Two Dems take brave stand on health bill
It took some courage for U.S. Representatives Melissa Bean and Bill Foster to do what they did Saturday night in Washington DC. They provided two crucial votes for the president's controversial health-care reform package, which narrowly made it out of the U.S. House.
In 2008, Barack Obama's victory was sweeping. But in 2010, like the tail of a comet, Democrats may see some fadeout come the midterm election.
There's no doubt Obama's home state holds both substance and symbolism for Republicans on the hunt.
If the biggest prize Illinois offers is the president's former U.S. Senate seat, Bean and Foster's seats also would salve old GOP wounds.
It was Bean, 48, who in 2004 defeated Phil Crane, one of the most conservative and longest-serving members of Congress. She has won three times now in the 8th District, and by increasingly larger margins. Yet the northwest suburban district she represents, which stretches from Schaumburg north to the Wisconsin border, is more conservative than the one 10th District Republican Mark Kirk serves.
And it was Foster, 54, who in 2008 defeated Republican Jim Oberweis, in both a special and general election, to take the seat being vacated by none other than Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House.
As a mere freshman, Foster is more vulnerable in the 14th District, which runs west from Wheaton almost to Moline. And one of the Republicans gunning for him in a general election is Ethan Hastert, the son of the former Speaker.
Both Bean and Foster are pro-choice, and neither voted for the Stupak- Pitts amendment, which creates more restrictions on the ability of women to get abortions under this health-care measure.
Overall, despite the heated debate that now propels this issue into the Senate, each contends that politics did not factor into their vote.
Bean, who remains concerned about cost-containment, said her constituents provided a crucial argument for passage.
"Families come to me in the grocery store . . . saying their son is ill and they are close to reaching their insurance's lifetime caps," she said by phone yesterday. "They say 'we don't know how long we can pay to keep him alive given the equity in our house.' "
The House legislation eliminates lifetime caps and prohibits exclusion based on pre-existing conditions. Bean called the bill "serious reform . . . an historic opportunity."
Foster, also by phone Tuesday, when asked about the difficulty of his vote said, "In the end, it was easy. I didn't have regrets at all. . . . Everyone knows someone who is uninsurable . . . and about the ridiculous exclusions, like the woman in my district excluded because of menopause."
Most of us have a hard time wrapping our minds around the complexity of a bill that now is up to 1990 pages of sometimes-impenetrable language.
Foster says it took him 50 hours to read the thing.
But as this debate moves forward, it will help if more of us understand the finer print.
We may disagree with one another on whether, in the end, this legislation is good for America. Or whether we as a nation can afford all of its provisions.
But what is harder to disagree with is that health care in this country, at the moment, is a ragged, patched quilt of different levels of coverage.
And for between 35 million and 45 million of us, there's no coverage at all.
That's why this vote, to my mind anyway, was historic. And why it took some moxie to say yes.