Just finished Obama’s article in the New Yorker I received the week of Halloween. I started reading it by the fireplace, in between sessions of the Shogun audiobook and my first copy of Sibley Birds East. It was frigid this Halloween morning and we hadn’t turned the heat on yet, stubbornly holding out for “real” winter, clinging closely to the hearth, always in need of a new log.
I enjoyed the essay. It was a kind of first person narrative of the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act, neither pompous nor self-aggrandizing, with unnecessary but delightful interludes with the Obama family. Bo, the Obama water dog, was by far the best character and actually somehow related to the narrative; Bo was given to the Obamas by Teddy Kennedy, the stalwart Senator who had for decades pushed for universal health care for the country.
I learned a bit about the history of healthcare in the United States, how we came to have a system of employer-based healthcare, with unions actually supporting this early on as a way of gaining members, to the detriment of anyone unemployed or not card-carrying.
I appreciated the nuance and the detail involved in getting a piece of legislation passed. As a relatively young person, and by that I mean, a person who is very unexposed to the inner workings on Congress and who has yet had no real understanding of “the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made, we just assume that it happens, but no one else is in the room where it happens.”
Would recommend it to anyone looking to increase their understanding of the legislative process, political points cost and spent, and to anyone who has benefitted from Obamacare, of which there are surely millions. Everything in 2020 has something to complain about, and Obamacare is no different, but I still think we should learn to celebrate the imperfect things wholeheartedly where they deserve merit.