How bad was yesterday’s vote loss for Harry Reid? Almost as bad as it was for the special-interest model he and other Democratic leaders have embraced for enacting health reform. The people, it seemed, spoke (and by the hundreds of thousands through phone calls and e-mails), forcing the AMA’s lobbyists to scurry back into their holes.
Between Monday afternoon and yesterday the vote on the doc fix morphed from a technical change to a complex reimbursement formula for physicians into a much bigger issue: about the proper size and scope of government, about the morality of passing along an additional quarter trillion in debt to future generations (not to mention a $3 trillion new unfunded liability for Medicare for a permanent “fix” to the formula). The moment this became a fiscal and moral gut check, the people prevailed and the special interests lost.
Now they know we, the people, are watching. You could say: We are the ones they been waiting for!