Stupak amendment plants poison pill in House Healthcare Bill

A seemingly innocuous last-minute amendment to the House Health Care Reform bill has added a poison pill to an already horribly flawed bill. For shame! The amendment seems to just reiterate the current ban on federal funding for abortion, and hence looks benign and probably redundant. But note that it enjoins any payment for abortion services by any company which receives federal funds, and the health care reform bill gives funds to all health insurance companies in the form of subsidies for the poor and uninsured. That means that today your Aetna or Blue-Cross policy will pay for an early term elective abortion, but after the law goes into effect it will not! To heck with Roe v Wade and those unreliable Supreme Court justices-- this law just takes a quick detour around them, and takes away a right that's been recognized for almost forty years.

Folks, this is an outrage, and it sets back the clock on choice. This is misogynist and anti-poor, because it affects only women, and it affects only those who can't pay up-front, in cash, for abortion services, even if they have otherwise excellent health coverage which pays for those services today!

The House healthcare reform bill-- already a tortured mess of waffling, accommodating wildly diverse special interests, and an unprecedented jumbo platter of glistening roast pork for the current for-profit health insurers-- has, by attaching this amendment, stopped being a set of acceptable half measures toward a positive goal and has instead become a worse state of affairs than we already have. I intend to call each of my representatives in Washington and let them know this bill should be put out of its misery immediately and a new bill should be brought forward-- one that is fair and effective, doesn't just hand the health insurance industry hundreds of billions of dollars in new business, and makes the status quo worse. Americans fought long and hard for abortion choice. Reinstating the bad old days by this back door trick must not be allowed. Hand the bill back to Bart Stupak, or even better shove it up his backside.