For all the historic force of the vote — Ted Kennedy’s widow, Vicki Kennedy, was in the chamber, as was the elderly John Dingell Jr., whose father introduced the first national health-care plan into the Congress almost a century ago — it has become difficult to write these milestone posts. Health-care reform, by this point, has had a lot of milestones. It has cleared five committees. It has come through the House of Representatives. It has been merged into a single bill in the Senate. It has passed through the Senate. No previous health-care reform bill has come anywhere near this far. But there are more milestones left to achieve: The House and Senate need to agree on a bill. That bill has to pass both chambers again. And then the president has to sign the legislation. Passing legislation, it turns out, is a long and ugly process. God, is it ugly. … Bad a system as it might be, it’s the only one we’ve got, at least for now. This is what victory looks like.