Take A Deep Breath — And Don't Blame Health Reform

Given some of the angry, CAPITAL-LETTERED comments on our post yesterday about health reform and the midterm elections, I'd like to urge readers to follow Sophie's lead: calm down, take a deep breath, maybe a walk, and remember (this part isn't in the book): the goal of health reform is to make people feel better, not raise their blood pressure.

The U.S. health reform law is not to blame for our current global economic travails, nor, more locally, for the spikes in insurance premiums, as Julie Rovner points out in her NPR piece yesterday.

For a little rationality and context, I suggest everyone read Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker before Tuesday. His "Recession Election" piece makes the point that Barack Obama didn't create the current economic mess with any particular policy, including health reform, but he is the target of voter anger nonetheless:

(Obama's) supporters are worried, sometimes dispirited; his enemies are full of passionate intensity. The Republicans offer plenty of rage and resentment, but nothing of substance beyond fulminations about a deficit that their proposals — more and bigger tax cuts for the comfortable, the gutting of health care reform-- would exacerbate. President Obama and the Democrats kept the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression. But the presense of pain is more keenly felt than the absense of agony.