Health Care Reform Turns the Corner

Paul Krugman notes that it is beginning to look likehealth care reform is going to pass,

What’s actually happening, though, is that the backlash crested mid-summer, and that there is now at least a modest backlash against the backlash. At the same time, the Obama administration has made it clear that they will push something through, using reconciliation if necessary, and in effect put Democrats who don’t go along on the spot.
 
And all this in turn means that Democrats who probably don’t really want reform have lost what they had in 1993: safety in numbers. It’s one thing to let health care die quietly; it’s another to be one of the, say, two Democratic senators responsible for denying cloture and blocking the party’s most important domestic policy initiative since Medicare, and then to be blamed, rightly or wrongly, for big losses in the midterms.
 
So the odds now are that the thing hangs together, and reform is indeed enacted this year. It will be a highly flawed product; we’ll probably spend much of the next decade trying to fix it.
 
But it does look as if it’s going to happen. And that will be a huge victory for progressives.