I think the difference is that we are talking about the federal funding of an elective procedure. Like botox. I don't think the gov't plans will cover botox, either. There are many compassionate alternatives for poor women who find themselves inconveniently pregnant that are covered by insurance. Like having the baby and putting the baby up for adoption. If womens groups are really determined to give poor women easy access to free abortions then they should fund them, not the federal government. And the men who impregnate these women could fund them, too.
sfall,
Actually it has nothing to do with federal funding of abortion, which has been illegal for decades. This is telling private insurance companies what plans they can offer on the open exchange. Completely different.
And as far as botox goes, yes botox for wrinkles is elective. But after my mother had her stroke she had botox injections in her arm. It wasn't cosmetic but therapeutic -- she couldn't straighten her arm without it. Under a Stupak-like amendment, that kind of procedure wouldn't be covered. It would just see the word "botox" and think "Ohh icky!!!" and immediately deny a claim.
You see, "abortion" is a loaded political term. Medically, it applies to a whole range of instances, not all of them pregnancy termination. For example, read this woman's story.
But when you have politicians making medical decisions, well, what can you expect. We now have a government bureaucrat between us and our doctors. Thank you, conservatives. The irony is not lost.
This cannot possibly pass constitutional muster. Similar attempts to restrict abortion rights have been struck down when life and health considerations are excluded from the language of the bill. In addition, "class exclusion" is considered unconstitutional, although this argument has not been tried in court challenges thus far.
Octopus, the ban of federal funds used to pay for abortion passed constitutional muster. The current court would likely say this falls under the existing precedent. Whether it is really constitutional is a good question, but we aren't going to see a successful constitutional challenge in the near future.
I understand why moderate Democrats were so willing to vote for this amendment. There are a lot of people who are pro-choice in a purely regulatory sense but who are pretty strongly anti-abortion. Such people tend to be willing to favor lots of restrictions, such as the ludicrous 'partial birth abortion' rhetoric of the Bush administration.
I'm 'anti-abortion' myself, and I used to be moderately pro-life. There was a time when I probably would have supported Stupak.
Now I am going to swear some, so anyone sensitive may stop reading.
The fucking problem is that the abortion debate in this country is not about fucking abortion. It is about the simple fact that if you claim to believe in granting women equal access to all the economic and social rights enjoyed by men, you have to be willing to fucking accept that it is not fucking possible without open access to what the right ominously calls 'abortion on demand.'
That is the fucking truth, and while I understand why moderates don't want to admit it... it pisses me the fuck off. The only /genuinely/ coherent rebuttal is the Phyllis Schlafly bullshit and no sane American wants /that/.
"But when you have politicians making medical decisions, well, what can you expect." Exactly why we do not need government involved in healthcare SB. This time it is abortion. What happens when next time it is decided not to fund the latest cancer treatment or an AIDS cure because it is too expensive?
"Or a government bureaucrat coming between doctor and patient." Well to this I would say that the child patient could use some government protection from the doctor that intends to kill them. See the government is tasked with providing us a right to life and should not be actively trying to kill us.
Jim:
1-And yet, government is not involved in healthcare, not now, not under the new legislation. Except for the VA and military, the doctors are not government doctors. The hospitals are not government hospitals. The government does not own the pharmaceutical companies or medical equipment companies. Outside the VA & U.S. military, the only place the government has any role under this scheme is in PAYMENT. That is not by any stretch of wingnut fantasy "government healthcare."
2-blastocysts are not children.
Also, read the link I posted on the comment above. Abortion is a political term, not a medical term.
Just another example of how to make a Super Majority a minority.
The whole healthcare debate devolved into a freak show a long time ago.
It's times like this that I agree with the conservative complaint " Gov't not doing the will of the people." Except the conservatives LOST DAMNIT! HELLO? ANYBODY HOME?
"Outside the VA & U.S. military, the only place the government has any role under this scheme is in PAYMENT."
In my experience, the party responsible for paying for something is the party that has the final say on whether or not it happens. So saying the government is only paying for healthcare but would not be in charge of healthcare is simply wrong.
Medicare has a satisfaction rate that far outstrips private health insurance companies. Almost without exception, Medicare consumers transitioned to Medicare Advantage plans by the government say they preferred their Medicare. County, state, and federal government nearly universally provides far better 'employer provided insurance' than the private sector.
If one is to judge the track record of government paid medical care vs corporate paid Medicare then one is struck by one inescapable conclusion:
Regardless of its flaws and foibles, the government is more trustworthy than corporate insurance providers when it comes to paying for health care. The record is there to show it.
Sorry Jim, if you prefer to trust corporate insurance providers given the historical evidence, your arguments stop holding the necessary weight to be taken seriously.
Eclectic - I am not against government regulations of health insurance companies. I believe that is one aspect of the government that is necessary to protect consumers. I am against government paying for healthcare for the general public as this is a personal responsibility issue.
Now those in favor of the government paying for healhcare via Medicare, Medicaid, government subsidies for people to purchase health insurance should not be suprised when that same government then decides to not pay for everything they want. Nor should they be surprised when the government changes the programs in a way that they are not happy with. When you pass responsibility of payment to someone else, you don't have much of a say in what that person/entity decides is worth paying for. When you as an individual are responsible for paying, then you have the final say in what your healthcare will include.
Ahhh. The magic words.
'A personal responsibility issue.'
Do you pay your own health care costs?
Unless you have no insurance and pay for all of your medical costs out of pocket, the answer is no you do not. Other people help pay your health care costs by paying into the same pool of shared cost into which you pay. There is no 'personal responsibility' in this area except for the filthy rich and the dirty poor. If you have health insurance of any kind, you are a bum riding someone else's dime every time you go to the doctor and all of your pretense of personal responsibility is garbage.
I'm sorry if this is harsh, but it is harsh /truth./
Everyone pays some portion of their health care costs, whether they do it through their payroll taxes, payroll deductions, Medicare taxes, or their insurance premiums. No one actually pays for their own health care, however. The costs are shared, because no one but the very wealthy can afford to pay their own full health costs. The only difference is in how those costs are shared.
Pools of shared cost are managed by administrators, no matter where the money comes from. Corporate administrators manage health insurance. Government administrators manage Medicare. The only difference is who pays their check.
As far as refusing to pay for health care services...
Again, the track record of government administrators is far superior to that of corporate administrators in this area. Doctors can tell you that Medicare pays promptly, with less paperwork, and with more trust in the doctors' judgment and patients' personal choices while health insurance is far more likely to refuse to pay doctors for treatment or even deny approval for treatment altogether.
The speeches about personal responsibility are all very pretty, but they are a very pretty lie.
For the last 4+ years my wife and I have indeed paid for all of the medical healthcare costs for our family. We carry a high deductible insurance policy where we pay all expenses up to ~$5000 per person per year. We have never reached that deductible yet. We have never had our insurance company deny a claim for services because we pay for them ourselves. In previous insurance we had, we did have problems with a certain medication not being covered, so we paid for that ourselves as well. Then we changed insurance companies since we were paying high premiums for what we decided was not good enough service.
Now if the government decides to take over and offer a single payer system - the hoped for program of most people here - where will I be able to go if I do not like the decisions made by the insurance company? I would not even have recourse to sue the government in a court of law.
Buying into an insurance program is not ducking my personal responsibility. Ducking my responsibility would be to not pay for insurance, show up at the ER for "free" healthcare and let someone else pay for it altogether. As the system is currently set up, I pay for my healthcare, the Medicare system, the Medicaid system, and (through higher prices) cover the costs of "free" care to those who do not pay for insurance. I am willing to bet that through my taxes, insurance premiums, and out of pocket expenses, I have more than covered my share of medical expenses incurred.
Eclectic - you are also basing satisfaction and payments of a medical system paid for by every tax payer that currently only covers a very limited portion of the population. And these systems are quickly headed for bankruptcy. Now if we change so that these systems cover everyone, how long do you think the government will be able to afford the payments? Heck half the plan in the current bill is to cut Medicare payments by ~ 400 billion. I am sure doctors will love that.
Jim:
Please shut the hell up. You have NO idea what you are talking about.
A blastocyst or a fetus is NOT a child.
Pull your head out of your ass for five minutes and quite the hatin' on women.
blastocysts are not children.
Cannot be repeated often enough.
Anti-choicers like Jim just don't get it.
Perhaps the bigger issue (...if there is one ...) is that we simply have too many men in Congress. Or not enough women, take your pick.
I say this as a man who likes to be a man; facts are facts and women aren't going to get their rights until they have fair representation. That'd be about 52 senators and 220 Reps. They might be just as crooked as the men but by golly they would be EQUALLY as crooked and ...more to the point ... not relying for protection of their rights on men who do not understand the need for and justice of practical abortion rights at a gut level. OR should I say, at a uterine level.
We need to women in positions of responsibility so that their POV gets a genuine hearing every time, not just at election time. Now you can't just leap into Congress without some experience, so this means jamming them into mayorships, city councils, dog-catchering, whatever.
Step forward ladies! and if no one's stepping forward, men, give someone a push!
If that makes me sexist, I say it's jam and t'heck wit' it!
One other thing:
Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan: all have mixed public/private systems in which doctors and patients freely decide what treatment is best.
Not the government.
Not the private insurers.
As a result, they are much healthier, at less cost. People with a strange feeling in their gut go in for a checkup and an operation when the tumor is small, instead of putting it off until they can come up with $500 and the tumor has metastesized. People with pre-existing conditions don't get dropped from insurance plans, lectured about "personal responsibility", and buried before their time.
In sheer economic terms, universal health care makes economic sense; it doesn't have to be a "socialized" system; it can be a public/private partnership as in Japans, etc.
But the bigger question is not ECONOMIC but MORAL: what kind of country do we want? It is really MORAL for a person to die of a treatable cancer because her job was shipped to China?
(For people interested in learning about how other nations do it, I recommend "The Healing of America" by T.R.Reid ... get it from any bookstore or your library!)
'Step forward ladies! and if no one's stepping forward, men, give someone a push!'
I live in Tennessee. So if SB wants to run for Senate or Governor, I'll vote for her. Who else is in for a 'draft SB' campaign? 
Add Sweden to your list as well, though the national insurance system is so good that the majority of Swedes have chosen NOT to switch to private insurance when the option was made available... even with a robust subsidy system to help them do so.
And for the popular line that 'socialized medicine' ruins medical innovation, a couple of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world are Swedish. Not American. Several pioneering transplant and transfusion techniques were pioneered in Sweden during the era of totally socialized medicine.
'Heck half the plan in the current bill is to cut Medicare payments by ~ 400 billion. I am sure doctors will love that.'
This is a lie.
The current bill includes reform of the Medicare Advantage program, which costs both the government and the consumer more money than standard Medicare because there is an insurance in the middle milking both sides for a profit. It is one of several 'privatization' schemes of the Bush era that was sold as a way to save the government money but actually allows corporations to get fat off the government tit.
This is not cutting Medicare, this is cutting artificial costs incurred by a failed privatization scheme.
'Ducking my responsibility would be to not pay for insurance, show up at the ER for "free" healthcare and let someone else pay for it altogether.'
This is also a lie. No one gets 'free' health care in an ER. The ER is required to provide emergency care regardless of payment, but patients are still billed for services and expected to pay. This is why emergency medical treatment is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.
It's great to be able to repeat right-wing tropes, Jim, but if nothing you are saying is true it isn't going to get you very far in the long run.
Projections that show Medicare heading for bankruptcy do not take any unknown variables into account. They assume costs will rise at exactly the same constant rate and /nothing/ else will change. They are not terribly reliable and if they /were/ reliable then Medicare would already be bankrupt, and it is not.
...and I will take this one:
"I would not even have recourse to sue the government in a court of law."
NOT, I repeat - NOT true. I am so tired of this absurd statement. Yes, "government" enjoys sovereign immunity IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS. This doesn't exempt them from liability across the board and it sure as hell does not exempt them from administrative appeals.
Don't believe me? Flip over your phone book and check out the attorneys who MAKE A LIVING from suing the "government."
Quit listening to people that either (1) have no idea what they are talking about, and/or (2) are trying to manipulate you.
Unfortunately, Stupak will actually take abortion insurance coverage away from millions of women who currently
have it. What happened to "If you like your insurance, you can keep it?"
http://www.now.org/issues/health...lth/
stupak.html
Another little-known fact about the health care bill without Stupak: it does not cover basic wellness exams for women. (See NARAL and RH Reality Check for this information - sorry - too tired to Google.)
This whole thing is mindblowing. Although some of us knew Obama and the DINOs were going to screw women over big-time, I don't think anyone saw Stupak coming.
jim:
You really should get that jerky knee checked out by an orthopod.
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