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A major question on everyone’s mind – in Washington DC and beyond – is whether or not the new health insurance legislation will survive the “changing of the guard” wrought by last week’s elections.It has long been an unstated rule of the Senate that major pieces of legislation pass as bipartisan bills. The new health care law broke that rule – not one single Republican voted in favor of its passage. The bill passed anyway, by a vote of 60 (58 Democrats and 2 Independents). A parallel bill passed in the House by a vote of 219 to 212, again with no Republican voting in its favor. The goal of the bills, which Obama termed “the most important piece of social legislation since Social Security passed in the 1930s,” was to implement an all-encompassing reform of the health care system on the national level that would, among other elements, extend health insurance to more than 30 million currently uninsured Americans. It was a goal earlier presidents had aimed for – but none had achieved. Now, it seemed, a president had finally garnered the necessary votes to attain that previously always-elusive objective of “universal health care” in the United States.
