Health of the Nation

President Barack Obama's health bill will pass, but will it pass muster, particularly with his own Democratic colleagues?

The bill will have no public health plan.

It will extend access to insurance to all Americans, but at what costs and to whom?

It is astonishing to witness this struggle from the smug and superior position of Canadiana.

Perhaps you find it as difficult and mystifying as I do to see decent and reasonable people fighting what should be best for them all because of some ingrained and frankly simplistic outmoded belief systems.

In a classic case of the Law of Unintended Consequences, the private insuring companies are probably singing all the way to the stock market this morning.

As for Ms. Poor and Desperate with three kids...good luck.

Obama has played politics with this enormous issue.

But what did people expect?

He is not a shoemaker. He is a politician. He came from nowhere and grabbed the White House.

This bill is far from ideal, but it is something.

Let's be optimistic (if a little dewy-eyed, I admit) and pray that in the coming years this flawed compromise will be seen as the building block to something that really pays off for those who need it and ought to have it in a modern democracy.

Especially one that spends more on health care per capita and gets less results than any similar democracy in the world today.