Comments on: VPR, Health Care, and Viewer Mail: Did Obama Make A Mistake? http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2010/01/30/vpr-health-care-and-viewer-mail-did-obama-make-a-mistake/ A NonPartisan Analysis of Presidential Politics Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:45:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Jack Goodman http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2010/01/30/vpr-health-care-and-viewer-mail-did-obama-make-a-mistake/comment-page-1/#comment-9171 Jack Goodman Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:42:16 +0000 http://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/?p=7481#comment-9171 Obama’s mistake was in not putting something like tort reform into the bill. Something it would be difficult for Republicans to vote against. Once this “red meat” was in the bill, Republicans might have started to seriously negotiate a health care bill. Right now, it looks as if Obama put the wrong bill on the table and has backed the Republicans into a corner.

Of course I realize that this is not “his” bill, so maybe his biggest mistake was to let Nancy and Harry hack it to death.

As I understand it, the main reason to support health care reform, assuming you already have insurance which is about 85% of the US, is to get costs under control. Had the focus of the bill been cost control…perhaps even means testing…the country might have rallied to the bill.

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