wrong

Myths and facts about the health care bill, in pdf format, from Firedoglake. Printable, downloadable, shareable.

Any good in the bill is weakly affirmed and ill-defended. This is not the beginning of something like Social Security or Medicare. This is the beginning of something at best like welfare, that will be vitiated and warped by those who oppose the idea of health care as a social responsibility, to be shared by a nation.

Most of the demonstrable benefits won't kick in for four years. For four years the opponents will get to run against it, demonize it, with the same fidelity to truth they've shown this past year. And the proponents will defend it with the same vigor and integrity they've brought to the process already. And so the opposition will prosper.

The real poison pill is the individual mandate. Short of a "let's kill all the puppies" mandate, I can't think of anything better designed to unite left and right in revulsion. Take it out, strike it down, and the economic assumptions collapse, making everything in the bill even more vulnerable to deletion, rejection, repeal.

There's a cliche in physics that a theory can be so bad that it's not even wrong. This health care bill may well make it impossible to revisit the idea, revise the theory, for at least a generation. It's so bad, it's not even wrong.