The bill falls somewhere between baby-step in the right direction and band-aid over a flesh wound. It will help cover a lot more Americans who need it. The costs will mostly fall upon the young, healthy, and currently uninsured. For your typical middle-class worker with health insurance through their employer it will be pretty negligible, aside from knowledge that more of our fellow human beings are covered.
It *probably* will be helpful to those who have to buy their own health insurance, such as small business owners.
Would single payer or actually switching to the Canadian style “socialism” Republicans tried to frame this bill as have been better? Yes. Single Payer would have done a lot more to control costs. And universal health care is the morally right thing to do, something every industrialized nation except the US has, and most of those countries enjoy a higher quality of care and life than we do. But change comes incrementally, and this is a step in the right direction.
