Get health care in order

Leave it to Sen. John McCain to remind his colleagues that when it comes to health care — when it comes to every matter that comes before them, in fact — they have a job to do. More than a job, actually — a duty, to their constituents and to their country. And it’s about damn time they all start doing it.

McCain came to the U.S. Senate floor yesterday, a fresh surgery scar above his eye, and joined all but two fellow Republicans in voting to advance a bill that would repeal and replace Obamacare. It was a procedural motion, so senators could move on to a bill they might actually be able to pass.

Of course you wouldn’t know that, from the prophesies of doom emanating from senators voting “no.” Just getting to “yes” on the motion to proceed — Vice President Mike Pence had to break a 50-50 tie — was an ordeal. And senators who began debate after the motion passed still don’t know what form the bill they will ultimately vote on will take.

But McCain made a convincing case for returning to actual deliberation and debate — to negotiation and compromise between the parties, as befits “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

“Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and the television and the internet. To hell with them,” he said. “Our incapacity is their livelihood ... ”

“We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without any help from the other side of the aisle,” he said.

McCain’s critics were so busy pointing out the “irony” of a cancer patient voting to advance a repeal of Obamacare that they missed the part where he said he’d vote against the bill, if it remains in its current form. And in so doing they made his point — that both parties are so blinded by the notion of “winning” that they are letting every important opportunity slip by.