Health Care Reform Good or Bad? Depends….

The headline this morning indicates that the 60th vote was found and the health care reform bill may be on its way to Christmas Eve passage.

Oh, goodie. And I though the fringes were difficult at Thanksgiving Dinner. Now I get to spend Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas with the same lot. Wondering if I can muster a migraine in time. . . .

But is the reform bill going to be good or bad? I’ve come to the conclusion that no one really knows — not the president, not Congress, not right-wingers, not left-wingers. No one. In government, each simply knows the 3 or 4 lines in the 1000 pages that he really cares about — and of course, he also knows his own several-hundred-page rhetoric on those 3 or 4 lines. The populace fringes are well versed, of course … but only on that same rhetoric.

Each believes what he’s going to believe about the reform bill, and none has a snowball’s chance in, errr, L.A. to get any real facts about any of it. As one friend of mine says, “Oh, the world we’ve created for ourselves!”

My wife recounted to me a good example of the two sets of expectations today. My mother and her step-mother are both needing knee surgery. Both have been waiting to be old enough for MediCare to kick in so that they can have the surgery.

She who is very left-leaning is waiting for that MediCare, now convinced that she’ll get the knee surgery quickly and with little or no cost at all to herself.

She who is very right-leaning is now convinced that Obama won’t pay for her knee surgery and she’ll never get it.

Conclusions aren’t coming from any particular facts, but from rhetoric and frenzied media pundits who, in turn, have whipped the populace into frenzy. Any more, I get suspicious and resistant when arguments lead with frenzy instead of fact. It’s especially amusing when the frenzy includes contradicting “facts” and arguments, but that’s another story.

I’m having dinner with my mother and my wife’s step-mother within hours of the supposed passage of the bill. I’m really looking forward to dinner, but now I’ll have to plan extra hard to have “deflection” strategies at my fingertips and try to keep Christmas conversation topics on, well, Christmas.

Really? You couldn’t wait until after New Year’s to pass the reform bill?