Farewell to Health Care

Maybe I had nothing to do with it. Maybe I only preached to the converted. Maybe no one changed his or her mind about health care reform because of the things I wrote over the last year. But I am an optimist. I would like to think I helped.

I would like to think that the dozens of columns amounting to some 15,000 words that I wrote about health care reform contributed in some way to making it happen. Heaven knows I tried.

They say you eat an elephant one bite at a time. I'm really tired of the taste of elephant. I got tired of writing about health care reform, not just because the same people trucked out the same arguments each time. The cause itself demanded my attention week after week, month after month, all year. I often wondered if there was anything else to say about health care reform, but I always seemed to find yet another angle to examine and yet another bit to cuss and discuss. Sometimes I worried that you would stop reading because you were as weary of the issue as I was, but you came back over and over and cheered me on. Thanks for that.

We did it, all of us, pulling together. There were a lot of times that it seemed like the dark side was winning, but the dark side didn't win. The tremendously heavy yoke we've been pulling at for the last year has suddenly been loosed. It's about damn time.

Utopia is not blooming on the Great Plains, but our society is just a little more civilized than it was yesterday. We will have left our country a little better than we found it. That is no mean feat. I think President Obama has said on occasion that doing the right thing was not necessarily the politically expedient thing to do, or the easy thing. Thank the Universe that his priorities were to do the right thing. He may not have done it perfectly, but by jeebers, he did something.

Insurance companies will not give up the gravy train they have ridden for so long without a fight. Eventually they will have to turn their priorities to serving their clients, rather than producing for Wall St. That will be fine. The teabaggers will continue to gripe, but eventually they will scratch their mad place and go back to being productive citizens.

Maybe your congressional representatives, like mine, were more interested in staying in office than in reflecting the will of their constituents. November is not that far away. I will try to help you remember that they, in the words of candidate John McCain, "need to find a new line of work." It's the least I can do.

So it is without sadness that I bid health care reform adieu. I cannot turn to the next issue without congratulating you and myself for the colossal realignment of the cosmos that we caused by our work and prayer and writing. Thanks for reading. Thanks for arguing. Thanks for coming back week after week. Elephant is officially off the menu.

Pax vobiscum.