Now that Chuck Schumer has provided us with headlines like this, we cats have to admit to something that, coincidentally, has been on our minds: A "what if?" game with the Affordable Care Act.
We generally don't care for "what ifs." But in this case, with the ACA once again in danger from the right-wing maniacs on the Supreme Court, we were wondering what might have happened if Senator Edward Kennedy had not died on August 25, 2009.
Actually, we have to go back to January of 2008, when Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for President. Did Obama promise then and there that if elected, he would dedicate his first term to Kennedy's signature issue, healthcare reform? Or did Obama decide to pursue it once it became clear that his friend the Massachusetts Senator was seriously ill?
We'll probably never know — Teddy is gone, and the President's not much of a sharer, is he? But it doesn't matter because the big question right now is how much better off the ACA would be if it had had a living, breathing Edward Kennedy to shepherd it through.
Answer: A lot.
Just picture the long-serving Kennedy holding forth on affordable healthcare on the Senate floor. Buttonholing colleagues in the cloakroom. Working the phones to wavering members late at night. Driving not only himself but his expert staff to fight the battle in the offices, dining rooms, gyms and watering holes of Capitol Hill. Gosh, the bill even might have passed with a few Republican votes!
And most of all, imagine Teddy elbowing John McCain off the Sunday talk shows and championing healthcare reform to the skies. In fact, he'd have been everywhere — on TV, talk radio, the Internet, in town halls, in infomercials, at pro-ACA rallies — not only selling affordable healthcare before, during and after passage, but outshouting all the haters on the right.
It would have been a sight to see. If not for an inoperable tumor in Ted Kennedy's brain, the ACA would be possibly one of the most popular pieces of legislation ever passed. Surely the GOP would be less able to chip away at it with appeals and lawsuits. In short, healthcare reform would be a lot healthier today. Which makes us cats HISS.
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