As a business speaker, I am always amused and sometimes appalled at hearing legislators, board members and committee members speak their minds. Clearly the nation’s health care system needed big changes. Did we get the changes we needed? Do we even know what we needed? Will the issues of quality of care and preventative activities get the prominence they deserve?
If you listen to what the people say who did not support this bill, we have just thrown our nation and our collective futures to the dogs. That seems a little over-reactive to me. My impression is that the party out of power tends to spend more time posturing than anything else.
It reminds me of playing street hockey back in Brooklyn when I was a kid. There was this one guy from a few blocks over who liked to play hockey against my block. He was always starting fights and being a sore loser. One time he skated hard at me to try and check me against a parked car. You see the cars parked in the street served as our “boards”. He missed me because I moved out of his way. He slammed into the car and crashed all over himself, falling to the street. He jumped up and started yelling about how he hit me hard and I went down and I was a sore loser. I had to laugh out loud. But after a few minutes of his speech, a few kids thought he had actually checked me to the street, even though they saw what happened.
Politics, like street hockey, has some odd moments.