Still time to think small

[babylonsister]

Still time to think small
Ezra Klein


This is a good bill. Not a great bill, but a good bill. Imagine telling a Democrat in the days after the 2004 election that the 2006 election would end Republican control of Congress, the 2008 election would return a Democrat to the White House, and by the 2010 election, Democrats would have passed a bill extending health-care coverage to 94 percent of Americans, securing trillions of dollars in subsidies for low-income Americans (the bill's $900 billion cost is calculated over 10 years, but the subsidies continue indefinitely into the future), and imposing a raft of new regulations on private insurers. It is, without doubt or competition, the single largest social policy advance since the Great Society.

Not bad, huh?

This bill is likely to pass the Senate on Christmas, and head to the president's desk before the State of the Union. It will be hard to change big things about the bill between now and then. But it will be fully possible to change small things. An example came in the manager's amendment. The original Senate bill barred insurers from imposing "unreasonable" annual caps on spending. This bill bars them from imposing any annual caps on spending. That's thanks, in large part, to the left, which attacked that weakness ferociously.

There are a lot of pages in this bill. A lot of sentences. A lot of loopholes and weaknesses (alongside a lot of strengths and improvements). Not all of them will be caught between now and passage, or even between now and implementation. But some of them can be. And some small things can be added, changed or tweaked. But first, they have to be noticed and publicized. Both the underlying bill and the package of amendment can be downloaded and scrutinized here (at link).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/time_to_think_small.html