Word: careful
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After more than a year of bitter political debate and seemingly inescapable congressional deadlock, President Obama sat down in the White House East Room on March 23 and signed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law with a stroke of his pen. And then another pen. And another. Obama used 22 pens to sign the landmark $938 billion health care bill. It would seem that either the President has an undiagnosed case of OCD or the White House needs better office supplies. (See pictures of Obama signing the bill...
Europeans are gloating this week. The continent might be struggling with ballooning debts, a faltering euro and national strikes, but when the U.S. House voted in favor of President Barack Obama's health care bill Sunday night, March 21, Europeans seized the moment to thumb their noses at Americans and remind them that they've had pretty good health care for decades...
...showing Obama as a contemporary Franklin D. Roosevelt, below which it placed a cartoon of Obama on the phone to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, saying, "Hi, Nicolas, how's your health?" The Dutch daily De Volkskrant noted that the change was a long time coming: "Where health care was until now a closed privilege, Obama and the Democrats have made it a law," read an article in the paper Monday. "One of the most important differences between America and other industrialized countries has finally been lifted." (See pictures of Obama discussing his health care plan...
...Europe, voters demand that their governments offer good public services - including decent education and medical care - and regularly vote them out of office when they fail to deliver. Taxes may be slightly higher in Europe, but medical fees are heavily subsidized by governments and are drastically cheaper than they are in the U.S. The French, for example, pay a fixed $30 for a doctor's visit - and proposals to raise that fee even a few cents can ignite national protests. And in most of Europe, insurance companies are barred from rejecting applicants because of pre-existing conditions. (See pictures...
...Aside from concern for the well-being of Americans, Europeans had another reason to want to see health care reform pass: Obama's political standing. Obama remains hugely popular in most of the continent, and European papers have treated the health care vote as a measure of the President's ability to push through his other policies. An editorial in Monday's Le Monde newspaper in France, titled simply "A Victory," referred not to the big news in France that day - the left's strong showing in the French regional elections - but to Obama's health care success. The President...