Editorial: Victory for America

In the lead-up to the March 2010 passage of what is sure to become President Obama’s legacy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, most normal Americans — i.e., Americans who are not members of Congress and who do not have deep hatred for Barack Obama — knew something was terribly wrong with the nation’s health care system.
Mr. Obama did a rotten job selling health care reform to a skeptical nation. He should have used his bully pulpit — the presidency is supposed to be the most powerful, most influential position in the nation and much of the free world — to highlight the great parts of the bill. He should have crouched into the political gutter to verbally bash the contrarians, the naysayers, the folks who said Obamacare is socialism, including right-wing wacko Glenn Beck, who now is selling T-shirts that have a picture of Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion upholding health care reform, with the word “Coward” beneath it.
Mr. Obama should have taken to the television airwaves far more frequently to look Americans squarely in the eye and tell them what was in the bill. He should have insisted that all of the provisions in the bill go into effect two years ago, not two years from now, and that illegal aliens be ineligible for free health care.
He didn’t do any of that, but still the law passed, no thanks to Republicans, and now, tens of millions more Americans will participate in, and pay their fair share for, universal health care. That includes the many elderly folks in Northeast Philadelphia who comprise one of the largest percentages of senior citizens in the nation, and whose lifeline known as Medicare will only be strengthened.
It’s about time.
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