I am sure that there are things about health care that you are mad about, disgusted with, and want fixed.
I am sure that you know someone who cannot afford the prescription medicine she or he needs. It might be your mom or dad, who is on a fixed income and even tries to go without their pills in order to make them last longer. It might be your child, who could benefit from a new drug that you can’t afford. It might even be you, struggling in this economy to make ends meet.
I am also sure you know someone who needs health insurance and cannot afford it. Cannot. They may be hardworking people with jobs – it often doesn’t matter. My sister is an RN and her husband is a roofer. For years, they could not afford insurance for themselves or their children. The term “co-pay” was foreign to them; they paid full price for doctors’ visits and medicine.. They lived with their fingers crossed that nothing catastrophic would happen to one of the kids.
Know this: Regardless of how you feel about abortion – whether you support a woman’s right to choose, oppose it at all costs or fall somewhere in between – that issue will affect how your health care future is formed.
Saturday night, realizing that she would not get the votes she needed without it, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed an amendment to be added to the health care reform bill that would harshly restrict the availability of coverage for abortions that some insurance plans now offer. The House passed its version of the bill with a vote of 220 to 215 with the amendment, which goes beyond even existing laws that prohibit public funding for abortion. The amendment will limit coverage even for women who pay for abortion without government subsidies.
Let’s go straight to this morning’s New York Times:
“A restriction on abortion coverage, added late Saturday to the health care bill passed by the House, has energized abortion opponents with their biggest victory in years — emboldening them for a pitched battle in the Senate.”
And:
“Both sides credited a forceful lobbying effort by Roman Catholic bishops with the success of the provision, inserted in the bill under pressure from conservative Democrats.”
OK. So a Roman Catholic lobbying effort will decide whether your insurance company can cover something or, more likely, whether it will be forced to drop coverage of something that exists now.
Attention now turns to the Senate, which must pass its own reform bill and then work with the House in conference committee to try to reconcile differences between the bills. Abortion-rights supporters vow to either get the amendment stripped from the bill or to block final passage.
“There’s going to be a firestorm here,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo). “Women are going to realize that a Democratic-controlled House has passed legislation that would prohibit women paying for abortions with their own funds … We’re not going to let this into law.”
There are so many critical needs that this health care reform bill must answer. We need to deal with cost. We need to deal with insurance companies who drop people after they become ill, or reject people due to pre-existing conditions. We must find a way to make health care affordable for those who now use emergency rooms as their primary care. We have to deal with the public option, with prescription medicine costs and with skyrocketing premiums. It may be naïve to think that all those issues could just be decided on their merits, by the people whom we’ve elected to do so. But it would be nice.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t vote the Roman Catholic bishops into the debate.
Read House Bill 3962 for yourself:
http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf
Do you have questions about the House bill that I can answer? What is your single most important priority for any final health care bill that is passed?
The New York Times coverage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/us/politics/09abortion.html?hp
The Washington Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/us/politics/09abortion.html?_r=1&hp
CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/07/health.care/index.html