Posts Tagged ‘Obama’

In case you missed the bipartisan Health Care Reform Summit yesterday, coverage of the six hour event made it seem that the Summit lived down to low expectations. You have to respect President Obama for trying and at least the conversation was civil. Still, it’s pretty difficult to see room for much progress to be made. This lack of progress has never been more evident than in women’s access to reproductive health care under the proposed legislation.

We recently learned that the President has joined Congress (including Congressional allies) in putting Women’s Health at stake in the name of Health Care Reform. President Obama’s Health Care Reform proposal accepts the Nelson Check Provision which contains extremely restrictive language around abortion from the Senate version of the bill which passed that chamber back in December.

See our post on the Nelson Provision for the details but, in a nutshell, the “Nelson Abortion Check Provision” effectively creates an abortion rider system where all individuals who purchase their health care coverage will be forced to write two premiums checks—one for their abortion coverage and one for everything else. This includes coverage of any abortion that is medically necessary.

Basically, if you want abortion coverage, the Nelson provision requires you pay for it separately from all other components of your health care coverage.

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With as much press as its gotten lately, I’m sure that most of you are probably familiar with the Stupak Amendment, the attachment to the House’s health care bill that would severely limit a woman’s right to choose.  If you want some of the history or explination, feel free to click here or here for Planned Parenthood’s analysis, or check out the links Mitchell posted in a previous blog entry.

I am, however, extraordinarily frustrated with the amendment, and not just because of the obvious reasons. Yes, it’s probably fairly clear that I am pro-choice and am, therefore, against limiting a woman’s access to abortion services, which this bill does in spades. And yes, I am concerned that insurance companies will use this amendment, should it become part of the final bill, to imposes restrictions on covering other services, including miscarriages (which, as this article points out, are referred to by medical professionals as “spontaneous abortions”).

But what bothers me most of all is that I just don’t understand why this is happening. As the president himself said, this is supposed to be a health care bill… not an abortion one. And the fact that this has suddenly morphed from a debate that needs to happen (i.e. the horrible state of health care in this country, especially compared to other comparable nations) into something strictly about reproductive rights. And here’s the thing: I don’t see any real way for reproductive rights to win this one, now that the bill has passed the House.

Should the Senate pass its health care bill (which is an “if,” especially if the threatened filibuster by Joe Lieberman actually occurs) and not include a version of the Studak Amendment (which is another “if,” as at least one senator is now talking about including some version of it), the bill has to go to a conference committee… and, at this point, various pro-choice Democrats in the House have said they will not vote for this bill out of conference committee if the language remains (which is probably about the same number of conservative Democrats who wouldn’t vote for the bill if the language is taken out).

In either event, of course, this would effectively kill any health care reform that may happen.

So it seems that we’ve been forced into making a horrible choice… we can either sacrifice the first real step this country has taken towards health care reform in many, many years (we can debate whether or not the change is far enough, but that’s an argument for another day)… or we can sacrifice accessibility to abortion services for women who might need it. And the people who are going to make this decision won’t be affected by it in the least. Why did the House Democratic leadership let this happen? And, other than his middle of the road statements in the above link, where is President Obama on all of this? Where is the advocate that we were promised? (A question I seem to be asking of Obama a lot lately.)

Whether this whole thing started because of personal beliefs or political grandstanding is up for debate. But it seems clear to me that there’s a very good possibility that it’s going to end in a way that’s going to be detrimental to a lot of women. And what are we going to have to show for it? Legislation that expands access to insurance, yet limits its services? That’s not the change that I want. And it’s not the change that we deserve.