We all know the game plan by now. The two health care reform bills are being combined as we speak. With some luck, the final result should be passed on to the President’s desk before the State of the Union address. Then everything on the legislative agenda between then and November will shift, relating only to jobs and economic recovery. After his first year in office, Mr. Obama will be able to say that he has achieved the holy grail of Democratic politics: near universal health care coverage. This is a great achievement, right?

Surprisingly enough for someone with rather progressive ideals, I’m not a huge fan of big government but I make an exception for health care and education. On each, I fall very far to the left of center. So this bill has me really excited. My family’s history of diabetes, cancer and heard disease or any condition I might develop is less likely to bankrupt me and will not prevent me from gaining coverage. If I choose a job or advanced degree program before I’m twenty-six that will leave me without coverage, I can stay on my family’s plan. These and many other measures are things we can all get excited about and rally behind. Surely no Republican will be able to run on a platform of trying to repeal them once the bill is finally passed.

Why then is this effort being deemed as such a failure by a majority of Americans, both on the right and even the left, that they all claim it should not be passed? Markos Moulitsas, the chief of the liberal Daily Kos, tweeted: “Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate.” MoveOn.org, everyone’s favorite firebrand of a website called on “progressives” to “block this bill.” Arianna Huffington dismissed it as “reform in name only.” Keith Olbermann of MSNBC lectured the President that he was about to consign his countrymen to a “Chicago stockyards of insurance” that would be “immoral and a betrayal of the people who elected you.” Even Dr. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, Presidential candidate, and Democratic Party chairman wrote that the Senate should defeat the bill, claiming that it “would do more harm than good to the future of America.”

They are all wrong. Even the most respected voices in progressive grassroots politics fail to grasp something very simple. This bill is a once in a generation opportunity to pass sweeping health care reform. Its passage will signal the end of the beginning of our reform efforts; it would be a single victory in a major battle of a very long war with no end in sight. If I can persuade you of my position, that reasons that passing a flawed the bill would not be catastrophic because this legislation is not the beginning of the end of reform. The system is more broken than most people realize and even the best of bills would have been no more than a band-aid. That’s exactly what this legislation will do. It will prevent the system from getting “infected” and causing even greater problems (such as the collapse of Medicare) and may even heal a few wounds by covering approximately thirty million people and preventing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths each year.

Don’t get me wrong, the critics are, to an extent, right about the conspicuous flaws of the pending health-care reform. It lacks even a weak “public option.” Its subsidies are more meagre than we would like, and the bill is essentially a windfall for big pharmaceutical companies and health insurers. I am as furious as anyone about the fierce attack on women’s rights through denied abortion coverage. While I am reluctant to support a “single-payer” system, the bill is also much too reliant on private insurance. And there are surely senators and representatives whose motives are corrupt. It is no secret that Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and others had to be bribed for their support.

Are Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress doing enough? No. But they are doing what is possible. You might find that pathetic, but it’s no fallacy. If any “system” is to be blamed, it should be the archaic, gridlock-inducing rules of the House and Senate. Even so, when the President reiterates in his address to the nation in a few weeks that this is “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the nineteen-thirties and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties,” he will not be exaggerating by much. Nobel Laureate and Times columnist Paul Krugman, calls the bill “a great achievement” that “establishes the principle—even if it falls somewhat short in practice—that all Americans are entitled to essential health care,” despite the fact that he has been a frequent critic of the administration and its efforts on this very bill. Jonathan Cohn, the New Republic’s health-care correspondent, calls the bill “the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation—a bill that will extend insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans, strengthen insurance for many more, and start refashioning American medicine so that it is more efficient.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that exactly what we tasked Obama and the Congress with accomplishing in the first place?

Critics of the bill must come to terms with the fact that within our system of government, this is the best we can do to fix our broken health care sector. We tasked our government with solving two problems when it was only legislatively capable of actively addressing one of them. Coverage needed to made made universal or close to it. Short of a mandate, the bill is pretty successful at accomplishing the first goal. The second is bringing costs under control. Insurance has doubled in cost over the past ten years to over twelve thousand dollars a year per family. It very well may double again in the next ten. Few can afford that. I can feel the crunch already and I bet you can too. Matthew and I have spent a great deal of energy wanting, hoping, and advocating for a “public option” as an effective remedy to this. It would have done a lot, but reforming the insurance industry can only do so much. Individual doctors and the way they administer care are just as much to blame. Yet mandating a solution upon them would be madness. We must strive to make them more efficient in a very different manner and the Senate bill lays the groundwork for doing so. Curious as to how that will work? Look for an explanation in a column appearing on this site very soon.