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Today's Top News
The Stupak Stupor
We know that the House healthcare reform bill passed after an eleventh-hour compromise (you might say betrayal) on abortion access. We know the compromise, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, is bad. But do we know exactly how it's bad for women (and their partners)? Here's a quick primer on what the amendment actually means for any woman accessing healthcare through the newly-created health insurance exchange.
Over the summer, legislators struck an agreement on abortion funding in which private plans offered through the health insurance exchange couldn't use federal dollars to cover abortion care. They could, however, cover abortion care with funds from individuals' premiums, and the agreement, the Capps Amendment, required at least one plan in every region to offer abortion care, and at least one not to. As many observers predicted, the Capps Amendment didn't mollify anti-abortion crusaders, namely the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which commands an outsize role in the debate over healthcare reform.
So what we ended up with was drastically worse. After the initial compromise fell apart, Rep. Bart Stupak introduced the eponymous amendment, under which any plan purchased with any federal subsidy cannot cover abortion services--even with private funds. Plus, the public plan won't cover abortion care. While plans participating in the health insurance exchange are legally permitted to offer a version of the plan that does cover abortion--enrollment limited to those who pay for the entire plan without any subsidy--it's unlikely plans will go the extra mile to offer that coverage, Planned Parenthood's Laurie Rubiner said this morning on the Brian Lehrer Show. That would be "awfully complex," Rubiner explained. Because the majority of Americans purchasing insurance through the exchange would be using affordability credits, the plan without abortion coverage will become the "standard plan." Rubiner also cited privacy concerns over purchasing abortion-inclusive coverage. The Wall Street Journal observed, "Insurers may be reluctant to [set up abortion-inclusive plans] because it could complicate how they pool risk and force them to label policies in a way that could draw attention from abortion opponents."
At Change.org, Jen Nedeau pointed out that even women who currently have employer-based insurance that does cover abortion care (and 87 percent of employer-based plans do) may ultimately be affected. "Since the plan for the uninsured is designed to open up to everyone over time, including large employers, it is likely that women will lose access to abortion coverage as part of any health insurance plan available for purchase," Nedeau explains.
In defending his amendment, Stupak made one misleading and one outright false claim. He argued that women could purchase "abortion riders" on top of their insurance, much like they might purchase a dental or vision rider. Such an abortion rider doesn't exist now, and the legislation does not provide for its creation. Rubiner pointed out that in states where private coverage of abortion care is outlawed, riders don't exist either. Besides, they defy logic: "Women would have to plan for their unplanned pregnancy," Rubiner added. "It's illogical to think they would look for a plan that includes abortion."
And for the falsehood: Stupak claimed that his amendment "goes no farther than Hyde," the amendment banning federal Medicaid funding for abortion care except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the woman's life. In fact, the amendment goes farther than Hyde in stipulating what kind of coverage a woman can purchase with private dollars. "It's the equivalent of arguing that women who receive abortions should not use public buses or highways to travel to the abortion clinic," Igor Volsky at Wonk Room points out.
In the Stupak amendment, the exceptions to the coverage ban read as follows: rape, incest or "where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death." The Center for American Progress's Jessica Arons writes, "Given insurance companies' dexterity in denying claims, we can predict what they'll do with that language." And in case you wonder what that leaves out entirely: "Cases that are excluded: where the health but not the life of the woman is threatened by the pregnancy, severe fetal abnormalities, mental illness or anguish that will lead to suicide or self-harm, and the numerous other reasons women need to have an abortion."
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45 Comments so far
Show AllStupak lives in the C Street Christian Power house in D.C. along with all the other dangerous hypocrites who take part in ruling this country.
I have tried to tell some of my friends that there are Democrats also living in the "C Street House," but they didn't want to believe me. Even Hillary Clinton is associated with the House -- she attended the same White House prayer meetings that George Allen did.
We need complete separation of church and state! However, Obama has continued the Bush "Faith Based Initiative" programs, funding religious charities -- that would be "we the people" funding religious organizations!
Kay
The "faith based initiative" garbage was started by Bill Clinton's administration. His administration did the preliminary work for the unjustifiable war on Iraq, the elimination of regulation over the financial crooks, the gutting of equal access to public education, and escalated the attack on pensions and social security also.
The vast majority of democrats are republicans in their actions.
Logan's Law: All undocumented statements critical of Bill Clinton should be regarded as lies.
Logan's Law (from the OUTSIDE): I have "zero-tolerance" for even the slightest justifiable criticism of the Clintons, and will squeal like a stuck pig in the presence of such in a desperate and futile attempt to defend their nonexistent honor.
It's running a little long, as usual, but that's the gist of it.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Taliban light!
they don't believe in abortion but...
they believe in denying people health based on this issue.
they believe in sending Americans off to die in illegal occupations of foreign countries.
the list goes on...
migrant rights: I agree -- they are complete hypocrits!
The sick part about this is that Stupid, er, Stupak apparently created this monstrosity because he said he could bring pro-life Democrats over to vote for the bill in the House...and 26 of the drones wound up voting against it anyway. This whole thing is completely screwing this up. This should have been a single payer plan, no questions asked period, end of sentence.
that would never pass, sorry
70% of Americans want a strong public option. Congressional whores to insurance do not. The French only guillotined about 2000 aristocrats, but it empowered the working and middle classes. The noose is more symbolic in the U.S., and I'll bet if the average stiffs of the U.S. hanged a mere 535 members of congress, things would reform in a hurry. That would leave, on the French model, about 1500 empty lamp-posts crying out for bankers.
Surely nobody is surprised?
I mean, seriously. What better way to make the issue of public health an untouchable one than to tie it to the abortion rights issue? It is a controversy with no solution in sight, and militants on both sides who prefer to war against each other than to compromise. Besides, it is a politically profitable controversy by the very virtue of its divisiveness. Issues WITH solutions (but which might cost capitalists some of their influence in D.C.) can be sidelined nicely by piggy-backing it to abortion. Well played, you sons of bitches. Anyone who didn't see it coming was blind.
Universal single payer health care is the only real fix for this situation. Kucinich is dead right. Anything else is simply a-bail out for the insurance industry (another protection racket, like banking, defense, police, and yes - GOVERNMENT ITSELF). I never would have thought that I'd have to learn real anger, real hatred, and betrayal from my own government. Every single 'morally superior' bit of hype I've ever heard about my nation, much less Christianity, has been proven a lie. It's time to reject every paradigm and think anew, and with confidence in our own individual capacity for critical thinking (I know, if the press the Average American receives is half true then we have no capacity for critical thought). I simply hope that it is only propaganda (A'la Jerry Springer, or Glenn Beck) which has us thinking the average American is dumber than a foot-ball bat. If it isn't we deserve to go the way of the Do Do bird.
You dont need healthcare..just get the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to ask the Great White Jesus to heal you.
Remember the good old days when a Catholic could not run for office, for fear they would put the foreign popes desires ahead of Americans needs?
The Christ-tards and the Republicrats haven't figured out that any loving woman will abort any fetus rather than birth it into a nation controlled by them. In fact, a loving woman aborts ANY fetus she conceives. "The death of a child is never really to be regretted, considering how much he has escaped" (Thomas Hardy)
Three female members (DeLauro, DeGette and Slaughter) of Congress issued a statement after the House vote that "We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women's right to choose any further than current law."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/09-6
Awfully brave sounding, isn't that? Well, if the three had voted no instead of yes on the bill (that contained the anti-abortion Stupak amendment) the vote would have been 212 for and 213 against and there wouldn't even BE a House meaure containing this stupid and outrageous amendment. Why didn't they exercise their bravery when they voted for the bill? But need I ask, some 70 members of the Progressive Caucus voted for the bill when they said they wouldn't if it contained no "robust public option," as the bill decidedly did not (with Kucinich and Massa the only progressives voting no.) So why should we believe the statement of the Three Brave Women? Or that any others of the "progressive caucus" would vote to offend the President by voting as they said they would vote when the bill comes back from committee? Might there by a bit of cynicism here; since the bill is already declared "dead on arrival" in the Senate?
The u.s. has suffered multiple rapes. It's time to abort this government.
That is funny!
Has anyone tried to challenge Hyde? If the Stupid ammendment is based on it, it would go away if Hyde did.
This ammendment ought to disappear anyway, when this gets to conference, that is, if it survives the Senate.
What I want to know is, if the Catholic Bishops and AIPAC had a deal, 'cause if AIPAC owns the USGovernment, how do the Catholics also own it?
CV: "if AIPAC owns the USGovernment, how do the Catholics also own it?"
Simple division of labor, the Catholics own our bodies, AIPAC our souls.
No one actually OWNS the government. There's just a whole host of special interests with a sizable timeshare!
can someone stop the prison planet so we can throw these fools off! the best thing that could have happened was if pitts and stupak's father had worn a condom. little georgie bush too!
these women are a joke. why is it when politicians stand
up after sitting down when they should have stood up do
they think that they fooled us and that they suddenly
have some new found credibility? do they think we are
as stupid as they are . these women and the rest
of those in the house are going to have to go to sleep
at night knowing they just fucked all the women of
child bearing age in america. what pals. with friends
like that no enemies are needed! what happens to women when they get to washington is there something in the water that makes
them think as coldly and stupidly as men do? on every
level you can think of its clear that we as a species
are a exercise that was a mistake to mother earth and
all the other species living on her! i wonder how long
it is before darwin's law kicks in? certainly not fast
enough for this planet!
If you truy feel that way about humanity and the planet, there's a quick and easy way to stop being part of the problem and become part of the soluttion...
camus13
Pitts from PA is one of the old time C Streeters. You know the guy that cheat on their wives.
cheat on your wife and guess what they will do to you?.........right screw us.
As for the Catholic Church the only way they can keep their members from having abortion is to take abortions away from us all. If they want to keep their women under the gun on this so be it but keep their damn nose out of our lives. Also they could try and take care of their major problem with little boys.
Defeat this bill.....show the Speaker in chief that he's finished next election as he should be
Religion is a virus.
Douglas inexplicably omits The Family from her indictment of those responsible for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Thus -- despite the fact the rank-and-file of U.S. Catholicism is about 62 percent pro-choice -- she implicitly (and misleadingly) blames Catholics for the amendment's passage.
Nor does Douglas note that Stupak is ultimately the de facto nullification of Roe v. Wade for all save the super-rich, who will always have abortion rights regardless of the law.
But those are it's bitter truths, just as I summarized Sunday in an extra to my blog -- "Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook" -- and will cover again in my regular weekly post on Thursday.
The Family -- exposed in Jeff Sharlet's must-read book of the same name ("The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power") -- is the mostly Protestant Christian cabal that increasingly controls U.S. government and governance at every level. The Family's malevolent influence is akin to that of the Ku Klux Klan in the South and Opus Dei in Fascist Spain.
Indeed the South -- where ever-more-fanatical Protestantism ever-more-savagely enforces the region's anti-woman, anti-labor, anti-homosexual, anti-intellectual bigotry (and thus functions as the brain police for capitalism) -- is the The Family's model society, the system it seeks to impose on the entire United States.
Thus too Stupak-Pitts, the fanatics' newest triumph in their march toward the goal of transforming Moron Nation from a dysfunctional constitutional democracy to a Bible-based dictatorship. This in service to the sole remaining U.S. purpose: the propagation of monopoly capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profits for the ruling class -- the total subjugation of all the rest of us.
Especially the subjugation of women, who in Christian theology are damned, per Genesis, as wellsprings of rebellion.
When O when will the U.S. Left wake up?
Religion has consequences -- and Christian zealotry is a primary weapon of the ruling class in its ongoing and ever-more-successful effort to reduce us all to slavery on the New Plantation of Big Business. Which is precisely why the religious affiliations of elected and appointed officials are even more important than their party labels.
lorenbliss; in a situation of increasing operational scarcity, competition demands the winners win as the losers are enslaved till they die.--will we still be commenting and blogging when the jackboots come to our doors?
What is the big deal? So women have to pay for abortions out of pocket if they have an Exchange plan. Oh darn, out a few hundred dollars. Get over it.
Lorenbliss is absolutely correct in her observation that they tried to make the Catholic Church the scapegoat. Anyone with any sense knows who was behind that amendment. The C-Street Cabal is gaining power in the halls of Congress that is quite scary in my view. When I saw Marcy Kaptur stand up and speak in favor of that amendment, I lost a lot of my admiration of her as a Congresswoman.
There is a six block ring of dental clinics around the border crossing at Nogales, Sonora, all fully staffed, all with state-of-the-art equipment and training, all listed in tourist guides, all doing a brisk business doing implants and root canals and crowns for Americans who would pay three times as much for the same service in the US. The absence of affordable comprehensive dental insurance here must be a big help to the Mexican economy, and is therefore a good thing. I would imagine that when affordable abortion care, or even the abortion right itself, goes the way of the dodo in our excellent country, medical referrals will also point south. So we should not worry about the worst effect of Stupak's idiotic amendment - that women will not have abortion options. Good clinics will be accessible for the price of a bus ticket.
Pitts will be facing a pro-choice Democratic challenger in next year's congressional office race. Plenty of people in his district want a new representative.
The Family is a real perversion. There must be separation of church and state.
Women can be controlled through policies that relate to their reproduction. The government cannot be permitted to control a woman's reproductive choices.
The average cost of an abortion is less than $500. If you're not willing to pay that out of pocket, then obviously you don't want it enough. That kid is going to cost you way more than $500. (Almost all health providers offer payment plans anyway!)
Oh, for crying out loud! Therefore, it's OK to exclude it? How about office visits? What's the average price of those? If it's under $500, then I assume you tolerate those being not covered too, or else "obviously you don't want it enough."
Your thoughtless critique also obscures some meaningful context, such as the much more expensive abortion procedures that need to be done at hospitals, not clinics, in cases such as a deformed fetus, ectopic pregnancies, and so on.
We should not be willing to discard hard-won rights so blithely.
Look, we're not discarding a right. You're arguing that the government should pay for you to exercise your right.
Normal checkups are also less than $500, yes. But abortions are a much rarer and dire event than a checkup. In fact, most people avoid preventative care today because of the cost! That is a central fact to the current health care debate. If a person needs an abortion, then they are not going to avoid it because they have to pay a few hundred dollars out of pocket-- otherwise they wouldn't really want it. The difference is that people think they can put off regular physicals and other preventative care, but in the end they are wrong because they cost the system and/or themselves a great deal by doing this. On the other hand, women understand enough about the nature of pregnancy to know they cannot just "put it off" if they need an abortion!
You are incorrect. I am arguing for consistency. That is: government should not overrule a medical judgement in order to proscribe perfectly legal, necessary medical procedures.
You also ignore my second point in order to repeat a weak moralistic argument about motivation for abortion. That is: not all pregnancies are the same, and some present far more serious problems that require hospital care, not a clinic.
Scolding women about pregancy is irrelevant here, but you can still do that even if we do not single out abortion for lack of coverage.
No doubt monroe thinks dental care shouldn't be covered because it's under $500. Ditto antibiotics, various tests, pap smears, and vaccinations. After all, if it's so cheap ($500) and you don't pay for it out of pocket, you must not want it badly enough.
PS. Don't bother typing a reply to this, monroe. I won't read it.
Stupor proscribes PRIVATE insurance companies from covering abortion, a perfectly legal medical procedure.
This is simply, further proof that "freedom" and "justice" depend upon how much money you have.
The flag of the U.S.A. should have a field of 50 dollar signs -
$$$$$$$$$$ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- instead of stars.
We live in an auction house.
Everyone still has the same freedom to choose abortion, much like you have the freedom to choose your vehicle. The idea that a freedom imposes an obligation on the government to pay for you to exercise your freedom is strange. Abortions don't grow on trees, you know.
"monroe"
Now calmly, clear your throat, and say "Oink".
i suppose you think you should get a free car too
Incorrect again. A right and a commodity are dissimilar in important ways.
Just another example of democrats telling the base to suck it up. Take another one for "the team." Get with the fucking program, as Rahm might say.
I read someone say that the GOP fears its base and the democrats fear the republicans. Too true.
"The GOP fears its base and the democrats fear the republicans."
Certainly seems to be true. I've always wondered what was so scary about a bunch of fat pedophiles.
More relevant to our situation is that progressives hate Democrats.
Let's face it, no one hates Democrats more than progressives do. I cite the comments to this article as proof.
No discussion amongst progressives is complete without a sound thrashing of a Democrat or two. You can make the folks at Democratic Underground foam at the mouth simply by saying "DLC." ;)
Progressives hate Democrats, and they bash Democrats constantly. I suspect they are not generous contributors to the Democrats' campaigns.
Progressives even join together to protest Democrats and fight Democratic incumbants, campaign against them, and in general make their lives miserable.
When they get really excited--as they did during the primaries--some progressives will even trot out hoary old right-wing smears to use against their fellow Democrats. This happened at the big progressive blogs during the primaries, which makes them party traitors.
And yet the progs can't figure out why the Democrats give them such short shrift. This suggests an unwillingness to face the obvious.
This suggests an unwillingness to face the obvious.
______________________________
Hmm, you got us! Because none can deny your expertise in being unwilling to face the obvious.
· Yr Obd't Servant