Health Care’s Second Wind
Posted on Oct 3, 2010
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Here is another piece of conventional wisdom about this year’s election that is being rendered patently false. It’s been said over and over that no Democrats are running on the health care bill. Actually, more and more of them are proudly campaigning on what the plan has achieved—and they should.
In a fight for his political life in Wisconsin, Sen. Russ Feingold went on the air last week with an advertisement that explicitly defends provisions in the bill and attacks his opponent, Republican Ron Johnson, for wanting to repeal it.
The ad portrays two different Wisconsin citizens telling Johnson: “Hands off my health care.” Their message is that repealing the health care law would, as another voter says, “put insurance companies back in control.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS_RudqV1Gk&feature=player_embeddedWI SEN Feingold On Your Side
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The standard Republican account was nicely summarized by Karl Rove in an Op-Ed piece in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. Rove argued that for Democrats, the health care bill “has become a reef on which many of their electoral hopes will founder.” He called the bill “a fiscal disaster of epic proportions” and declared that because of it, Democrats are “going to get an electoral defeat they won’t easily forget.”
Not so fast, Karl. In fact,
there are two “health care bills” competing in this election. One is the parody Republicans have lovingly created that casts the health care bill as a big government monstrosity with no redeeming features. The other is the law itself, an admittedly sprawling legislative compromise that nonetheless moves things in the right direction—and most of whose individual elements voters support.more...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/health_cares_second_wind_20101003/