we like our presidents to seem strong. (We invest the presidency with monarchical trappings: the White House, Air Force One, “Hail to the Chief.”)

If only he could argue that terrorists were trying to deny us single-payer health care.

Politics is not primal scream therapy. The last decade would have turned out much differently if a bunch of Florida Naderites had sucked it up and voted for Gore. And don’t even get me started on the teapartiers.

Politics isn’t about magic ponies. Don’t drop out of the process just because you don’t get what you want.