As you are undoubtedly aware, the health care reform bill recently passed the House of Representatives. While the Senate still has to concur on some aspects of the bill due to the reconciliation process, we can be assured that, at the very least, the core tenets of the legislation will soon be signed into law by President Obama.

There’s been a lot of chatter about what this bill will and won’t do. About what had to be removed and added. And about the compromises that were made to insure the passage of reform.

I am a big proponent of universal health care, as I believe that every person should be able to afford to get sick and that no one should be denied access to health care for any reason. So the lack of any sort of universal plan or public option is disappointing to me. I identify as a member of the LGBT community, so the fact that provisions that were designed to help lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (“banning discrimination against LGBT people, the Early Treatment for HIV Act, ending taxation of domestic-partner health insurance, and launching a program to study LGBT health and discrimination”) were stripped out of the bill is upsetting to me. And as someone who has worked for Planned Parenthood for a number of years, and believes quite strongly in a woman’s right to choose, I’m incredibly saddened by the deal that President Obama and the Democratic leadership struck with Rep. Bart Stupak and other conservative Democrats in order to gain their votes for the bill. Agreeing to an executive order re-affirming the ban on using federal funds for abortions (after strongly opposing the Hyde amendment previously) is shameless political maneuvering at its best and outright hypocrisy at its worst.

But…

I seem to have a lot of friends who are outraged for the above reasons, and whose perception of this legislation is completely clouded by the fact that it’s not everything that everyone hoped for. But politics rarely, if ever, works that way.

The fact of the matter is that it seems unlikely that the bill would have passed without those maneuvers and compromises. And what we can say today (that we couldn’t say a week ago) is that 32 million more people will have health insurance in this country. And that’s a pretty incredible thing. Yes, the abortion aspect is troubling, for many reasons. But I don’t think that the Democrats completely threw women under the bus, as they’ve been accused. Because the fact is that this bill is going to give a lot of women access to things they couldn’t afford before. Pap smears, birth control consultations, colposcopies, STI testing… these are major components of women’s health care and, all of a sudden, more and more women will have access to them. And that, in my opinion, is quite something.

As I said, I understand the nature of the disappointment. But things are better today than they were yesterday. It’s progress. And we should enjoy it, while keeping in mind that this is a start, not a finish. So take a moment and celebrate the achievement… and then let’s get back to work to make health care even better.

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