We all fail if health care reform fails

Reading first Jonathan's Cohn's account of the uphill struggle to muster enough House Democrats to pass the Senate health care bill with a reconciliation fix, and then Amy Sullivan analysis of how the fragile majoirty that passed the House bill may founder over abortion, I heard myself mouthing former Counterterroism chief Richard Clark's words at the 9/11 Commission hearings: "your government failed you...I failed you."

If Congress does not pass a comprehensive health care reform bill this year, that will constitute a massive collective failure in which we all share.

Republicans will have failed in their callous disregard for the plight of tens of millions of uninsured and tens more millions underinsured Americans,and in their willingness to place political gain ahead of the welfare of the people they are elected to serve. They will have failed in their success at scuttling  the country's best hope of bending the health care cost curve and thus laying the basis for a sustainable fiscal future.

Progressive activists will have failed in their refusal to recognize that for all its concessions to industry and to the spending inhibitions of the most conservative senators in the Democratic caucus, the bill that passed the Senate maintains the capacity to transform our health care system vastly for the better. They will have failed to recognize that the bill's limitations were imposed by the constraints of the Constitution and the filibuster and the U.S. electorate, that it could not be more sweeping than the most conservative Democrats would allow.