Health care and unanswered questions

My bro believes that Obama's address to Congress last night left two questions unanswered: Will Obama be able to get a bill passed, and what will it look like ? He noted that the Republicans in the audience had to sit on their hands to avoid giving the president an EMF (the emphatic extended middle finger).

One of them couldn't control himself, and this item explains why I've written the whole health care reform issue off as a lost cause.

Health care reform, or HCR for brevity's sake, has always been about Obama, but never been up to Obama.

Republicans have known since election night last November that if Obama could deliver the kind of change he was promising, they'd be on the outside looking in for at least a decade, maybe more. Significant economic recovery and an improved health care system on Obama's watch wouldn't necessarily destroy the Republican party, but would make it harder for them to win elections. Since the Reagan era began, Republicans have used fear of liberalism as their main weapon in the political wars. If voters ever lose that fear, the GOP has nothing left to sell.

After tagging Obama as the worst kind of liberal, the commie-socialist-Marxist kind, there's no way Republicans can allow him to succeed, particularly in an area of as much interest to the typical voter as health care services. That's why I say HCR has always been about Obama, to the extent that conservatives call it Obamacare.

In our system of government, Obamacare isn't really up to Obama, though. It's up to Congress, where there are still plenty of Republicans committed to gumming up the works. The GOP strategy is a scorched earth, take-no-prisoners campaign which exploits fear and greed, two commodities in plentiful supply among American voters, to kill Obamacare -- or at least cripple it to the point it's certain to fail. In poker terms, they're all in this time. That's why Rep. Joe Wilson is being referred to as a great hero at websites like Red State.

Like my bro and his wife, Mrs. bee and I have health insurance coverage that is satisfactory in virtually all aspects. Ours is available through government retirement systems, is affordable, and thus far has come through like gangbusters every time we've needed it. From a purely selfish perspective, I don't have a dog in the HCR fight. My main concern now is that Republicans don't fuck things up so badly that we lose what we already have. They're capable of it.