Health Reform and Abortion (Cont’d.)

I hear what you are saying KT, but there can’t be so many pro-life Democrats that this bill won’t pass unless they remove abortion from the mix. And who cares about Republicans, they are not going to sign-off on this thing no matte what’s in it. As we speak Kristol is shouting from the roof tops that the GOP has Obama on the ropes and if they just stay united as the party of no they can destroy his administration.

Dee: Bob Casey is a Democrat. Also, abortion is just one of many issues that are likely to spring up from the fine print.

Yes I know Casey is a Democrat, I just think he can’t derail this thing by himself, and being that choice is a pretty big part of the Democratic platform it would be pretty hard for them to give in on this issue don’t you think? I just don’t see him coming from Pennsylvania of all places, with their loss of manufacturing and steel jobs thus loss of health insurance coverage, that he would be willing to derail health reform. He’s going to find away out of it.

I just read an article from today’s WSJ focusing on the health care meltdown in Michigan.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124743926415729611.html
The comments section was particularly enlightening. Even if you dump abortion from any national health care plan you still have to contend with the crowd who doesn’t “want to pay for their deadbeat neighbors insurance”. As if they themselves will never succumb to cancer, be in an auto accident etc.

Is it covered by most private insurance?

Assuming your private insurance company doesn’t find a way to dump you as a client once you start racking up the bills. Or you aren’t laid off from your job. You aren’t retired and your company changes your pension plan. Etc, etc.
My uncle is a bankruptcy attorney. He told me several years ago that 75% of his clients were middle class people who paid their bills on time, lived within their means. But one series illness, one accident and that was it. It was health care that sunk most of his clients. Not irresponsible people who wracked up credit card debt buying toys. And he told me this several years back, before the economy really tanked.

Argh! I’m so utterly tired of the culture war hang ups from the baby boomers. Why must we continue to spoil useful and constructive legislation with fights over abortion, homosexual marriage, and God. Where have all the rational people gone?

Someone should have told Joe Biden. He’s a stickler for personal responsibility that guy….well, not so much the corporations but people…yeah. Well, not politically connected people, or people in government who’ve broken the law, or started illegal wars, or wiretapped Americans illegally, or war criminals…but everyone else definitely.

I agree with hotbbq. Just because I do not approve of certain lifestyle choices, do I have the right to withhold treatment (or re-imbursement) for say STD, diabetes or lung cancer?

hotbbq:
For some reason, even though the Culture War Republicans (sorted out of all of ‘em) are too weak to do anything, I guess what we have is either one of two things going on:

1. Endangered Species Act
We have to preserve their habitat, and hence, their opinions regardless of whether they have political power or not

2. Wingnut Affirmative Action
We have to always include a percentage of wingnut issues in any bill put up in congress. Diversity of opinion, you know…

Ok, just did some checking around the Web and… most private health insurance companies will pay for abortions. The public option is not “using taxpayer money” it’s just transferring premium payments made to private insurers to the government. So if private plans pay for this, the public plan should too. There’s nothing “tricky” about it.

You’re not far off 53. For the sake of the journalistic imperative of balance, we have to include them in everything even though they have little power and even less knowledge about doing the right thing.

Argh! I’m so utterly tired of the culture war hang ups from the baby boomers.

Be glad of those “baby boomer” culture wars. I direct your attention to the periods prior, wherein it was an accepted fact of life that religious doctrine rocked your life. At least now that crap is being challenged and done away with.

And too, look to the ranks of the primary proponents of the current ‘conservative’ culture wars and their warriors; an awful lot of post-Boomers are rapidly filling those ranks.

You maybe need to be talking to some o’ yo’ own (contemporary) homies, bro’.

destor: i dealt with that a bit in my story last week. there are statistics that point in two different directions: guttmacher says that most insurance companies say they do cover abortion, but another report by the kaiser family foundation says that most employer-provided plans do not. is that clear? in other words, though most insurance companies will provide it, most employers do not buy that coverage for their workers. but both sets of data are old. there’s also a huge difference depending on the size of the company you work for: kaiser’s figures indicate that 54% of workers for large firms (200+ workers) have abortion coverage, while only 30% of workers for small firms (3-199 workers) do.

Dee: I didn’t write that story or this post “for the sake of the journalistic imperative of balance.” i wrote it because my sources–in this case, sources on Waxman’s staff and on Nancy Pelosi’s–told me that this has emerged as a complication in their efforts to draft a health reform bill. I wrote it because of my “journalistic imperative” to inform my readers on the state of the health reform debate.

There’s a simple solution here. As a compromise, the Democrats should just offer a swap: Leave abortion coverage in the public plan, but write into Medicare a provision that forbids it from paying for abortions for any women over 65.

We know that women over 65 are universally fertile, since Republicans tell us that marriage is unthinkable between people who can’t biologically have kids, and they don’t object to senior women getting hitched. Consequently, this compromise will stop millions of abortions from happening, and the GOP will be ecstatic to see it enacted into law.

Original idea, nicteis, cool, but there’s already enough senior discrimination. Good point about unthinkable marriages between infertile couples. Are the R’s now insisting that all childless couples divorce? Do they really want to return to the days of “Dirty Dancing” (watched again this past weekend; imagine THAT fluff film having an abortion subplot, albeit with Mika-like passivity).

KT — The balance issue is not just about this post. Its about the media’s posture in general, acting as it we haven’t had an election where the GOP lost. Right now all I’m hearing about is what will the GOP think. I want to know why do we care what they think? It’s not as if they are going to support anything except their own philosophy. So why does the media give them more legitimacy than they deserve given who is actually calliong the shots — you know, the people who actually won?
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Now you can think about yourself and maybe you don’t do this, but if you’re honest you will acknowledge that the national media still acts as if Republicans are in charge. It’s like the media is wired for a split decision and are still thinking of the country as center right when the center moved so far left so long ago its ridiculous. At no point was Indiana, Virginia, or North Carolina ever a swing state. The country is no longer split down the middle and Republicans don’t hold anything in the balance unless we let them.
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Right now supposedly health care is in trouble because Obama’s job approval is plummeting — well that’s the GOP’s story, but the rating went from 61& to 59% please give me a break, that’s margin of error. I just sat here for the last 5 minutes listening to Orin Hatch lie his behind off about Sotomayor and the Hyde amendment and no one challenges him. It’s as if no one in the media sees the GOP devolving into a lump of crazy before their eyes.
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Sorry, but the committee just voted down the amendment to uphold the Hyde amendment. Hatch claims that we’ve never never ever used tax payer funds to pay for abortions. Well that’s crap, That was the first casualty of the Republican realignment. Well now things are going in the other direction and I’m still waiting for the press to acknowledge that there has been a shift. One that’s been in the making since 2000 if you believe the stories on how the GOP stole two elections.

“Right now all I’m hearing about is what will the GOP think. I want to know why do we care what they think? It’s not as if they are going to support anything except their own philosophy. So why does the media give them more legitimacy than they deserve given who is actually calliong the shots — you know, the people who actually won?”

It’s rather simple really. It’s hard for us to understand because regular people have a common method for evaluating who and what to listen to: consider the source. So for you, it’s political irrelevance. Me, I make it normal practice to not bother with people who’ve been caught lying to me repeatedly. Journalists don’t have the luxury to consider the source, it’s their convention and practice treat the political reject, the serial liar, the known war criminal, as just as legitimate as anyone else. It’s ironic, it’s awful for journalism, politics and the public conversation but there it is.

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I rest your case, Dee…

Also, we could, in exchange for terminating the Civil Rights for all Martians living on earth, they would be willing to allow the construction of a statue of Martin Luther King next to Lincoln’s memorial.

To elaborate a bit, so I don’t get my heart toasted on KT’s stick (she has powers, you know…) ’till it’s golden brown and bubbling, I don’t think KT is, specifically, but among the media, it’s definitely the rage.

Can you imagine how much better the Bush years would have been had there been an equal amount of false equivalence practiced by the Republicans?

I’m guessing they would have placed one “liberal” on the Supreme Court…

[...] Swampland blog writes about the Mikulski Women’s Health [...]