Health care needs a shot in the arm

To introduce myself, I'm Sammy Dweck, a politics major and this semester's opinion editor with an untamed interest in American politics. I came to college as a registered Democrat, but through my experiences moved to the center right. My column, "Exit, Stage Right," will run each Wednesday from that perspective.

Massachusetts' decision to send Republican Scott Brown to Washington, D.C. as its senator in a special election has been acknowledged by members of both parties as a possible fatal blow to ObamaCare. I have admittedly been opposed to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care initiative ever since I read of the new taxes that would be imposed on all Americans, buried in the 2,000-plus pages of sinister and nefarious gobbledy-gook. As such, this result, which strips the Democratic caucus of its supermajority in the Senate, is temporarily desirable.

If Virginia and New Jersey's gubernatorial elections were not seen as a referendum by those who ignored their constituents and voted for the bill, there is no lack of clarity here. The people of Massachusetts have sent a crystal clear message to any proponent of the epic bill that Obama pushed all year. This is very likely because people are unwilling to accept reforms that are unnecessarily complex. It should be accessible and comprehensible to the general public. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 only takes up eight pages in the National Archives, but look at how effective it was.

That said, even as a fiscal conservative, it is hard to ignore the pressing need for some form of health care reform in this country. There is no simple answer to this issue, which is why it needs to be debated at length. Americans widely agree that we need to fix our health care system, but a rushed and forced political endeavor by a supermajority overconfident in its mandate hit our gag reflex.

Now, President Obama will need to push a scaled-back bill to declare victory, which he will not be able to do by tomorrow night's State of the Union address. The bill should focus on ending lifetime caps and discrimination based on pre-existing conditions — which sounds great, until insurance companies raise rates to compensate for added costs. If we rectify this, we will need to find a way to mandate coverage to control costs, but first, we must make it more affordable. It's an ugly catch-22 requiring careful thought. This legislative session should move to focus on jobs and revisit health care with appropriate bipartisan transparent debate in 2011. The Republicans will have to make a genuine effort to participate next time around and the Democrats will have to sacrifice expedience for quality.