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Two thoughts:

1) The Republican Party doesn’t seem to stand for anything anymore, other than “Get Obama.”  And the only ideas Republicans seem to have brought to the Health Care debate amounted to:  “If Obama wants it, we’re voting no.”

So of course the President had to push through the legislation as a strictly Democratic bill, fighting the Republicans’ monolithic bloc with another of his own. 

2) Any meaningful Health Care reform has to be comprehensive or it simply won’t work.  That is just a fact.  Yet, for all the cliché’d rhetoric spewing forth from the right-wing, Obama’s bill is simply not a radical proposition.  As William F. Pewen, former senior health policy adviser for Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) wrote in an opinion piece in Saturday’s Oregonian: “…the core of the Senate's legislation closely resembles the very bill the Republicans offered in 1993 as an alternative to the Clinton plan.”

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/03/missteps_eroded_bipartisanship.html

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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