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Originally Posted by Azure
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Let's not pull the wool over our own eyes here. There are no good guys in the U.S. health care mess--not Obama, not Frank, not the blue dogs, not Pelosi and CERTAINLY not the GOP, whose roster of alternate solutions is shorter than a hobo's grocery list. Everyone's got their fingers in this pie, and when the legislation takes its final form there will be plenty of kickbacks for the health care industry--it couldn't pass otherwise. There are already some pretty nice plums for the pharmaceutical companies, which they got in exchange for allowing price negotiation with the government.
The Democrats do deserve credit for trying to take on a thorny and complicated problem--note that Bush never really attempted anything of nearly this complexity. However, they also deserve blame for failing to come up with a sufficiently simple solution (mostly because they lack political courage) and Obama deserves blame for leaving the details in the hands of the Congress. The U.S. congress could turn a diner lunch menu into an 11,000 page document.
So, there's enough blame to go around. But really, the worst option was to do nothing--and at least they didn't do that. But Obama should perhaps have paid attention to the lesson of the Gordian knot. When a knot can't be untangled, chop it in half and get a new rope. That's the solution the U.S. needs, and sadly for their people it's the one they'll never get.