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Healthcare bill a nightmare before christmas
Call it the nightmare before Christmas or Santa's lump of healthcare coal. Either title captures the disastrous qualities of the healthcare reform bill passed by Senate on Thursday. After months of media coverage, a summer of wild town hall meetings and all the high-sounding rhetoric one could swallow, a 2,000 page monster has been birthed.
Though President Barack Obama hailed the bill's passage by declaring, "This will be the most important piece of social legislation since Social Security passed in the 1930s," it carries few of the universal qualities or public control of the Social Security legislation. For all the political theater associated with the bill, remarkably little in the bigger picture of healthcare in America has changed - private health insurers still run the system, Washington politicians are still gathering in the campaign contributions and millions will still be left without health insurance.
Bad Gets Worse in the Senate
The Senate bill is even weaker than the already comprised piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives. The number of uninsured capable of gaining insurance will be somewhere around 24 million.