Musings During the Delay

The plan is to print out the health care bill today. I found it, but then heard from a friend that he thought there were separate House and Senate health care bills which would have definitely complicated things. The bill's name is H.R. 3200; there is a direct link that will take you to its text located at the right side of this website. I also wanted to draw your attention to a new White House website, Health Care Reform Reality Check. This website was launched, obviously, to answer questions and dispel rumors that people may have heard about the health care reform. Not everyone has the spare time to read the health care bill like I do, but hopefully, they'll have three seconds to look up this website and set things straight.

I'm afraid this is a very naive outlook on things, especially with the recent developments at Town Hall meetings around the country. People are angry; whether or not they've been egged on by interest groups to be that angry remains to be seen. Are they really angry about the health care bill? They are angry about what they think the health care bill is about. They've been told mistruths, by whatever sources, in hopes that there will be a massive public outcry and H.R. 3200 will be stopped. Cenk Uygur wrote on the Huffington Post that people aren't angry about health care; they're angry that their world is changing and it's moving on without them. There has been an outcry for certain; people screaming at their representatives and senators and getting into physical altercations at town hall meetings. What this is preventing is the serious discourse between the people who really need their questions answered and their representatives. People who truly need to learn about the bill only see these angry, angry people and automatically think that health care reform is bad. They don't know what's really in the bill and they believe what they see on television or what they read on the internet. I even saw a website that "translates" the health care bill into tiny, three word summaries of entire pages and of course, the summaries run along the lines of "the government is rationing health care!!"

What I want to assure you is that my blog will be an intelligent, unemotional summary of H.R. 3200. I believe the facts stand on their own and I believe the government would not deceive us. This isn't about politics. This is about people's lives.