The Opposition

It's not enough to have voted last November. If you want health-care to change (particularly if you, like me, think the public options is necessary to achieving actual reform and many other goals, including saving money in the long run), you need to speak up and call your senators.

If you don't want anything to change, looks like you're all set, with the GOP and a good number of congressional Dems all lined up against a plurality of the country:

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.