Healthcare win will cost Obama long term

President Barack Obama's victory on healthcare may spell defeat for his other domestic priorities if Republicans, incensed by Democrats' legislative tactics, succeed in blocking energy and immigration reform.

Obama, a Democrat, signed the controversial bill to overhaul the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry into law on Tuesday, delivering a major political victory for his party while antagonizing Republicans, who vowed to repeal the measure and fight his agenda going forward.

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of this year," Senator John McCain, Obama's opponent in the 2008 presidential election, told a radio program, criticizing the way Democrats steered the bill through Congress. "They have poisoned the well in what they have done and how they have done it," he said.

The healthcare legislation passed both houses of Congress without Republican votes, and many Democrats say the opposition party has done little to support Obama's agenda anyway.

Even so, if the legislative "well" is in fact poisoned, the impact could be broad.

Obama's hopes to upgrade US education standards, rewrite rules that govern the financial industry, fight climate change and address illegal immigration depend largely on his ability to get backing in the Senate, where Democrats lack the 60 votes necessary to overcome Republican procedural hurdles.

White House advisers, who see political momentum from the healthcare success, played down concerns about other policy initiatives being blocked.

"It would be a shame if, as a political strategy, the other side adopted a kind of 'just say no' approach," David Axelrod, one of Obama's top policy advisers, told Reuters, adding that was not what Americans wanted from their government.

"They want us to work together. They want us to disagree where we disagree and find common ground where we find common ground, and that's what the president's going to continue to work to do," he said.

Axelrod said the president would turn his attention to advancing financial regulatory reform and fighting a recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate campaign contributions, two issues the White House sees as political winners. Republicans and Democrats are both claiming momentum after the healthcare debate. The coming months will show whether that leads to progress or stalemate for both sides' policy goals.

Obama Healthcare win is a perversion of Democracy

So the Democrats have a healthcare win in the House—of Representatives. This win that could prove mighty Pyrrhic. It will cost them dearly in the midterm elections as well as in 2012. Barack Obama, who seemed a lock for a second term at the time of his inauguration, will stand every chance of losing to any decent candidate the Republicans can muster. And in truth, Obama, who has collapsed in stature since the day of the inauguration will have wrought his own eclipse.

Americans have witnessed an ugly and extraordinary display of how the practice of democracy can so often overwhelm its theory. Firstly, they saw how those who claim an exalted moral stature for healthcare reform made a naked attempt to dodge a basic constitutional requirement for the passing of a bill. The subversion of the Constitution was abandoned when it became clear that the Supreme Court would not put up with a law that had been deemed to have passed.

What Americans saw next was the legislative process at its most squalid: bribing, cajoling, threatening, wheedling, all designed to bring on board those Democratic congressmen whose votes were needed to attain the number 216, and whose“principles” were getting in the way of a yes”vote. Hewing to principle is difficult, because it makes party whips angry, spoils dinner parties, and ends careers and friendships. So Kucinich, Stupak & Co. caved and succumbed. To borrow a phrase from historian Tony Judt, writing in the latest New York Review of Books: “We… have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications.”

So we’re now on the verge of a tectonic change in the way American society is regulated—a change vigorously opposed by over 55% of all Americans. Barack Obama did, of course, promise“change in his presidential campaign. He just left out the bit about its being change in which those who think they know what’is good for us pass a law that most of us oppose with a passion—a passion born not merely of political opposition, but of a sense that President Obama has dealt the nation a calamitous hand.

Potential problems with the new Healthcare Plan

Here is a wonderful video from youtube where Peter Schiff explains the potential problems associated with the upcoming Democratic Healthcare Plan.




So basically I will not have to buy health insurance at all. Just pay the $95 yearly penalty and wait. If I ever do get sick then just join the healthcare plan then and get the benefits I need, but up until that point I should not spend a penny on health insurance.