Nate Silver's two cents on healthcare reform (and my nickel)

Nate Silver has some great posts on healthcare reform and the current brouhau over the demise of the public option. I agree with him on one major point: the public option isn't real reform. It's a Band-Aid on our existing, screwed up system. It doesn't address the underlying issues that are broken in the current system: namely that the incentives for healthcare providers are wrong. The system rewards more tests and procedures as opposed to better outcomes. The public option simply gives people an alternate way to buy into the same system. It's not a bad idea. It just doesn't get to the root of the problem.

And nothing that's being debated right now gets to the root of the problem. As far as I'm concerned, if real reform is unobtainable right now (and I believe it is), then we'll have to take what we can get. The legislation now being considered would benefit me personally. And as I've told a number of gay friends this year who've been dismayed by the lack of progress made on LGBT issues: I'm a gay man, and I didn't vote for Obama because I thought he was going to make life better for me as a gay man. But I did hope that he'd do something about healthcare, and where I am in my life right now, that'd make a lot more of a difference for me.

So speaking unapologetically from the perspective of what works for me--and for a whole lot of other people: expanding access to the current broken healthcare system and preventing insurance companies from denying coverage in a bunch of ways that have been the norm up to now is a win. It's not a win where you go to the locker room and whoop it up about kicking some ass. It's a win where you go home thinking you were damned lucky to have pulled that one off.

Killing the bill because it's not perfect isn't a victory. It's a loss. A big one.

Here are links to some of Nate's recent posts: the elevator pitch, 20 questions for those who'd oppose the bill, and why progressives are nuts to oppose the Senate bill.