Just Pass the House Bill

Ezra on why the House should simply pass the Senate health care reform bill, regardless of the results in the Massachusetts Senate election.

There is a tendency, however, to get caught in the politics and process of health-care reform. But the most important fact is not that House Democrats can pass the Senate bill. It's that they should, if it comes to that.
 
This argument is generally made in terms of the politics of health-care reform. Both chambers of Congress have already voted for reform. The question is simply whether Democrats want to own a historic legislative success or a calamitous political failure. If Democrats pass the bill, they have a major accomplishment to message around in 2010. Every paper in the country will have a front-page headline featuring the word "historic." If Democrats don't pass it, they must explain away their failure, and beyond their failure, their decision to try at all. Just as no campaign is ever as good as it looks when it's winning or as bad as it seems when it's losing, bills that pass look better than bills that fail, regardless of the underlying merits.

But that argument is almost sociopathically detached from the actual bill. Democrats should pass health-care reform because it's the right thing to do. They should pass health-care reform because between 18,000 and 45,000 people die each year because they don't have health-care insurance, and this bill will save many of those lives. They should pass health-care reform because it will prevent countless medical bankruptcies and an enormous amount of needless chronic pain and infirmity. They should pass it because it will take important steps towards cost control. They should pass health-care reform, as my friend Chris Hayes says, because it's important for the American people to see their government doing more than starting wars and bailing out banks. They should pass health-care reform because it's the right thing to do, both for the millions of people whom it will directly affect and for the country as a whole.

The fact that this argument is being made by a blogger rather than a congressional leader, however, is exactly the problem. This legislation, like all legislation, is the product of an unending series of compromises and a long and tough political fight. The bill's natural allies have made painful concessions that have sapped their enthusiasm, and its natural opponents have had a long time to learn to hate it. But for all the concessions, the bill is not that different, in effect or in construction, than it was at the beginning. The problem is that the bill's supporters seem to have forgotten why they were doing this in the first place. And if they can't remember the bill's virtues, who will remind the country?