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Inch By Inch, Barrack Obama Is Moving Mountains, Health Insurance


The right considered the Senate passage of health insurance reform-a bill that essentially subsidizes private health insurance for the working poor. The left however was no kinder. Many leading liberal lights called for the bill to be destroyed because it gave too much to insurance and drug companies and failed to promote a publicly funded alternative to private insurance. The bill is not perfect and will need to be mended in the next few years on cutting some entitlements and controlling costs in other ways. But the law remains largely what Obama vowed in the campaign. Obama deposited an unprecedented amount of federal money in infrastructure. He formulated a vast and nerve-racking banking rescue that is now under-budget by $200 billion because so many banks survived. He organized the restructuring of the US car industry. No recent president has had such a good start since Ronald Reagan, Obama has in a minor image of 1981, reoriented America back to a political culture that asks what government will now do to prevent a banking collapse, to avoid a depression to insure the working poor to ameliorate climate change, to tackle long-term debt. The idea about health insurance reform is that it represents a big expansion of government intervention in the lives of the citizen and that is a game changer from three decades of conservative governance.