It was a strange experience Sunday night watching the lead-up and vote on HR-3590, the US House of Representatives name for the health care bill.
At this point, there have been so many twists and turns to the story, so many months of arguments and counterarguments and analyses and revisions, so many worst case scenarios promoted as truth — if we don't do something now, health care costs will bankrupt us all; if we pass this bill, the government will throw us out of the plans we love, and saddle our grandchildren with untenable debt — that it's hard to know what exactly what rough beast this might be that slouches toward our Bethlehem.
And I have to say, during the three hours I caught of 45-second, one- and two-minute speeches back and forth from Republicans and Democrats, I longed for the visceral dynamism and interaction of Question Time. The same themes, same stories rehearsed ad nauseaum, this was death by a thousand sound bites.
The Democrats had the better story, returning again and again to the idea that this bill was not about politics, but about sick kids and Grandma Alice and the poor folks down the street and your son that brave self-employed entrepreneur.
They praised the bill for ending insurance discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, for providing insurance for 32 million citizens who cannot currently afford it, and for its value to women, whose medical insurance tends to cost more. Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: 'After passing this bill, being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing condition.'
The Republicans, on the other hand, bemoaned the bill for not having listened to the people's concerns and, stealing a page from the Liberal Party's playbook, for the huge burden that it will place on future generations. (The struggles of the tens of millions Americans in the current generation who have little or no health care went unnoted.)
Republican opposition leader John Boehner began his comments, 'I arise with a sad and heavy heart', as though at a funeral, and spoke of how the Democrats had broken trust and strong-armed the deal, claims that seem unjustifiable from the facts, and yet certainly speak to the fears of a large segment of the US population.
He and his colleagues also attempted to position themselves as friends of the insurgent small-government, throw-the-incumbent-bastards-out Tea Party movement which has swept the country, cheering on the Tea Party protesters earlier in the day and repeatedly referring to the House of Representatives as 'The People's House'. (How pleased Mao Tse-Tung would have been to hear American Republicans using such a term.)
Listening to these alternatively utopian and apocalyptic visions of the post-bill future, I felt as though I was in a J. J. Abrams TV show, standing at the fissure between alternate universes with almost nothing in common. What does the Republican me look like, I wondered? (Probably thinner, damn him.) And how does he justify denying the kind of health care that he himself likely receives?
What little common ground remains at this point between Democrats and Republicans lies in the belief that this bill, for better or worse, represents one of the most consequential decisions in recent US history. Long time health care advocate Senator Ted Kennedy wrote in a brief letter before he died that 'health care is the great unfinished work of our society'. Pelosi quoted Kennedy, adding 'Until today'.
Whether that is true or not remains to be seen. After the bill passed Obama himself was more careful, saying this was a step in the right direction rather than the end of the line. His rhetorical attacks against insurance companies, while certainly speaking to the experience of many Americans, have been evaluated by some nonpartisan groups as less than the full picture. And the abiding law of unintended consequences has, if anything, more relevance to a bill of this size and complexity.
Still, for the moment our country's aspirations are clear — to be a place more giving to the sick and the needy, more welcoming to the stranger, more flexible for the creative and the entrepeneur — and to do so at the expense of those who can afford it. Of those who have been given much, much will be required.
Unlike the night of Obama's election, there was no cheering to be heard in the streets after the bill passed, no roars of joy, no celebrations. If there were any exclamations, they were probably sighs of relief.
But perhaps, as Obama said in his speech, 'This is what change (really) looks like.' Not elated but exhausted; not flashy but a grind; spin and arm-wrestling and point making and political compromise, yes, but in the end still a policy bespeaking what Lincoln called 'our better angels'.
We live in hope.
Jim McDermott SJ is an associate editor at America Magazine, the weekly review of the US Jesuits. He recently finished a seven month assignment in Australia.