An excellent column. You would have got an A+ from a tough critic -- if you hadn't compared Dennis Kucinich to Michele Bachmann. That is really, really unfair. Kucinich is an intelligent, well-informed purist for principle; Bachmann is an extremely loony, stupid, ill-informed camera-hound.

As for UFOs, if you live long enough, there's a darned good chance you'll see one. That doesn't mean what you see is filled with little extraterrestrials from a far-off place; it just means you are observing phenomena in the sky no terrestrials have identified. Several decades ago, I myself saw SOMETHING in the night sky which hovered over Albuquerque, New Mexico for hours. I'd guess I'm not nuts; I just don't know what was looming there, which -- thank the mysterious heavens! -- means I probably have more in common with Dennis Kucinich than with Michele Bachmann.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

The first priority of any health care bill should be to reduce costs by enabling head to head competition between health care givers. This bill does not do that. It is an illusion to extend coverage on a massive scale without first reducing costs because it will lead to national bankruptcy. The Democrats are fixated on coverage only and it is acceptable to them that total costs will be reduced by rationing. Through mandates, taxes, and penalties, this bill rides on the backs of the small businesses that are supposed to hire the unemployed. This massive piece of legislation is 52 times longer than the Constitution. The paper should be recycled and four separate bills should be introduced. 1. Mandate that health care givers publish their costs for services and their historical outcomes on websites. 2. Enable a cadre of ombudsman who can assist in making economic and outcome related decisions. 3. Enable larger health savings accounts and higher insurance deductibles. 4. Mandate that all insurance companies be policy holder owned. 5. Mandate that the insurance industry pay into a pool that will cover extra costs associated with mandatory acceptance of preconditions and higher risk people.

The Republicans have failed to adequately describe the long-term consequences of this overreaching omnibus bill that is aimed primarily at health insurance. Since it does not provide for needed head to head competition among health care providers, this bill will not reduce the pressure against cost containment. The result will be a two-tier system based upon individual affordability. One system will ration care to those with less resources and the other will provide full service to those with more resources. As long as Democrats treat poverty as a condition caused by victimization rather than as an inability of individuals to create value, we will continue to see socialistic legislation that is unaffordable. Without relieving the drag on individual value creation caused by dysfunctional urban education and by globalization, our GDP will not sustain the entitlements we currently have. That is our real challenge. It seems that we are heading towards some rough times.

Hmmmm … I wonder what bribe Dennis the menace got for switching his vote. Maybe Obama promised to resurrect Kucinich’s bill banning the use of space based mind control weapons (no joke).

Great column! I admire Kuchinich's principles, but at some point he has to admit that he works in a sausage factory and make some sausage. No Vegans hired.

Kudos to you, Tim: you are wobbly: on the one hand, you are praising Dennis K; on the other hand, you attempt, cutely, to cast him as a California Brown; on the third hand, kiddo, stick to the motto of the fourth estate. Write, REPORT; we are able to make our own minds up.
kay Boyd- Brooklyn, NY

This is merely rewarding bad actors again, like Obama did with the bailouts to Wall Street bankers. In this case, the bad guys are health insurers who broke the system by wanting to gouge consumers ever more, and now they are poised to be rewarded richly for their bad behavior -- change we can belive in indeed. And US citizens are forced by the threat of law to add ever more to the cofers of these health care CEOs. Throw all democrats who vote yes on this out of office -- I have had it with both democratic and repubican thugs in power.

Yea Dennis Kucinich! Yea Obama! Yea healthcare! And yea to the lefties seeing the forest for the trees. I must be in that 19% of liberals. I know I'm about as pro-choice as voters come. HOWEVER, I will be gravely disturbed if women's organizations stand in the way of health care because of the abortion issue. No, the anti-choice extremists should not have hijacked health care over this issue. But they did -- they outgamed us. So take the lumps and fight for health care.

I have always voted my uterus, and its freedom. (Yes, I'm familiar with birth control and have never had an unintended pregnancy, but that's no excuse to invite the government to my bedroom.) But I'm also all too familiar with what it means not to have health insurance, to face job loss, to worry whether I can afford the treatment I need to survive.

I have every confidence that if the broad pro-choice community -- especially the very well-resourced ones (yes, Barbra Steisand, I'm thinking of you!) -- simply commits to creating private funds to cover abortions for low-income women, we can make the funding a non-issue.

I say this with love, and in memory of the brave abortion providers who have been murdered.

I think and believe you have Dennis Kucinich wrong. Plus, the nasty and cutting remarks are more of a reflection on you than on Mr. Kucinich. I support his initial reluctance to vote for the current health bill even though I was hoping he would eventually vote for it--not that I like it either but I want medical care for the 30 million plus fellow citizens that currently have no insurance. He has opposed needless and reckless wars, pushed for a health care bill that would cover all Americans, pushed for jobs and wages that allow one to have a reasonable lifestyle, and shown concern for the average citizen. And yes, I too have seen a UFO--figured it for a natural phenomenon. So Dennis Kucinich has not passed lots of bills, but did he spend the wealth of our nation, shipped our jobs offshore, and get us into one unjustified war after another?

I guess if a liberal does it it's "self-righteous defiance". If a right-wing hack does it it's "principled". The hatred the media have for Kucinich - probably based on his opposition to the disastrous war in Iraq they all supported to the hilt, publishing lies over lies over lies without doing any reporting beyond stenography - is astounding.

That is a cheap shot to pin that U.F.O. comment on Kucinich and try to define him by it. Why not define Kucinich by what counts -- his consistent opposition to the war in Iraq, his opposition to the Patriot Act, and many other courageous stands?

As far as that U.F.O. comment is concerned, if Egan had taken the trouble to listen to Kucinich's actual answer in that debate, he would see that Kucinich quite accurately pointed out that U.F.O. merely means Unidentified Flying Object. Kucinich never said he saw aliens. He merely said he saw something in the sky that could not be identified. But such distinctions are lost on shallow critics like Egan, whose only concern is to score cheap political points.

First off, thank you for repeating all the ridiculous frat house moronic jerky idiotic slams at Dennis Kucinich, because it shows who you are. You're nothing in comparison to this thoughtful and genuine man of truth. That said, you're completely wrong. This is another case of the white house buying votes. We don't know what the deal was that bought Kucinich, maybe promises of a public option in some later bill. Blah. All lies. News flash: Obama doesn't want the public option. He was a Senator. He is on the take just like the rest of that rabble. The real horror is that even Kucinich is able to be bought. Good night, America.

Let's see now, President Obama met behind closed doors with the representatives of Big Insurance and Big Pharma to see what kind of regulations they'd be willing to be subjected to.

Then some of the most conservative Democrats were charged with writing the bill.

They tried to cajole some of the Republicans to join with them, but they were unsuccessful. In spite of it being clear that the Republicans weren't interested in supporting the bill, no matter what, the Democrats kept trying to persuade them.

The Democrats gave up single-payer health care, the Medicare buy-in, the public option, and any insurance company regulations that had any teeth to them.

The end result was a 2000+ page bit of patchwork containing who knows what booby traps for the unwary. It contains the mandated private insurance that Candidate Obama campaigned against.

It will leave significant numbers of people uninsured. Insurance will be allowed to charge people over 50 up to three times as much as younger people. All insurance under this system will have large deductibles and co-pays.

Nearly a year of deliberations, and we end up with nothing more than a national version of Massachusetts' Romenycare plan.

Given all the backroom dealing and insincerety in the process, you're badmouthing KUCINICH?

Insulting!!! Condescending and uncalled for. Dennis is and always has been a man of the highest political integrity, to compare him to the likes of Bachman et al is scurrilous, and something I'd expect from Fox news, not the NY Times. If the amount of legislation one passes is the sign of a good congressperson, I'm sure you can find a lot of awful legislation passed over the last 14 years, in fact, the preponderance has probably been awful. I'll take one Dennis Kucinich to 100 of his republican and 50 of his democratic house members anyday. If we had more like Dennis, this would be a better country. Fie on the NY Times.

David Kirkpatrick, a New York Times reporter, confirmed yesterday that Obama made a deal to kill the public option: http://www.huffingtonpost.com...

It's lonely on the left fringe without Dennis. I'm having a real identity crisis here.

I llike Dennis Kucinich. His integrity is to be admired. I like Michele Bachman, her life of selflessness and caring for others is to be emulated, not disparaged. One thingabout these two politicians, is that unlike so many others, they haven't enriched themselves, their friends or families, by using their positions of trust. That alone makes them a step better than most of their peers.

I congratulate Mr. Kucinich both on his original position and his change of mind. I believe many people in this country want MEDICARE FOR ALL; I know I do.
This bill is defective, there's no covering that up. The process necessary to pass it proof of our nation's political gridlock. But we need to weigh in the potential political costs for the Democrats and, very particularly, Obama’s administration.
Our country is running out of time and credit. We can’t wait for Palin 2012 and hope she would do better as I’ve heard some friends say. We need Obama to get it right and stay for two terms. We can’t afford to waste these years.

A very ungracious response to Kucinich, Mr. Egan, especially since Kucinich, perceptive as ever, cited as the major reason why he is supporting Obama's version of health care reform, namely, that it would effectively be the Waterloo for Obama's presidency -- as that wonderful Jim DeMint from South Carolina put it -- and the Democrats generally if this does not go through.

Talk about purists, Mr. Egan. Look in the mirror.

And by the way, if Obama had not so thoroughly botched the management of this matter beginning back in May of last year by "handing it over" to Max Baucus -- acting under tight instructions from the White House -- and visibly turning his back on the more progressive House, as he turned towards Billy Tauzin et al, we might at least have the camel's nose under the tent for Kucinich's utterly sane "Medicare for All" single payer preference in the form of a robust Public Option, rather than the Medicare Prescription Drug "Reform" Bill of 2003 Redux that we are about to get. A necessary evil that we now have to swallow hard and hope to meliorate over time.

But c'mon, don't blame Dennis Kucinich for Barack Obama's failings. Just be glad that he was gracious enough, and patriotic enough, to overlook them.

My question is this: why is it that, whenever it's in power, the Right is never asked to moderate itself like Mr. Egan asks the Left to do here? It's bizarre.

The problem is clear. There still exists a strong, unjustified anti-Leftist bias in this country. It's residue of the Cold War, to be sure, but I can't fathom why it still exists. It's not that principled Leftists are crazy to the degree the right is in this country, but that for some reason, the Right is seen as less extreme than the Left. Why can people defend supply-side economics and scream at an uninsured man with Parkinsons about "getting handouts" without anyone so much as batting an eye, but when people so much as suggest that communism isn't all bad they're murderous totalitarians? Why exactly is "socialist" an insult?

My issue with the healthcare debate so far is that the principled Leftist position wasn't even on the table -- no one was willing to even think about a British nationalized system or a Canadian public system in the political class and, for the life of me, I don't know why. Kucinich, I think, understands the issue with the system. Why should he be forced to support a system and a process that's deliberately oppressive to the principles he holds dear, and when he so much as suggests that he *might* not be willing to go with it, he's branded as insane, or deliberately malicious, or apathetic to people?

This piece is just a symptom. It's advocating bipartisanship for the sake of it, even when it's really clear that bipartisanship can't work in this environment or that all we're doing is passing policy where everyone can be kumbaya and agree. That's not the point. Bipartisanship is a means to develop good policy that helps people, nothing more and nothing less. If the opposition is being deliberately obstructive, or it's clear that a bipartisan solution doesn't work, the majority can and should be willing to run straight over the minority in order to effect some change so people can live decent lives. Kucinich was trying to send this statement. While I think at this point it's probably better to try and pass this and change it later, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that this bill's going to change after it passes. The Democrats should have just changed the cloture rules, or passed all of it through reconciliation, a long while ago.

So the bottom line is that bipartisanship should work like this: the Democrats should have taken Republican objections into account -- not the insane death panel nonsense, but sensible Rightist input -- and worked with it. Yet seeing the current state of the Republican caucus and the current state of the elected Right, the Democrats should have forced healthcare through. There's an insane dichotomy between what the Right and what the Left are allowed to believe and do in this country and still be thought sensible, and that perception needs to change. If the Democrats in Congress need to start flexing their political muscle and start breaking the Republicans to do it, so be it. But until that happens, we shouldn't disaparage Dennis Kucinich or any other principled Leftist for pointing at the elephant, the oppression, in the room and make a stand on reasoned principle.

Mr. Egan makes an overwhelming call for pragmatism in this piece. In doing so, he attempts to illustrate the flaws of Kucinich's purism: that he mustn't hold out for better plans, that he mustn't remind his Democratic party-fellows of single-payer's efficiency while bluntly articulating the insurance companies' assured profits from the current legislation; he must side with Obama because this is the small window of hope amidst a 30 year cycle health care reform blockade. Yet, it seems that the foundation for his prescription is flawed. For one, where does Mr. Egan collect data on American liberal/conservative tendencies? 1 for 4? Can we believe that one liberal for every four conservatives elected Barack Obama and his Congressional majority? This statistical obfuscation is reminiscent of Fox New's Brit Hume on election night, reassuring the audience that America was still a center-right nation despite just having overwhelmingly elected the man derided for his socialist platform.
If, as I suspect, these statistics are misleading, then perhaps there exists a fundamental misunderstanding about the conditions wherein this pragmatism must occur. It's obvious that Obama and his blue dogs, pumped full of insurance industry money, do not want entanglement with such sticky issues as single-payer Medicare for all,--the most efficient and sensible option. But why not a robust public option? Why not a Medicare buy-in?
Pragmatism, as Mr. Egan champions, is indeed the ubiquitous legislative tactic in American politics. But with the overwhelming citizen mobilization for health care reform (of some kind) and with the numbers in the Democrats' favor, why not start at Single-Payer universal health insurance and pragmatically settle on the public option/buy in?
In short, the problem is not with Mr. Egan's prescribed degree of pragmatism, but rather the point from which the argument starts. It's one thing to make three right steps toward concession when you start from the left...but when you start from the center, there's no hope of making any substantive changes to our broken health care system, in which case "pragmatism" becomes a euphemism for accepting FAILURE.

What a smug treatment of a genuine hero. The author is an example of the kind of self-out to corporate America who dominate the DLC and the Obama administration. Kucinich has repeatedly pointed out that Obama's health care bill is little more than corporate welfare for the insurance companies. It will permit premiums to continue to climb through the roof. It will mandate that every American pour their cash into bloated, hyper-profitable insurance companies. It is a disasterous example of how captive American politics are by corporate interests. Dennis Kucinich has been the voice of reason against this give-away from the start and a supporter of the real solution to health care: a single-payer national health system. It's a tragedy that Obama strongarmed him into supporting this bill. I only hope that it presages Obama becoming a one-term president, so the Democratic Party can get back to being the party of FDR and the people rather than the party of big business. The progressive mantra from 2012 has to be: no public option, no second term.

I am for a single payer system as Congressman Kucinich but this bill is better than nothing. I am sure that Mr. Kucinich is not too happy to have vote for it because he cannot wait for another 30 years particularly with the Tea party and Michelle Bachmann.

To people who think that this bill is expensive then they should vote for a public option next time around. As long as the health care system stays in the hands of insurance companies it will be hard to control costs because we would all have to pay billions in salary and stock options and billions in bonuses to the CEO of these insurance companies.

France has the best health care system in the world for every single person living on French territory including Gypsies that happen to wander there; yet the system costs only half of what we all have to pay here. Where did the difference go ? In the pockets of CEO and insurance owners and the black hole of inefficiencies they create to keep the status quo.

The capitalist world is very simple: money first and morality last but you will certainly see these guys in church on Sunday and may be they also teach Sunday school. Just like Bernie Ebbers, the CEO of Worlcomm who stood in front of the congregation of his church telling every body that he did not do anything wrong (he is in jail for 22 years for cooking the book).

another day in the dc babble perception-is-reality machine .....

never seen a ufo bunky; what planet do you live on?

Kucinich is absolutely nothing like Michele Bachman. If you want to understand him, think of him as a left version of Ron Paul. Both Kucinich and Paul are clearly appalled by the corruption and lack of principle among their fellow members of Congress. Michele Bachman, on the other hand, is an attention-hungry wingnut. She'll do whatever it takes to get invited to appear on Fox News.

Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, et al. held up the health care bill in the Senate until they could extract whatever concessions they thought might benefit them at re-election time. Kucinich did nothing of the kind. He withheld his support because he is, rightly, troubled by a bill that mandates the purchasing of coverage, while doing nothing to rein in costs.

Kucinich is not the only thoughtful person who worries that the current health care bill might simply make health care in this country worse by strengthening the very entities that have made it so bad already. I think that he is right to finally decide to support the bill, but his misgivings are anything but trivial or absurd. He deserves something better than this snide and condescending column. The very things that make him uneasy now, may very well come back to haunt us all in the future. He was right to express his reservations--and to even consider voting against this deeply flawed piece of legislation--before the bill became law.

Currently our system is as if --- shopping at the grocery store (doctor's office), filling the cart with food (getting medical treatment), going to the checkout stand (the doctor's office clerk), giving the clerk our address, going home and eating the food (maybe getting better) , then getting a bill for the highest rate the grocery store (medical providers) can get away with charging. Then you as a consumer, being expected to pay it------ personally OR through a food broker (insurance company) who takes our money in exchange for a slight discount to the grocery store (medical providers/manufacturers) and a huge profit to the broker.

It's a SCAM that transfers unnecessarily large resources from the public to insurance companies and medical providers --- doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, equipment manufacturers, laboratories, , ect.

And if you think that the lack of affordable health care hasn't affected you because you have employer-based health insurance, think again. Raises you should have gotten are going to pay for your inflated health costs.

The solution is for government-mandated price controls of medical services such as they have in (gasp!) Europe where the public pays much less for medical care.

Dennis Kucinich understands what's going on. But there is only so much he (as an individual sane, intelligent, uncorrupted official) can do in Congress when his constituents are made clueless by medical industry interests working hard to make them clueless. Voting for the health care bill (as stupid as it is) is the right (and brave) thing to do, given the twisted political situation in this country.