Only time will tell when it comes to health care reform

This might surprise you, but I get into a lot of political arguments with my friends.

One friend, a business major and staunch Republican, and I have had quite the feud over health care reform. The night Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s senate seat, he gloated over the demise of reform when I saw him at $2 Tuesday.

So, when I ran into said friend at Nick’s this past weekend, I had to bring it up: “What do you think about health care reform passing?”

I expected a skeptical “We’ll see how this thing works out.” Instead, I got, “Oh, we’ve got one more chance. Daniels 2012 and then Republicans can knock that thing out.”

I was intrigued. “You really think you’re going to gain enough votes to actually repeal this thing?” I questioned.

“Nah, but we’ll be able to punch enough holes in it that it will be ineffective,” came the optimistic response.

I was taken aback. With the vast majority of Americans believing that our health care system needs major overhaul and the polls revealing that Americans support the passage of the health care bill, attempting to undermine “Obamacare” seems like an odd strategy.

“Aren’t you at least curious to, you know, see if this thing works now that it has passed?” I inquired.

Summary of his response: “No.”

Sadly enough, I think that’s how virtually all Republicans feel about health care reform. House Republican Leader John Boehner’s Web site declares in bold print on the home page, “Repeal the Dems’ Health Care Law and Replace It.” Republican attorneys general across the nation are suiting up to challenge the constitutionality of the law, fights that aren’t likely to succeed.

Moreover, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele announced prior to the passage of the health care reform legislation that the GOP will run on the platform of ‘Repeal the Bill’ in the 2010 mid-terms.

I can only hope that Republicans repeat Alf Landon’s catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign, in which he railed against “the largest tax bill in history,” that compared poorly to the “much less expensive” and “practical measures” favored by the Republicans. “We must repeal,” he asserted. “The Republican Party is pledged to do this.”

He was talking about Social Security. Franklin Roosevelt handed him the worst electoral defeat since 1820.

The point, however, is that Republicans have invested themselves in the failure of American health care for the next several decades. They have no interest if seeing if the reform that 49 percent of Americans were happy to see passed could actually improve the welfare of American citizens.

This is either because they are so audacious that they believe they hold all the solutions to health care reform and absolutely nothing Democrats put forth could possibly work, or they do not care about fixing the system. The fact is that no one knows what the exact effects of the new law will be until they begin to unfold.

It’s an ongoing process, and this is only the start; as the law plays out in the real world, undoubtedly it will need to be altered and added to.

But we owe it to ourselves and to those who suffered so much under the old health care system to see if this works, if this is the solution for which we’ve been waiting.

Undermining a law at the detriment of those who would be aided by it, not to mention the nation that desperately needs some type of health care reform, simply because it was passed by the opposition party is not only childish — it’s malicious.


E-mail: akames@indiana.edu