Float Like A Butterfly

The sky is falling. Socialized medicine. New taxes. Rationed healthcare. Government takeover. Euthanasia. Still, the U.S. Congress passed a Health Care Reform Bill, and President Obama signed it into law. Although serious information on the subject has been out shouted by the sound and fury of the politics, some facts can now begin to trickle down. Among them, the new Health Care Reform Law provides:

Insurance companies may not deny coverage of Pre-Existing Conditions, cancel your coverage because you get sick, or impose lifetime and annual caps on coverage.

Small businesses will get a tax credit for providing employees health insurance. A tax credit is worth more than a tax deduction, because it is full strength real money, not just a percentage of something.

Your kids can be covered longer on your health insurance, now that they can not find jobs, even after you have taken out a home equity loan to send them to college.

Definitions for Medicare eligibility will add some poor people less poor than those previously included.

Seniors will get a $250 rebate to help fill the $3,454 "doughnut hole" in Medicare prescription drugs coverage. The rebate may go further for savvy seniors who order medications from Canada and elsewhere in the world not in on the U.S. Big Pharma Fix.

I was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy for President but often a silent critic of his campaign. I did not feel that he was aggressive enough in countering his opponents. Hillary Clinton would have made chitterlings of anyone who dared to say such ugly things about her. But Obama has accomplished two things Hillary did not. He became President, and he passed Health Care Reform. It is not the national health care plan every other civilized country in the world has, not even close. But as Vice President Joe Biden insists, it's a "big f***ing deal."

Muhammad Ali brought wit, charm, and political courage to an activity otherwise distinguished for brutality and gambling away the grocery money, boxing, of which he won the Heavyweight Championship three times. Born Cassius Clay, he renounced his “slave name” and became Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam. During the Vietnam War, he refused induction into the U.S. military. He could have pulled V.I.P. strings and taken a job being on display in a military uniform, giving boxing exhibitions and boosting the morale of the troops. Some of his generation dodged the draft; Ali stood his ground in explicit opposition to the war. He was arrested, prosecuted for draft evasion, stripped of his boxing title and his boxing license, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor nearly four years later. As a boxer, Ali successfully used the technique of allowing his opponent to land punch after unanswered punch, until the opponent became exhausted and vulnerable. Ali himself named this “rope-a-dope.“ He had a flair for language. Describing his own unorthodox fighting style, he said that he could "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Maybe President Obama has a stinger somewhere, too.