Colorado Progressive

Today’s Paul Krugman, apt as ever:

Think of health care reform as being like a three-legged stool. You would ridicule anyone who proposed saving money by leaving off one or two of the legs. Well, those who propose doing only the popular pieces of health care reform deserve the same kind of ridicule.

Suppose that Congress took the advice of those who want to ban insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history, and stopped there. What would happen next? The answer is that if Congress didn’t require that healthy people buy insurance, they would choose not to, leading to high premiums for those who remain, driving out more people, and so on.

And if Congress tried to avoid that by requiring that healthy Americans buy insurance, it would have to offer aid to lower-income families to make it affordable — aid at least as generous as that in the Senate bill.

There just isn’t any way to do reform on a smaller scale.

Oh, and Krugman includes a memo to all pols everywhere:

Politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election. America desperately needs health care reform; it would be a betrayal of trust if Democrats fold simply because they hope this would reduce their losses in the midterm elections.

Indeed. And, frankly, the White House ought to make sure the House gets a bill to the president. This is Obama’s baby, whether it’s politically expedient to own that child today or not. Krugman’s warning about the greater good of politics invokes exactly what Candidate Obama tapped in the American zeitgeist of 2008; now it’s 2010, political realities are cruel, midterm elections are notoriously inconvenient to sitting administrations, and the health care reform is every bit as hard to realize as the president promised us it would be.

Now more than ever, the nation–especially wobbly Dems–needs this president to return to campaign mode and bring this thing home. Otherwise, Obama’s just another incumbent protecting his ass seat.