From President Obama to his campaign e-mail list:
Friend —
For the first time in our nation’s history, Congress has passed comprehensive health care reform. America waited a hundred years and fought for decades to reach this moment. Tonight, thanks to you, we are finally here.
Consider the staggering scope of what you have just accomplished:
Because of you, every American will finally be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage.
Every American will be covered under the toughest patient protections in history. Arbitrary premium hikes, insurance cancellations, and discrimination against pre-existing conditions will now be gone forever.
And we’ll finally start reducing the cost of care — creating millions of jobs, preventing families and businesses from plunging into bankruptcy, and removing over a trillion dollars of debt from the backs of our children.
That’s one way of looking at it. The alternative: In order to save the remainder of his first term, Obama just put a torch to dozens of vulnerable Democratic House members and all but conceded a Senate seat in Indiana.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., on MSNBC’s Morning Joe just now, explained that the bill contains $24 billion in unfunded Medicaid mandates for his state alone. This fall, be prepared to hear such a number for each state.
