by Benjamin James

Created on: March 20, 2010

Health care reform has been a dominate story in the news over the last year. As the debate on health care reform nears an end, The President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader have been pressuring other democrats to pass the health reform bill. My question is who do President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid think that our representatives and senators should be serving; us, their constituents or the White House and congress. My impression was that our congressmen were in Washington to represent the will of their constituents within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

This obviously is not what is going on here. We've got a health care bill which Americans overwhelmingly oppose and leaders in Washington who are pulling out all stops to get this bill passed. In response to the possibility of the bill being underhandedly packaged with the Budget Reconciliation Bill in the Senate, President Obama stated that he is not concerned what means the bill is passed by, as long as it is passed. Meanwhile, Pelosi had stated that we need to get this bill passed so that we know what is in it (and Washington wonders why Americans oppose this bill).

In the President's attempt to sell his health reform ideas, he continually states that Americans want health care reform; which is true. Unfortunately, he is tuning out that while the majority of Americans do want some form of health care reform to make health care more affordable, the polls have consistently showed that the public does not want the current Obama-Reid-Pelosi reform. Americans' calls to our representatives to not support this bill has fallen upon deaf ears. All the while, the President has been able to garner more support in Washington for the bill through holding private individual meetings with our representatives who had previously opposed the bill.  

There has been a lot of arm twisting and threats being made in order to get this bill passed, meanwhile, the will of the people is arrogantly being disregarded. We are merely spectators, instead of being the driving force that we should be. I won't even touch on the question of whether or not this bill is constitutional since virtually nobody, including our own representatives in congress even read the entire bill. In their defense, how could they possibly read and fully understand a complicated couple thousand page bill. On the other hand, how can they pass a bill that they haven't read and how can they pass a bill against the will of their constituents.

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