Saturday, I sat on my sofa, my laptop appropriately in my lap and television tuned to C-SPAN. Throughout the day, the laptop moved; C-SPAN, however, did not.
There, on C-SPAN, history unfolded as the House of Representatives debated its health care reform bill.
Early Friday evening, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., threatened to read the entire 1990 page bill on the floor of the House, a decision he, thankfully, decided to forego.
Then, early Saturday morning, abortion emerged as the major sticking point for passage of the bill as anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., offered an amendment to that, as Politico reports, “...would effectively bar insurers that participate in the [health insurance] exchanges from offering coverage for abortions.”
The amendment passed 240-194.
In those early hours Saturday morning, House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer, D- Md., spoke to MSNBC, telling them, “We think we’ll have 218 [votes] by the time we vote on this bill later this afternoon or early this evening.”
President Barack Obama arrived on Capitol Hill early afternoon to conference with Democrats on the historic nature of the moment and the politics of their vote, warning skittish conservative Democrats that, regardless of their vote, Republicans had little intention of letting them off the health care hook in next year’s midterm elections.
A little before 2:00 p.m., the House voted 241-192 to move the debate forward and onto the House floor. In that vote, Rep. Dan Boren, D-Okla., joined 15 other Democrats in voting not to move the debate forward.
The health care debate began in earnest with representatives from across the country taking the floor in either support or opposition of the bill.
Nearly 10 hours later, just before midnight, the House, the Democrats and one lone Republican, Joseph Cao of Louisiana, passed the most sweeping changes to our country’s health care system since Medicare four decades ago.
Thirty-nine Democrats voted against it.
Not in the bill were the “death panels” proselytized by Sarah Palin (R-Twitter, Facebook), a claim she repeated yet again this weekend. The $1 trillion measure passed the House meeting Obama’s key provision that it not add one dime to the U.S. deficit.
In fact, Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the bill “would yield a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2010-2019 period.”
This is it. “This is history,” Obama wrote to House Democrats late Saturday after the bill passed.
And, history it was for America and its representatives who cast their historic vote in favor of reforming our country’s absurd health care system.
“Moments like this are why they sent us here,” Obama noted in a press conference Sunday afternoon, encouraging the Senate to “take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line.”
Now, should the Senate take the baton and pass real health care reform that ends discrimination based on make-believe words like “pre-existing condition,” that makes accessibility its goal, that includes a robust government public option to compete with private insurance providers to drive down costs — an idea supported by the majority of Americans. That would be change Americans could believe in.
And, I’m sure both C-SPAN and my laptop can handle it all.
James Cooper is an MA student in screen studies. He received his BA in film studies and political science from the University of Oklahoma.
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