Things that make a person say, "hmmmm......"

Here's an interesting post by Steve Benen over on the Maddow Blog  about the fate of the Affordable Care Act.

The lesser of two evils?

If the Green Party's presidential candidates had been listed on the Oklahoma ballot, I would have voted for Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala.

Given Oklahoma's extremely restrictive ballot access laws, the only two choices I had were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Obama is the lesser of two evils by a large margin. Romney demonstrates a complete lack of core integrity, a willingness to shift from progressive to extreme conservative opinions based on whatever is popular at the moment, and an alliance with the most regressive economic and political forces in the United States.

Nevertheless, I wish I'd had the option to vote for Jill Stein today. For one thing, living in the reddest of red states, I know that Oklahoma will go solidly for Romney. Given the reality of the way the Electoral College operates, a vote for anyone else is a protest vote. I would like my protest vote to be for the candidate I prefer.

As Doug Henwood put it in a recent post for The Nation:

...I wish, just once, an endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate coming from the left would mull over some serious structural issues that are at stake.

There are certain eternally recurrent features of these endorsement editorials, and they are depressing. The shortcomings of this year’s Democrat are acknowledged, only to be dismissed, because this is always the most important election since 1932, or maybe 1860. If the Democrats lose, brownshirts will move into the Oval Office. It will be repression and immiseration at home and aggressive war abroad. Sure, there will be some repression, immiseration and war even if the Dem wins, but see above re dismissal of shortcomings.

The persistence of the pattern is no exaggeration. Here’s something from a 1967 essay by Hal Draper on the imminent 1968 election: “Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right. The lib-labs would then swoon, crying ‘The fascists are coming!’ and vote for the Lesser Evil.”

And what is the consequence of that swoon? Draper’s answer: “the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right.” Almost every editorial urging a vote for this year’s Dem will lament the rightward move of our politics without ever considering the contribution of such calls to the process.

In other words, the Democrats will continue to ignore and disrespect the progressive vote, because they've learned that they can get away with it.

I would much prefer to have the opportunity to vote for candidates who actually respect my views.

Good news or bad news? Court upholds health law

So. According to this statement from the Oklahoma Policy Institute, it looks as if the US Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act. I was both surprised and relieved to read this when I opened up my e-mail just now. OPI's post provides a link to the entire decision. (It's almost 200 pages long, so I'll have to read that later.)

BBC News reports that the law was upheld by a 5-4 ruling, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the deciding vote. Justice Anthony Kennedy, sometimes described as the key swing vote on the court, wrote the dissent.

OPI welcomes this decision as a step forward in the journey to bring quality healthcare at a reasonable price to all US residents, and calls on Oklahoma lawmakers to move forward on implementing the ACA:

The Supreme Court also upheld expansion of the Medicaid program, a provision that will particularly benefit low-income uninsured Oklahomans, paid for almost entirely by the federal government.

For the 1.7 million Oklahomans who are privately insured and happy with their plan, coverage is now more secure and comprehensive. Insurers can no longer deny their claims or drop their coverage without oversight. Their insurer will now cover routine preventive care, like immunizations and cancer screenings, for no co-pay or additional out-of-pocket cost.

The health law is already working to strengthen consumer protections and ensure that Oklahomans are getting what they pay for from their insurers and providers. It’s now up to state leaders, regardless of their personal political preferences, to move forward quickly to implement the Affordable Care Act.

That's an optimistic assessment about the ACA's effects. Others have less optimistic assessments. As Physicians for a National Health Program point out:

Although the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the unfortunate reality is that the law, despite its modest benefits, is not a remedy to our health care crisis: (1) it will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million uninsured, (2) it will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance, because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and (3) it will not control costs.

Why is this so? Because the ACA perpetuates a dominant role for the private insurance industry. Each year, that industry siphons off hundreds of billions of health care dollars for overhead, profit and the paperwork it demands from doctors and hospitals; it denies care in order to increase insurers’ bottom line; and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.

In contrast, a single-payer, improved-Medicare-for-all system would provide truly universal, comprehensive coverage; health security for our patients and their families; and cost control. It would do so by replacing private insurers with a single, nonprofit agency like Medicare that pays all medical bills, streamlines administration, and reins in costs for medications and other supplies through its bargaining clout.

Some folks argue that the Affordable Care Act is merely the beginning of a process that will ultimately lead us to a single-payer system. Right-wing opponents of the law certainly made that case as the bill was making its way through Congress.

I would like to believe that the ACA will lead to a better system, but I'm not sure that it will. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court had struck down the law, this would have been a decisive blow against any kind of comprehensive national health insurance coverage. Thus, while I'm not particularly happy with the ACA, I am relieved that it wasn't struck down.

It's not about epistemology

You may wonder, gentle reader, what the heck is "epistemology," besides a funny looking big word that is fun to say in order to impress your friends? It is, very simply, that part of philosophy that is devoted to studying what we know and how we know that what we know is true.

This is a very important question. I think I know all kinds of things--that all people should have equal rights and power, that climate change is a serious problem and needs to be stopped, that US military intervention always makes things worse rather than better. There are large numbers of people who think I am exactly wrong about all of those things. How do I know that I am right and they are wrong?

Yes, that's an important question, but as you read in the title of the post, this is not about epistemology, so we'll take that question up at another time.

This post is actually about the Affordable Health Care Act, which has made its way to the Supreme Court. Right-wing opponents of the law have challenged its constitutionality, saying that the federal government doesn't have the right to require citizens to purchase health insurance. Liberal supporters of the law say that it provides a huge step forward in making health care available to all citizens.

As for myself, I just don't know. I expect that the law is constitutional, but I don't think it fixes what's broken about the US health care system. The US health care system is designed to allow private companies to make enormous profits by providing services that cost lots of money but may (or may not) improve anyone's health. Despite its name, I'm not sure the health care act will really make health care more affordable.

Robert Reich has written a blog post that expresses very well my reasons for ambivalence about the ACA. (You may recall that Reich served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. Reich is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.)As Reich writes:

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the Administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

But don’t expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Now Republicans are using this compromise in order to whip up resentment from far-right Tea Party supporters who don't want the government to tell them what to buy. Some of this resentment probably comes from people who, even with subsidies, cannot afford to buy health insurance or pay a fine for not having it.

It seems like a lose-lose situation. If the Affordable Health Care Act is struck down by the Supreme Court, we are left with the same broken system, with all of its skyrocketing costs and inadequate coverage. Plus, it's a big defeat for the whole idea of universal health care. If the ACA is upheld, more people have some kind of coverage, but most of the problems of the existing system are left in place.

Reich, however, sees a silver lining in the possible overturn of the ACA. He argues that no one objects to mandatory participation in Medicare by people over 65, because this is a government program that works well and is universally popular.

So why not Medicare for all?

Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds the government’s authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

I would like to believe that Reich is right.

I have only one minor quibble about what he has to say.

The court debate started off with an argument about whether this is the right time to hear this case. This was a procedural issue based on an interpretation of an 1867 law that says that you can't file a legal challenge to a tax until you've had to pay that tax. People who don't buy health insurance won't need to pay a penalty for several years. The Supreme Court spent the whole first day of argument considering whether the 1867 law applies to this case.

Reich describes this argument thusly:

Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Um, no. This procedural argument had nothing at all to do with epistemology, it had to do with the way the word "tax" is defined. Maybe Reich meant to use the word "etymological," which has to do with tracing the history of words.

If we had an epistemological discussion about the ACA, we would be discussing whether we have any reliable way of predicting exactly what its effects are going to be. This is not a "nicety," but a very substantial problem. Even big words have meanings, and you can't just throw them around at random to prove how smart you are.

Against Social Security except for themselves

 The Nation has a fascinating post about right-wing billionaire "free market" proponent Charles Koch writing to  economist Friedrich Hayek, encouraging him to sign up for Social Security. The irony in this is that both Koch and Hayek were leading opponents of Social Security and other safety net programs.

A copy of the letter, written in 1973, is available here. Nation reporters Vasha Levine and Mark Ames explain that Koch wanted Hayek to come to the United States to serve as a senior scholar at Koch's libertarian Institute for Humane Studies in 1974. Initially, Hayek turned down the offer. Hayek had health problems. His native Austria had a program of almost universal health care that had provided him with gall bladder surgery. In the United States, he would not be able to afford private health insurance. Not to worry, Kock said. Hayek might be eligible for Social Security, based on his employment at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. In that case, he would also be eligible for Medicare to cover hospital expenses.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Levine and Ames go on to explain how the Cato Institute (originally called the Charles Koch Institute) carried on a stealth campaign to undermine Social Security and other social safety net programs.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

Deficit attention disorder

Over on AlterNet, Joshua Holland calls out President Obama for giving a deficit speech that was long on "flowery talk" and short on substance:

The reality is that while our private profit-driven health-care system is unsustainably expensive, the U.S. spends less on the public sector than almost every other developed country. We're running large deficits because we're maintaining costly military operations in several countries and the federal government collected less tax revenue in 2010 than in any year since 1961.

Progressives will no doubt celebrate Obama's deft dissection of the GOP's budget gimmicks and his full-throated defense of the welfare state. But it was ultimately some thin political gruel with unemployment remaining at 9 percent and the foreclosure crisis continuing unabated. When Obama's on, as he was today, it's easy to forget that our biggest national debate is little more than a distraction from the real issues plaguing our economy.

The big question on my mind is, how much, in the end, will Obama going to cave in to the extreme budget agenda of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan. Dean Baker explains exactly how bad Ryan's budget proposal is. It will "leave the vast majority of future retirees without decent health care by ending Medicare as we know it. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, most middle-income retirees would have to pay almost half of their income to purchase a Medicare equivalent insurance package by 2030." Baker also notes that:

he ostensible rationale for this attack is the country's huge budget deficit. This is garbage. As all the pundits know, the country has a huge deficit today because the Wall Street boys drove the economy off a cliff. If the government deficit were not propping up the economy, we would be looking at 11 or 12 percent unemployment, rather than 8.9 percent. Spending creates jobs, and at this point, it is not coming from the private sector, so the government must fill the hole.

Over the longer term, the projections of huge deficits are driven by the projected explosion in health care costs. President Obama's health care reform took steps toward constraining these costs, although probably not enough. Remarkably, Ryan's plan abandons these cost control measures, virtually guaranteeing that quality health care becomes unaffordable for all but a small elite.

Finally, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out how expanding Medicare could actually lower both health care costs and the federal deficit:

For starters, allow anyone at any age to join Medicare. Medicare’s administrative costs are in the range of 3 percent. That’s well below the 5 to 10 percent costs borne by large companies that self-insure. It’s even further below the administrative costs of companies in the small-group market (amounting to 25 to 27 percent of premiums). And it’s way, way lower than the administrative costs of individual insurance (40 percent). It’s even far below the 11 percent costs of private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance option under Medicare.

In addition, allow Medicare – and its poor cousin Medicaid – to use their huge bargaining leverage to negotiate lower rates with hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. This would help move health care from a fee-for-the-most-costly-service system into one designed to get the highest-quality outcomes most cheaply.

Estimates of how much would be saved by extending Medicare to cover the entire population range from $58 billion to $400 billion a year. More Americans would get quality health care, and the long-term budget crisis would be sharply reduced.

Worth considering

Over at thenation.com, Katha Pollit argues that the flexibility of prochoice feminist leaders allowed the president's healthcare bill to pass, and that in return, there ought to be a Payback for Prochoicers.

Equinox

It is the first day of Spring, and in my little neighborhood in northwest Oklahoma City, there are several inches of snow on the ground. Snow covers large parts of the state of Oklahoma. But I am fairly confident that hell has not frozen over. Therefore, there is no way that my Congressional representative, right-wing Republican Mary Fallin, will vote for the health care bill when it comes before the House of Representatives some time tomorrow. Therefore, I can safely ignore the pleas that have been flooding my email inbox, urging me to call her and ask her to vote for the bill.

As I've noted recently, my overwhelming reaction to the current health care bill is ambivalence. I hope that in 20 years, we will all look back and see this bill as a historic first step toward achieving meaningful health care for all. I fear that we will look back at this as the moment when a Democratic president and Congress sacrificed the well-being of ordinary people in order to serve the interests of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit health-care providers.

Regardless of my hopes and fears, despite the united opposition of Republican lawmakers, it now appears that the bill is almost sure to pass. You can see this from several recent posts on Talking Points Memo. The Democrats have abandoned a controversial parliamentary maneuver and now the House Will Hold Straight Up or Down Vote on Senate Health Care Bill. Progressive skeptics are now falling in line to vote for the bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is refusing to allow anti-choice zealot Bart Stupak the opportunity to amend the Senate bill, which is slightly less destructive to women's reproductive freedom than the version originally passed by the House. It may not be a done deal. It will be a close vote that could still go the other way. But even the racist and anti-gay ugliness perpetrated today by "Tea Party" protesters at the Capitol suggests a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the inevitable.

So it's Spring, y'all. There was so much snow that the local protest that had been scheduled to mark the seventh anniversary of the Iraq War had to be canceled. It may be rescheduled, and other protests took place nationwide. Tomorrow, immigration rights activists will march on Washington, DC to demand reform of our nation's unjust immigration laws. Activists continue working for single-payer health care. And frankly, my friends, I don't believe there is a hell.And I still believe that if we work really hard, we can make this world better without waiting for torment or paradise in some world to come. I hope you are having a lovely Equinox. As for myself, I am going to go for a walk in the snow.

There's still hope for the public option...

...according to this post on t r u t h o u t:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists that the public option is dead, but progressive organizations are mounting an aggressive campaign to resurrect it as Democratic lawmakers gear up to pass a final health care bill this week via a budgetary process known as reconciliation.

Democracy for America, Credo Action, and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee (PCCC) raised $75,000 for a 60-second spot that will air on MSNBC, CNN and a local station in Pelosi's home district of San Francisco. The ad challenges assertions she made last week that the public option does not have enough support from Democratic lawmakers in the Senate to be included as one of the amendments in the reconciliation bill.

On the Web site whipcongress.com, the groups, in supporting calculations that the measure has enough votes to pass the Senate, list the names of Democratic senators who have either signed a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid supporting the public option, or have made statements saying they would back it or would "likely" cast an "aye" vote if it were introduced as part of the final package of legislative fixes.

Majority leader will use reconcilliation to pass health bill

t r u t h o u t has this report about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to use the budget reconcilliation process to pass a health care bill through the Senate. This process allows the Democrats to pass a bill with a 51-vote majority, rather than needing to garner 60 votes to overcome a threatened Republican filibuster. Is this good news or bad news? Commentator Robert Kuttner points out that as long as we have a for-profit healthcare system, costs are likely to continue spiraling out of control, and substantial numbers of people will lack useful coverage. I find myself deeply ambivalent over the question of whether President Obama's bill is better than nothing. It doesn't seem to be clear at this point whether the Senate will even pass a bill with any form of public option. It is oddly comforrting, in the grip of this ambivalence, that my opinions on this subject will have no effect whatsoever on the far-right congressional delegation of my home state, Oklahoma.

There is one thing that I am quite clear about. The various young male progressives out on the 'net who call for the Democrats to "grow a pair of balls" and pass meaningful health care reform are voicing a hope that is patently stupid  The possession of testicles does not qualify someone to help make wise and courageous public policy. We have a genteel sufficiency of testicles in Congress already, thank you very much.

Sebelius criticizes California firm's health insurance hikes, California Senate passes single-payer bill

T r u t h o u t has the details.

Hope for healthcare reform?

Janinsanfran at Can it happen here? has an interesting analysis of Organizing for America's latest effort to revitalize a health care reform bill.

Nothing the matter with Massachusetts?

Robert Scheer at Truthdig argues that the reason that Massachusetts voters elected a Republican senator who vowed to opposed President Obama's health care reform plan is because they have experience with a similar plan in their own state -- and it stinks.

Instead of blindly following the failed Massachusetts model, Obama should have insisted on an extension of the Medicare program to all who are willing to pay for it. He squandered the opportunity to bring about meaningful health care change that the public would have supported had it been kept simple and just. Instead, Obama gave away the store to medical profiteers. They, in turn, hopelessly muddied the waters with well-funded scare advertising tactics that principled leadership on Obama’s part could have thwarted.

Six scenarios in search of an election result

Generally, I think it is better to avoid the old game of "what if?" but John Nichols at thenation.com has created an interesting and useful analysis with Six Scenarios for the Massachusetts Vote and After.

New York rep posts healthcare poll

New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner has an online poll asking whether he should oppose the final health insurance reform bill "unless it represents a genuine improvement on the Senate Bill."

Senate passes health insurance bill, capitalists cheer, patients mourn, progressive House Democrats fight back

As you've probably heard already, the US Senate passed its version of the health insurance reform bill today. The Associated Press (courtesy of msnbc.com) calls it an historic occasion:

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats passed a landmark health care bill in a climactic Christmas Eve vote that could define President Barack Obama's legacy and usher in near-universal medical coverage for the first time in the country's history.

The 60-39 vote on a cold winter morning capped months of arduous negotiations and 24 days of floor debate. It also followed a succession of failures by past congresses to get to this point. Vice President Joe Biden presided as 58 Democrats and two independents voted "yes." Republicans unanimously voted "no."

The Motley Fool site, which offers stock investing advice, is glad to be "closer to capping off the long process that's weighed on health-care stocks this year. If it's made into law, the $871 billion bill will represent the largest expansion of health-care coverage since the creation of Medicare in 1965." Commentator Brian Orelli notes that

Someone has to pay for this thing, and it's been interesting to see who has the most clout in Washington. Pharmaceutical companies negotiated early. Medical-device companies like Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) and Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) looked like they were going to get a big hit, but managed to whittle down their tax considerably. And cosmetic treatments like wrinkle removers and breast implants made by Allergan and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) managed to get their proposed tax removed altogether. Tanning salons (and their customers) apparently don't have that great of a lobby; they've been slapped with a 10% tax, which will raise an estimated $2.7 billion over the next 10 years.

The only question now is whether the companies will end up being able to pass the costs along to consumers. Will investors have to pay for health-care reform with their portfolios or their pocketbooks?

Orelli doesn't know (or doesn't care) that there are vast numbers of us out here without stock portfolios who need access to health care. For us, the news is not very good. At CommonDreams.org, Donna Smith describes the Senate Bill as "a lump of Christmas coal all polished up with sparkling rhetoric. " She knows what she's talking about from personal experience.

I went broke while carrying health insurance, a disability insurance policy and a small healthcare savings account. And if I get sick under this mess of a plan, it will happen to me again. Little has changed except that millions more of my fellow citizens will join my ranks.

Smith describes exactly how this can happen, and her entire post is well worth reading.

Meanwhile, progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives are pushing back against the watered-down Senate bill, which lacks a public option. New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter says that the Senate bill is so fatally flawed that it could not be successfully reconciled with the House bill passed earlier this fall. She calls for the defeat of health care legislation in its current form. And California Reps. Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey have mounted what politico.com calls "a full-throated defense of the public option."

Will healthcare bill destroy the Right?

Nathan Newman at TPMCafe thinks that it will. It's an interesting post. Newman says that

You have some bloggers treating the health care bill as a sell-out to the rightwing and many on the Right treating it as the slipperly slope to socialism. While the latter is probably a bit far, I actually side more with the political analysis of the right; while progressives didn't get as much as they wanted, they got enough to put in place a dynamic that will be almost impossible for the right to reverse. The working middle class will have a clear monetary stake in federal spending each year and participation in the broader welfare state. That reality will profoundly change both political rhetoric and budgetary politics in ways in which the modern conservative movement can not survive.

There will be a few stormy years to come but in two decades, this week's votes in the Senate I predict will come to be seen as a turning point in American history and the cementing of progressive power for decades to come.

I hope that Newman is right about this, but it might merely mean that the Right and the Republican party rely more on anti-feminist, anti-gay social conservatism in order to keep power.

Health care live chat tonight @ six

Congressman Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who is a proponent of a strong public option, is conducting a live chat on health care reform tonight at seven eastern time (which would be six o'clock out here in Oklahoma).

Rep. Weiner says:

There's a lot to discuss. Some have said that progressives shouldn't support the current Senate proposal. Without the public option, they say, there's not enough to provide genuine competition to insurers.

Others have said that we should focus our energies on how to improve whatever emerges from the Senate. Once the Senate passes a bill, it will go to a conference committee to be reconciled with the House bill. That process could be a real opportunity to move the Senate bill closer to the one we passed in the House.

Looks interesting. If I weren't working tonight, I would log in and check it out.

Bad news from DC, good news from Oklahoma

Blogger Robin Marty tells all in a reproductive rights news roundup at RHRealityCheck.org. An Oklahoma law that would require women seeking abortions to answer more than 30 invasive questions has been blocked again for the time being. Marty also has more information on the abortion compromise that gained the vote of conservative Democrat Ben Nelson for the health insurance reform bill. This is the compromise that allowed Democrats to win a key procedural vote at one o'clock this morning, virtually guaranteeing passage of the Senate bill by Christmas Eve.

Feminists condemn Senate health bill compromise

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently has succeeded in cobbling together a filibuster-proof health insurance bill that can pass the Senate before Christmas. In the process, he has made a bill of questionable benefit even worse, according to John Nichols at thenation.com. Among the changes weakening the bill were concessions to right-wing Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To get Nelson's vote, Reid had to agree to restrict the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created exchanges.

"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," Nelson said of the anti-choice language. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."

The question now is whether supporters of abortion rights can -- or should -- back a bill that not only disrespects but disregards a woman's right to choose.

While President Obama made a bizarre statement Saturday about how he was "pleased that recently added amendments have made this landmark bill even stronger," the co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus signaled deep disappointment with the Senate compromise.

The compromise has also angered mainstream feminist organizations that have supported the health insurance reform bill up until now. Groups opposing the compromise include the National Partnership for Women and Families, EMILY's List, and NARAL. The National Organization for Women has gone so far as to oppose passage of the health insurance bill if the anti-choice amendment remains.

Over at RH Reality Check, blogger Rebecca Sive is also calling for defeat of the health insurance bill in its current form:

If the bottom line in all this is that we won't be getting healthcare reform, but we might be getting healthcare finance reform, is it too much to ask that the Democratic women members of the House and Senate insist on eliminating any kind of two-tiered system for paying for abortions-one for the rich and one for the poor. Is it too much to ask that they say to do otherwise isn't reform of any kind; it's the same bad business as usual, and we won't have it?

I can understand someone who believes abortion is wrong and must be prohibited under all circumstances; hence, my respect for Senator Nelson. What I don't understand is women who are complicit in the use of government power to deny their poorer sisters access to the healthcare they, the richer sisters, get. This looks like what we used to call in the 70s "identifying with the oppressor." It's still a very bad idea.

So, here's this week's talking point for the Democratic women Senators:

Have the courage of your convictions: Stand-up, and say what Ben Nelson said: "There isn't any real way to move away from your principle on abortion, and we won't."

Update: Thanks to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for linking to this explanation by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on how the latest anti-choice compromise is supposed to work:

The basic compromise is that states can impose the Stupak rules on their own exchanges, but the rules will not be imposed by the federal legislation. I've been assured that at least one plan in each state will cover abortion, but I'm still trying to get clarification on how that works (my hazy understanding is that at least one of national non-profit plans, and probably more, will include abortion coverage, and they'll be offered in all states).