Nobody lost their health insurance yesterday
I'm going to talk you off the ledge...and by you, I mean ME!
Yesterday was a bad day. A very bad day. There were and still are a lot of distressed people and lots of freak outs. I admit to being one of them. I was in a horrible mood to start the day and the new insurance news made it much worse. I couldn't even enjoy the Cubs beating the Phillies in thirteen innings but that I blame on the teams that couldn't figure out how to win a game in less than four and one half hours.
What made it worse was how distasteful the members of the House acted after the vote. The Republicans headed to the White House for beers and all of them acted like they were having orgasms. I guess that make sense since the only way they can do that is by taking things away from people who need help and putting more money in their pocket. The Democrats weren't much better. They were singing Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye because they think they've just won back the House in 2018....two years from now. So they're happy because they'll have jobs on the backs of a lot of dead and broke citizens. Good for them. Seriously...fuck all of them!
Now here comes the ledge jump saving part. The only politicians acting like adults yesterday were the members of the Senate. When asked about the health bill every Democrat said dead on arrival. Okay, that was expected. But it was the Republicans that had the more interesting responses. I didn't see any of them celebrating and most of them were laid back and subdued. The few that talked about it said there was a lot of work to do. They were waiting to see how the bill was going to be scored and how much it cost. Then they were going to write their own bill and it was going to look a lot different than what was passed in the House. Even the draconian Mitch McConnell didn't have anything to say and didn't do any celebrating yesterday. I'm going to take that as a sign that this isn't going to be as bad as it seemed yesterday. That's the positive point of view; of course, with McConnell things could be worse but I choose not to go there today.
The reactions of the two legislative branches were totally different. The House members were celebrating like they did something great, not realizing that all their jobs are at stake in 2018 if this goes wrong. The Senate Republicans don't have that many seats up for grabs in the next election. Most of them belong to Democrats. And yet they were the ones that were reserved and going to take it slow to make sure it gets done right.
Thursday was like the Amy Winehouse song: The House tried to pass a health care bill. The Senate says No, No. NOOOOO!
And that's why we all shouldn't be jumping anywhere today. There's no need to do anything drastic. Obamacare is still the law of the land and likely to be so for a long time. This is going to be a slow process....very slow. I think we can chill right now while at the same time being aware of what's going on. I'm pretty sure that even the politicians don't know what the final bill is going to look like. That's comforting and scary at the same time, isn't it.
Here's yesterday's post about preexisting conditions.
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