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Medicare funds no abortions. Did the "Public Option" die to avoid a Hyde Amendment donnybrook?
by jollyroger 2/11/2012 - 4:28 am
Watching in stark amaze as the issue of contraception coverage (contraception!) proves fraught enough with controversy that it troubles, still in the 21st century, the councils of the great and mighty, I am moved to reconsider some of my prior analysis of the great health care reform fiasco.
I had diligently wrenched reality around to maintain through most of the excruciating process via which Prez (ostensibly) sold out both the policy and the politics of his professed position, a cheerful optimism grounded in the conviction that Prez was letting his opponents overreach so they would fall into his trap.
Yeah, right.
In my subsequent disappointment, once it became clear the the public option had been laid upon the chopping block before the ink was even dry on the big pharma checks, I figured that for some reason Prez simply couldn't get past the Ben and Joe clown posse.
Perhaps, having thought the matter through with more thoroughness than I, Prez realized that a public option health care plan would inevitably run afoul of the Hyde Amendment.
Unwilling to take on that pernicious restraint on Federal funding of an important women's health issue, Prez might well have decided that discretion in this was was the better part of valor.
Considering the kerfuffle over contraception, imagine the war over a federally funded health plan that covered abortions.
One thing about Medicare, no one comes seeking reimbursement for abortion services. The Hyde amendment's strictures are already deforming the delivery of health services in no less important an arena than Military medical facilities. Likewise Medicaid cannot spend federal funds on abortion services. We may safely say, whatever other motivations weighed in when Prez sold the public option down the river, he was probably not sorry to be ducking the shitstorm over abortion coverage.
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Obamneybush Plans for Afghanistan
Perceptive Dagblog readers know the difference between Obama, Romney and Bush:
Obama NYT today: .how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House....The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. “Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”...Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy...
Mitt Romney, Feb. 2012 : LAS VEGAS -- LAS VEGAS -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday night blasted President Obama and his administration for “putting in jeopardy” the nation’s military mission by signaling it hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013.
Appearing at a campaign rally here shortly after landing in Nevada, Romney said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that U.S. forces would transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan next year “makes absolutely no sense.”....George W. Bush, from May, 2003: BBC - "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide... Free nations will press on to victory,"
Bush Afghanistan strategy : Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”
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Marco Rubio as VP: Bilderberg conspiracy
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html#ixzz1vN5egowzRead the article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html -
Why science needs wonder
Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.
Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science. That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Hadron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.
[....]
Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Renaissance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.
Read the article at http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/05/why-science-needs-wonder -
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
... We’re trying to harness photosynthesis. A key part of photosynthesis is what happens when the sun goes down. Cells convert CO2 into sugar and fat molecules. And they store the fat to burn as energy to get them through the night ... We’re trying to coax our synthetic cells to ... store far more fat than they actually were designed to do, so that we can harness it all as an energy source and use it to create gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel straight from carbon dioxide and sunlight. This would shift the carbon equation so we’re recycling CO2 instead of taking new carbon out of the ground and creating still more CO2. But it has to be done on a massive scale to have any real impact on the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, let alone recovering from the atmosphere.
... We envision facilities the size of San Francisco. And 10 or 15 of those in this country. We need sunlight, seawater, and non-agricultural land, but you need a lot of photons to drive this. You need a lot of surface area of sunlight to do that. It’s a great use for Arizona. Lots of sunlight there.
... If we can’t get some key scientific breakthroughs within the next couple of years, it probably won’t happen in 10 years. So it’s something that’s really dependent on fundamental science. But we’re already able to do things that were once seen as impossible.
... I think the new anti-intellectualism that’s showing up in politics today is a symptom of our not discussing these issues enough. We don’t discuss how our society is now 100 percent dependent on science for its future. We need new scientific breakthroughs—sometimes to overcome the scientific breakthroughs of the past. A hundred years ago oil sounded like a great discovery. You could burn it and run engines off it. I don’t think anybody anticipated that it would actually change the atmosphere of our planet. Because of that we have to come up with new approaches. We just passed the 7 billion population mark. In 12 years, we’re going to reach 8 billion. If we let things run their natural course, we’ll have massive pandemics, people starving. Without science I don’t see much hope for humanity.Read the article at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/mf_venter/2/
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Perhaps the above sentiment is at the core of this matter?
Since I'm unaware of any women who have used alternate methods to conceive, other than participatory male partners, who seek abortions to terminate; and since historically it has been males whose first choice is usually abortion when wanting the by product of their actions to 'go away', it's interesting that men aren't as passionate, vocal and proactive about securing the right to choose this option as they are when participating in the initial act.
Labeling this as a female gender issue, which the vast majority do, is part of the problem and akin to abdication of the male's acknowledgment of their responsibility in creating the base need for this healthcare option. This is one healthcare issue, unlike ovarian and/or prostate cancer, when it truly is both gender's bodies, choices and actions that create the end result. Thus, men have the responsibility to stand up and speak out in support acknowledging without their participation, this wouldn't be an 'issue' only for women to 'vote as a block'.
And yes, I acknowledge that women need to do more to ensure men are included in their speaking out and standing up with them when championing this cause.
Oh, dear, Auntie.
You appear to have consorted with a better class of men than the norm.
Or, at any rate, you have retained high expectations.
The collapse of the patriarchy has, to date, seen very little few forward looking Gorbachavs, and lots more paranoid, flailing Stalins.
Obama figuring out the wall he would hit
I wouldn't want to back off of my fundamental position of disappointment w/him, but it's possible that I overlooked some of the cross currents that characterized the dynamics of that whole fiasco.
Good points, Jolly. Apparently one of the national health care lobbies issued a statement that Obama's solution was "troubling" and some suggested the reason might be that it -re-opened doors to the public option. I'm not sure of the logic behind it. But I don't think we've heard the last of it from the health care industry---this deal seemed too simple to me, left me a little suspect that some more shoes were going to drop.
this deal seemed too simple to me
Word. If insurers were all standing in line to underwrite contraception as a means of avoiding paying for deliveries (or abortions....) why did this whole brouhaha erupt in the first place?
Hypocrisy is a way of life for all politicians; hypocrisy is part and parcel of the definition of what it takes to become a politician.
But the gap between actual behavior and proposed values by the repubs is just remarkable; truly a remarkable thing to behold.
I just read that the individual who runs the corporation that publishes Penthouse sends monies to Mitt for chrissakes! I cannot wait till the repubs begin protesting masturbation as a form of birth control!
That men walking around in dresses should be allowed to tell women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies in this day and age is criminal to the extreme and the Vatican should be ashamed of itself!
And the Mormans? Are we really to believe that Mrs. Mitt never used some sort of birth control?
Oh well that is enough out of me!
the corporation that publishes Penthouse
From the originator of the "Hard R" man's mag to the namesake of the purveyor of "Hard R" in- room on demand entertainment. What's to wonder.
There was a post around here that I was looking for. It was cloudy but I swear I saw it here. Damn.
Check the desktop--there's better light.
The President didn't sell the public option down the river.
It needed 60 votes. He didn't have 60 votes because that would have required Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Baucus and Conrad..
End of story
I am given to understand, and will return with a cite, that he agreed in one of his early meets with the industry that the public option would be short circuited. Given the totally manufactured brouhaha over the Stupak amendment, even where the only additional funds would be under medicaid or as subsidies to private coverage, I imagine that a frank public option would have demanded confrontation with and repeal of the Hyde Amendment.
Not a bad idea, but more of a fight than we have learned to expect from Prez.
That said, it could have been brought in under reconciliation, particularly as it has obvious budgetary implications.
Prolly I got it from FDL, and there is some controversery around the actual analysis.
TPM says yes, there was a deal
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/t/r/truthseeker77/2010/0...
Of course. Since he didn't have the votes to pass the public option he agreed not to do something he couldn't do and in exchange got something else he wanted.
Wouldn't you?
Didn't have the 60 for cloture or the 50 for reconciliation? (You could be right on both points--there was no lock on reconciliation getting past 46 at first.)
For cloture.
I don't know enough about reconciliation to rebut the argument that it could have been used to create a public option.
There was a lot of discussion at the time and I know that Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein jointly took a position that it could have been used to a greater degree than it ultimately was. ( I've no doubt there were intellectually respectable counter arguments to Mann/Ornstein )
So while I could be right , equally I could be wrong . At a minimum I should stop being so adamant that Obama just didn't have the votes for the public option.Pity. I liked being adamant and now I'll have to go back to being wishy washy.
Advantage jollyroger.
"Reconciliation rules" which for practical purposes are most germane in their impact upon the order of debate: Bottom line, you only need a majority to end debate when a budget resolution has carried with it a "reconciliation instruction"
That said, the public option was a perfect candidate because the Byrd Rule (of reconciliation procedure) requires a clear budgetary impact of the items subsumed, and without the public option (as we have learned) there is no hope of containing medical costs or their budget busting impact.
One thing about Medicare, no one comes seeking reimbursement for abortion services
You bringing this point up to make another point got me wondering whether it is 100% accurate, as I know disabled under 65 are on Medicare (if they qualify for SSDI, rather than SSI-those on the latter usually are only eligible for Medicaid.) Of course, as always, a lot depends upon a discrete doctor knowing how to code procedures, i.e. dilation and curettage for dysmenorrhea or fibroids or whatever.
You're right--it crossed my mind after I had posted, and decided to adhere to the keep it simple stupid rule.
I am, on the broader issue, bemused by the alacrity with which we cater to the anti-choicers disinclination to pay for dead babies in utero, while giving no respect to my disinclination to pay for the incineration of babies ex utero
Where is the Kucinich Amendment, forbidding the expenditure of federal funds to blow up kids with drone strikes?
My first inclination with the Catholic bishops' lobbying re: "we don't want to be paying for birth control" came up was to think along similar lines, i.e.: "yeh well but how come you don't bitch about paying for war?" But then I thought again: doh dummie, they don't have to, the Church ain't paying those taxes.
In my Jesuit high school the Church's position was clear cut:freedom of religion meant that it should be allowed to promulgate its views. Naturally we asked
We got a clear answer.
I heard Catholic theologians say that the Vatican conference under John the 22nd in some way undercut this view. Undercut, possibly. But I believe that the US bishops essentially still hold it.
If you
you're probably not a US bishop.
the Church ain't paying those taxes
When you live in a Christian Theocracy, it's good to be a Christian Church.