By Wayne Dawkins
 
HAMPTON, Va. – On this first weekend of spring, Americans are at the brink: Will the anticipated Congressional vote on a health care reform law be a transformative victory, or a crashing defeat fueled by inaction?
 
Anxious citizens should have been encouraged by the latest assessment from the Congressional Budget Office. The non-partisan experts this week said the $940 billion health bill in its current form could cut the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years because it would eliminate waste.
 
Also, by providing health coverage to 32 million additional Americans, those changes would take a lot of strain off hospital emergency rooms that run up costs that are passed to citizens who pay health insurance premiums.
Already, as the federal health care bill appears to be rolling to a climatic weekend vote – Sunday – real consequences of health care change are being felt.
 
A family member intimately familiar with the local health care industry told me that a regional health care system here was letting doctors go because of deep cuts in Medicare reimbursements.
 
It’s the Obama effect, I was told. Already, waste cutting is taking place.
 
Tightened budgets are bad news for the jettisoned doctors, but should be encouraging news for Americans who have become convinced that government cannot do anything constructive about health care, even though our government rose to the occasion in the 1960s and created Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.
 
Four decades later, doing nothing about the seriously flaw state of American health care is a bad choice. Two poll numbers cited Thursday on the CBS Evening News intrigued me. A poll said half of the respondents were nervous about the health reform bill passing Congress. That’s a lot of doubt.
 
However, the second number said two thirds of the same respondents were anxious about what would happen if nothing were accomplished with health care reform.
 
Americans are at the brink this first weekend of spring. It is time to summon courage and take the leap of faith with an imperfect but overwhelmingly effective health care reform bill, or cower with fear and those who pay for health insurance will be nickel and dimed until they too join the ranks of the uninsured and untreated.
 
The writer is an assistant professor at Hampton University Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications. Dawkins is a member of the Trotter Group, www.trottergroup.org