With the strokes of 20 pens, President Obama signed his health care overhaul — the most sweeping social legislation enacted in decades — into law on Tuesday during a festive, at times raucous, White House ceremony.
“We have just now enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care,” Mr. Obama declared in the East Room, before an audience of more than 200 Democratic lawmakers, White House aides and others who rode a yearlong legislative roller-coaster ride that ended with Sunday night’s House passage of the bill. They interrupted him repeatedly with shouts and standing ovations.
Moments later, the president sat down at a table, and affixed his left-handed, curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, using 20 pens that he intended to pass out to key lawmakers and others as mementoes.
He was surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other top Democratic leaders, as well as some special guests: 11-year-old Marcelas Owens of Seattle, who became an advocate for health care reform after his mother died without health insurance, and Connie Anderson, the sister of Natoma Canfield, the Ohio cancer survivor whose struggle to pay skyrocketing premiums became a touchstone of Mr. Obama’s campaign to overhaul the system.
Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had been a driving force for health care legislation before his death last year, was also by Mr. Obama’s side. Mrs. Kennnedy wore a blue plastic bracelet around her wrist that said “TedStrong,” and appeared emotional after the ceremony.
“I know how happy he would be,” she said of her husband, adding, “It was so meaningful for him, in a very personal way.”
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Obama Signs Health Care Bill Into Law
At the New York Times, "Obama Signs Health Care Overhaul Bill, With a Flourish" (via Memeorandum):
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2 comments:
Yeah, ol' Teddy would surely be happy today, if he was alive, as opposed to the burning torment that he currently is enjoying. Mary Jo Kopechne needed health care too.
THIS MOMENTOUS DAY!
Not one day in anyone's life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down's syndrome child.
Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example.
Each smallest act of kindness - even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile - reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.
Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will.
All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined - those dead, those living, those generations yet to come - that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.
Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength - the very survival - of the human tapestry.
Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in THIS MOMENTOUS DAY!
Excerpt from Dean Koontz's book, "From the Corner of His Eye".
It embodies the idea of how the smallest of acts can have such a profound effect on each of our lives.
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