Health Care Reform Passed & Signed

On Sunday, the House of Representatives passed (again) the health care reform bill. Later this week, the Senate will pass it (again). And our president has just signed the House bill. All after a very ugly, protracted media campaign in which incivility and paranoia in political discourse reached new extremes. After the House passage, Fox News extreme right-winger (of many there) Glenn Beck compared the health care reform passage to past historic disasters like the Hindenburg crash, Chamberlain's peace treaty with Hitler, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait, I think Beck's on board with nuking 200,000 people!

Already several states are filing lawsuits claiming that the bill is unconstitutional by mandating that citizens purchase health insurance. I initially had similar concerns, but after reading the opinions of a few legal scholars, this doesn't appear to be the case. But that doesn't make it right, either.

Still, the bill does have some good features. It allows young adults to remain on their parents' policies to age 26. It should help entrepreneurs to obtain affordable health insurance for themselves and their families. And the specter of pre-existing conditions will diminish greatly, enabling people to more freely change jobs and careers (even possibly starting their own businesses) without the fear of becoming uninsurable because they may have one or more of them. That should help our economic growth and innovation greatly.

So we'll see how the health care reform legislation translates into real world application. I feel better about it than before, but still would have much preferred for there to have been a public option to keep insurance companies honest with their pricing. Especially since the health insurance industry, for some reason, has a special exemption for federal anti-trust laws.