Everyone with any intelligence agrees that any nation needs a functioning healthcare system and overall coverage. It was evident at the time Barak Obama was elected that the existing healthcare system was going to bankrupt the nation. Then Obama forced through the first national healthcare bill in the nations history. Okay so the right doesn’t like Obama’s bill, but despite the right’s objections, all rationally thinking people accept the need for some kind of national healthcare. Bob Dole, a Republican, had a bill very much like this one but he couldn’t get it off the ground because too many congressmen were and are in the back pocket of the insurance companies, companies whose money keeps these quasi-honest congressmen in office.
Sure the Healthcare bill isn’t perfect but the Republican alternative isn’t anything. So until they come up with a better idea they should sit down and shut their mouths.
David Gregory posed this question on Meet the Press: Why, when the country needed economic revival, when we needed jobs, did Obama push ahead with his healthcare bill instead of trying to create jobs or cut the deficit?
Well, despite all the right wing screaming about the Healthcare Bill being a destructive horror, the truth will out. It was able to pass because logic demands that it was a necessity for a civilized country. Every president since Roosevelt has understood this but some didn’t care enough and the others just weren’t able to muster the support until now. Maybe the need is greater now and more obvious, maybe there were enough Democrats who saw that need or maybe there were enough who just voted their conscience for a change, but for whatever reason it passed. It’s not perfect yet and it needs some revisions but basically it needs to stay the law.
And there are other reasons besides, being the right thing to do why it needs to stay the law. Those reasons have to do with Mr. Gregory’s question because they have to do with the nation’s economics and they put the lie to the Republican’s objections to the bill.
Over the next ten years, because of the Healthcare Bill the government will save over $230 billion of direct healthcare costs that would have been spent without it. These come from economies in the system that the bill addresses. By the way, I’m not getting my facts, as the Republicans do, from Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck. I’m getting them from the neutral Government Accounting Office and organizations like it. That $230 billion figure is more than the Republicans will try to save with all their cuts over the next five years. The Republican myth that the Healthcare bill will cost us money is just that, a myth. The status quo that existed before the legislation went into effect was costing us a fortune, but Boehner and his gang don’t want us to see that, don’t want us to have a healthcare bill that was put in place by Democrats because their principal agenda is getting reelected, not governing.
In addition to this huge saving, the Healthcare Bill has already created jobs. In his State of the Union speech last year Obama promised to create 1.5 million jobs. He has fallen short of that goal creating only 1.1 million jobs, but over 200 thousand of those jobs were in the healthcare sector and as the new bill continues to gear up (most of it will not come on line until 2014), more jobs will be created.
The Republicans will accept jobs in health care because to deny them would reveal them in a bad light, but they would prefer to create jobs in manufacturing where the base of their financial support lies. Any jobs would be great, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen. The industrial revolution is over and it’s not coming back, at least not to this country.
If we are going to create jobs anywhere but infrastructure, it must be in the industries of the 21st Century, and in order to do that we must educate our children and re-educate our current work force to compete for those jobs that will otherwise be done by the children of India, China and a host of emerging countries around the world.
If you listen to the likes of Boehner and Cantor they will tell you that cutting spending and reducing the deficit are more important than investment in our future and as usual, they’re wrong. There has never been a better time to borrow money than now. Interest rates are at rock bottom and the cost of money will never be cheaper. Assuming debt is never a good thing, but accepting the need for infrastructure and education and understanding the need to do it now when the cost of money is almost non-existent, is a lot better than doing it in the future, when the cost of money may be five to ten times higher. At some point we will have to renew our infrastructure. There will never be a better time than now. This is due to the desperate need for jobs, especially in the construction trades, which will force down the cost of labor, making work done now cost a fraction of what it will later. Not repairing our infrastructure will delay the recovery by impeding the ability of business investment to achieve its optimum goals.
Yes, infrastructure and education are the keys, to both the immediate and the long-range problems of the country but we have to have the guts to take advantage of these needs now, and to do this we have to ignore the thoughtless demands of the Tea Party nuts and maybe even raise taxes.