This week’s special election in Massachusetts – to fill the seat formerly occupied by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy – has shaken things up in the Senate. The voters of Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, a Republican, over Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, thus ending the Democrats’ 60-seat majority and leaving Massachusetts residents – and the rest of the country – wondering: What’s next for health care?
ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture interviewed the Reform Movement’s own Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, Director of Just Congregations (the Union for Reform Judaism’s community-based organizing initiative) about the future of health care reform in the United States. Rabbi Pesner, an ardent support of health care reform and a longtime activist. ZEEK writes, “In addition to being one of the nation’s top Jewish resources on social justice issues, Pesner has an intimate knowledge of Massachusetts health care reform. A former rabbi of Boston’s Temple Israel, Pesner also served as the chair of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, and spearheaded that group’s successful effort to pass landmark health care reform in Massachusetts.”
ZEEK asks Rabbi Pesner hard-hitting health care questions, like “What are your impressions about what this election means?,” “What about people in the Jewish community?” and “Do you think the national health care bill has gone so far off track that Obama should scrap it and start over again?” Answering that last one, he says, in part:
The one clear policy implication of this election is not about health care reform at all. It’s that people still are really struggling. They don’t experience that struggle as being around health care–they experience it as being around the economy. Politicians need to focus on economic programs, on putting limits on Wall Street, on stimulating job growth. If their programs will take 2-3 years, they need to explain that. Someone has to explain why things aren’t getting better and yet we are still paying high (and sometimes higher) taxes.
Head on over to ZEEK for the full interview and then tell us: What do you think the Massachusetts Senate election means for health care?