“Dave” and Health Care Reform

I’m sitting here in front of my TV watching “Dave” on TV, while thinking about the House vote tomorrow on the Health Care Reform measure.  This is one of my all-time favorite movies, because it is full of romance, but perhaps more so because it calls for us to live up to our highest ideals.

The personal part of me is heart-broken tonight because this is the three month anniversary of the end of a relationship that I thought was forever–one that I believed called me to live up to my highest ideals.  Obviously, for lots of reasons, it did not work out for the two of us.  And yet, that does not mean that either of us should cease to seek to live up to those ideals.

Sometime tomorrow, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the, already passed, Senate version of Health Care reform.  The Senate bill is a lousy bill.  While one email I received today touts the vote as having worldwide historic implications, the truth is that this bill, and everything else considered in this debate, falls far short of bringing the United States into the realm of health care that every other industrial country in the world already enjoys.  Healthcare in this country costs more per person than in any other industrial country in the world with far fewer people covered and an overall outcome well below any other industrial country.  By almost any means, the passage of this bill should be considered a colossal failure.  And yet, in this time and place, the real failure would be that the bill does not pass.

We are together in this society and we have a responsibility to one another.  While this pass at Health Care Reform falls short of the ideal, it is a step towards our ideal that would be passed over at the expense of not making progress for at least a decade.