republican the bill is

I think that they have helped set the stage for

the public turn around and vote R.

Furthermore, you are ignoring the giant risk to democrats this bill represents.  If it succeeds, it will have proven progressives wrong.  The system can be fixed without progressive ideals - i.e. public insurance.  If it fails and in a few years our health system is a disaster, the public will not embrace democrats to give them another shot and take the bill "oh my God, even further left.  Even more socialistic."  The public will instead recoil from the democrats and embrace conservative ideas.

So either the bill succeeds and progressives are proven wrong.  Or the bill fails and progressives (liberals) take the blame.

There is a reason insurance and parma stocks are trading at 52 week, 3 year, 5 year highs.  

I can appreciate that this bill isn't what we wanted, but it's a damn good start.

Whether it's a good start depends on how big you think the task is: are we trying to empty out a bathtub with an eyedropper, or did we pull the plug?  Many of us think that not only is it the former, but the tap is still running, so the tub is in danger of overflowing.

I hate when people start comparing different era political ideas, from "the party of Lincoln" to the "HRC bill a republican idea".

The "principles that Republicans espoused for years" have nothing to do with the modern day republican party principles, or rather lack of them.  Making any sort of meaningful comparison to the medical and political system in the past 70 years to today's political and medical environment is far too simplistic.

 

What was the state of Americans and Health Care when either Roosevelt was in office, how about Johnson, Nixon or even Reagan and Clinton.  Nothing was the same and this bill, which I might add was closer to failing than passing, was about the best we can expect.

Universal care, pleaze, if that is what would have become law today there would be an all out revolution in the red states, or at least some very serious civil disobedience with people dying, IMO.  A this point a true blue liberal plan could have ripped this country apart for years.

People do not die because they can get care, they die because they cannot.  They don't riot because universal care will keep them out of medical bankruptcy - they should be rioting because this private system does not.  I was too young to remember, but was there civil disobedience when Johnson signed Medicare into law?  Was the nation ripped apart because seniors were enrolled in a single-payer health plan?  That must have been left out of the history books.

Let's not forget, we went up against some of the most influential special interests out there and won.  We won.  Anyone thinking we could have walked away with everything liberals wanted is as delusional as the idiots suing to get the President removed from office.

"We" will continue to go up against those special interests, because our president invited them into the WH and made special, industry-favorable deals with them - not to improve our health care, but to make sure the industry dollars kept flowing into Democratic coffers.  "We" won the requirement to buy health insurance from a private company, but there is still no guarantee people can afford the care they need.

What is important now is to keep hammering away, and to do that we need to get more liberals elected, which requires getting the public on board with what is actually the law.  Make people want more change and it will happen, complain and whine about how worthless and republican the bill is and watch the public turn around and vote R.

How much harder can we hammer?  How loud must we speak to be heard.  The public was fully on board to get the insurance companies to stop strangling us, fully on board with a lot of things, and we have been summarily ignored.

I don't dispute that there are not some good things in this legislation, but they could have been passed on their own, and not packaged with a trillion-dollar bonanza for Big Insurance.

Even though Obama put in mandates, the program will not provide universal coverage. It will eventually provide insurance for 32 million people. According to the last figures I've seen, there are currently 45 million people uninsured and that number may rise by 2014.

Major concessions (all worth more than $100 billion) made by Obama as reported by major news organization.

1. No public option
   
2. No reimportation of prescription drugs
   
3. No negotiation of prescription drugs
   
4. No elimination of the overcharge for prescription drugs on dual eligible Medicare/Medicaid participants.
   
5. No acceleration of generics for high priced prescription drugs.