Liberals furious over a last-minute deal that secured passage of healthcare legislation in the House by restricting abortion coverage threatened Monday to derail the massive overhaul bill.

At least 40 House members pledged to reject the final bill if the abortion provision survives in the Senate and the conference that joins the Senate and House versions into a single piece of legislation.

At issue are the insurance policies offered in a new “exchange,” or marketplace, where many people would use federal subsidies to buy coverage.

The House measure bars any insurance policy from covering abortions if it was purchased with a federal subsidy.

Read it all.

First, let there be no more wrangling about the facts. The Bill as proposed by Nancy Pelosi – an unfaithful Catholic who should be ashamed and strongly opposed in her next campaign while we all pray for her return to the truth – promoted the intrinsic evil of abortion. It would have funded the feticide of our first neighbors in the womb. End of discussion. All of those folks who tried to argue that all of us who sounded the alarm over this evil were wrong have been exposed as frauds. The phony compromises and fake amendments were a subterfuge.

Before the determined and courageous efforts of Congressman Bart Stupak, a Pro-Life Catholic Democrat whose name along with Republican Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania of the 16th District of Pennsylvania is on the now historic amendment, the legislation would have funded more abortions with tax dollars. The “Health Care Reform” legislation which passed last night as HR 3962 – by a vote in the House of Representatives by a vote of 220 ”“ 215 – would have had a lethal effect, resulting in the intentional killing of potentially millions more of our first neighbors. Thank God for the courage and perseverance of faithful Catholic Democrat Bart Stupak!

The Stupak/Pitts Amendment was strongly supported by the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops who worked with admirable persistence and courageous clarity in order to force its passage. It actually was passed earlier in the evening by an historic vote of 240 to 194.Some cowardly members did not vote at all.

Read it all.

But its narrow passage in the House, where the Democrats have a large majority, underscores the difficulties ahead. Senate Democrats are struggling to agree on how to pay for the overhaul and whether to create a new public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, as the House did. Friction over how the bill treats abortion, which almost derailed the House vote, is likely to divide the Senate too.

“If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) said on Fox News Sunday.

With the passage of the House bill, Congress moved closer than ever to providing Americans with near-universal health insurance — a goal that has eluded many presidents since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.

Read it all.

MS. [Rachel] MADDOW: So to the extent that this is going to actually cut the deficit, to the extent that this is designed to bring health costs down, we’ve got to do something. And I think people who vote against it are going to regret it.

MR. [E.J.] DIONNE: And 98 percent of small businesses are exempt from the taxes in this bill. This is a millionaire’s tax, basically, the biggest tax in this bill. And that the other thing is there are a lot of benefits in this bill that kick in right away. There’s a fund for people who have pre-existing conditions to get coverage right away. There are a lot of other provisions; no more recisions, so you can’t discover that, “Gee, I’m not covered after all.” They were smart enough to put a lot of things that kick in as soon as the bill is passed.

MR. [David] BROOKS: Rachel’s right that doing nothing is not fiscally responsible. But doing something that adds onto our current system without fundamentally changing our current system is fiscally insane. The idea that this is paid for is a political mirage. That tax surcharge on millionaires, that’s dead, that’s going nowhere in the Senate. The idea that we’re going to cut $400 or $500 billion in waste, fraud and abuse from Medicare, that’s historically unsupportable. We will never make those cuts, we’re never going to pull the plug on granny, all this stuff. It–most healthcare experts think that this fundamentally does not change the problem with healthcare system, which is the fee-for-service system which has been driving up costs for decade after decade.

Caught this on the way home from morning worship–read or watch it all.

The House of Representatives passed a sweeping health care bill Saturday night with a tight vote of 220-215, making it the biggest expansion of health care coverage since Medicare was created more than 40 years ago.

The Affordable Health Care for America Act, or H.R. 3962, restricts insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition or charging higher premiums based on gender or medical history. It also provides federal subsidies to those who cannot afford it and guarantees coverage for 96 percent of Americans, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

However, turning the bill into law remains uncertain.

Read it all.

Despite White House efforts to discount the importance of the loss of the only two governorships on the off-year ballot, especially in New Jersey, where Obama had campaigned heavily for embattled Gov. Jon Corzine, the implications were clear to other Democrats.

Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, a leader of the moderate-conservative “Blue Dogs,” called the result “a wake-up call for Congress. A tidal wave could be coming.”

His fellow Tennessean, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, said that Obama “retains his personal popularity, but his policies, and those pushed by the congressional Democrats, are scaring the daylights out of people.”

Democratic pollster Peter Hart, in a memo to his clients, warned of the possible consequences of “the disappointment and disgust the American public feels toward Washington. It is as strongly negative as the period of 1979-80 and 1973-74.” Both those cycles saw wholesale changes in Congress, the Democrats benefiting in the latter and the Republicans in the former.

Read it all.

What does all of this mean?

Populism is on the rise and conservatism is gaining steam, perhaps at its own expense. (If Hoffman loses in New York, it almost ensures that the Northeast will be almost exclusively Democrat-blue territory).

A sour mood exists among people, with close-to-10-percent unemployment, decreasing health-care benefits and rising taxes – and a view that the well-heeled get bailed-out but John and Joan Q. Citizen do not.

Because our political system was designed to be slow and laborious and to do little, that sour mood grows rather than dissipates.

These political conditions have made the difficult course of lawmaking become nearly impossible, and governing has become highly averse to coherent action.

Read it all.

Yet this might just be where the president’s luck runs out. For precisely the power of his own party in Congress could prove to be a source of weakness rather than strength. On my most recent visit to Washington, I could not help being struck by the shift that has occurred from the imperial presidency of the Bush era to something like parliamentary government under Mr Obama. This president proposes; Congress disposes. It was Congress that wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. It is Congress that will ensure the healthcare bill falls well short of being self-financing. Mr Obama recently snapped at an unnamed “Blue Dog” (conservative-leaning) House Democrat: “You’re going to destroy my presidency.” He could be right.

According to the polls, voters disapprove of Congress by 61 per cent to 31 per cent. What’s more, the two parties would be neck and neck if the midterm elections were held today. The reason is clear. While the stimulus package had a sound macroeconomic rationale, the growing structural imbalance between federal revenue and spending scares the hell out of voters. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 59 per cent of Americans think government spending is excessive. Mr Obama receives his lowest approval ratings for his handling of the federal budget deficit.

—Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School

With the Senate Finance Committee set to approve its health care bill this week, Democrats are tantalizingly close to bringing legislation that would make sweeping changes in the nation’s health care system to the floor of both houses of Congress.

Party leaders still face immense political and policy challenges as they combine rival proposals ”” two bills in the Senate and three in the House. But the broad contours of the legislation are in place: millions of uninsured Americans would get subsidized health benefits, and the government would move to slow the growth of health spending.

Senior Democrats said they were increasingly confident that a bill would pass this year. “I am Scandinavian, and we don’t like to overstate anything,” said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and an architect of the Finance Committee bill. “But I have a solid feeling about the direction of events.”

Read it all.

Perhaps no other issue Congress deals with touches every American as intimately as health care. Yet a new poll by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that, so far, the public feels profoundly shut out of the current health overhaul debate.

“Most people don’t feel that they personally have a voice in this debate,” said Mollyann Brodie, director of public opinion and survey research for the Kaiser Family Foundation. “In fact, 71 percent told us that Congress was paying too little attention to what people like them were saying.”

Nancy Turtenwald is one of those people. The tourist from Milwaukee was walking around the sparkling new visitor center at the U.S. Capitol Tuesday. She was quick to agree with poll findings that the lawmakers debating the massive health overhaul bill just a few blocks away weren’t much interested in problems like hers.

“I don’t think they are people like us, you know?” she said. She thinks Congressional lawmakers know very little about the daily lives of the average American ”” and the health care costs they face. “How often do they go and buy gas and bread and stuff to see what it’s really like for the people like us?”

Read or listen to it all.

As if it were not complicated enough, the debate over health care in Congress is becoming a battlefield in the fight over abortion.

Abortion opponents in both the House and the Senate are seeking to block the millions of middle- and lower-income people who might receive federal insurance subsidies to help them buy health coverage from using the money on plans that cover abortion. And the abortion opponents are getting enough support from moderate Democrats that both sides say the outcome is too close to call. Opponents of abortion cite as precedent a 30-year-old ban on the use of taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions.

Abortion-rights supporters say such a restriction would all but eliminate from the marketplace private plans that cover the procedure, pushing women who have such coverage to give it up. Nearly half of those with employer-sponsored health plans now have policies that cover abortion, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The question looms as a test of President Obama’s campaign pledge to support abortion rights but seek middle ground with those who do not. Mr. Obama has promised for months that the health care overhaul would not provide federal money to pay for elective abortions, but White House officials have declined to spell out what he means.

Read it all.

Nearly a week after Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) interrupted President Obama’s speech on health care, Congress passed a resolution admonishing him. He’s the first member in the history of Congress to be formally chastised in a resolution for such actions.

At first, Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t seem too interested in going after him for shouting “You lie!” when the president insisted that health care subsidies would not be available to illegal immigrants under the health care overhaul bill.

“As far as I’m concerned, the episode was unfortunate, and Mr. Wilson has apologized. It’s time for us to talk about health care and not Mr. Wilson,” Pelosi said.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The president’s contention was questionable.

But Rep. Wilson’s rash rudeness was a disgrace for him, an embarrassment for South Carolina and a particularly appalling breach of protocol by a native of Charleston, a bastion of gentility. Fellow federal lawmakers swiftly responded with bipartisan condemnation….

And we express sincere disappointment at seeing Joe Wilson descending to such deplorably bitter depths in a sorry spectacle that’s a sign of our increasingly acrimonious times.

Read the whole thing.

“God of grace and God of glory,” prayed the Rev. Cynthia Hale during a national conference call Aug. 19 on health care reform, “É We believe that it is your will that every man, woman, boy and girl receive quality health care in America.”

On that point, no religious leader would contest Hale, pastor at Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga., who offered the prayer at the kickoff of an effort by the faith community to mobilize religious support for the ideals of health care reform favored by President Obama.

From the pulpits and through public statements, religious leaders have been weighing in on various elements of what they say is a crucial moral issue. Catholic bishops in New Jersey, in letters to the state’s members of Congress, have lobbied against possible inclusion of abortion coverage in any federal health care plan, a possibility Obama dismissed in his prime-time speech Wednesday. The Episcopal Church USA passed a resolution favoring a single-payer system, while some Catholic bishops in the Midwest have publicly opposed any massive government effort.

Read it all.

Some 150 years ago, a congressman from South Carolina, angered by a speech on slavery, entered the Senate chamber and beat a senator from Massachusetts into unconsciousness with a metal-topped wooden cane.

Years earlier on the House floor, a representative from Vermont attacked a colleague from Connecticut — also with a cane — only to be attacked himself with a pair of fireplace tongs.

And then there was the 1838 pistol duel in which William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed fellow Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine over words spoken on the House floor. (Graves wasn’t even expelled.)

Given those breaches of congressional protocol, it would seem that a mere shout of “You lie!” from a 21st-century South Carolina congressman would be small potatoes. Especially when compared with a global tradition of brawls, scuffles, hurled insults (sometimes fruit too) and other mayhem in legislatures around the world.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

President Barack Obama’s address to Congress on healthcare reform was short on specifics and long on ideas he and his advisers had already floated this year.

The historic speech left some liberals wanting more details and conservatives emboldened to torpedo the president’s top domestic priority.

The big question of the night was how Obama was going to address the public health insurance option, but he largely repeated what he has said for weeks: He supports it, but will sign a bill that does not have it.

Read it all, and, yes, Joe Wilson should apologize–that was uncalled for.

While some were moved to tears by the president’s soaring rhetoric, others were moved not at all. Where some saw a new clarity, others saw more vagueness. And while some praised him for reaching out to Republicans, there were those who felt he was overreaching in some ways and not reaching far enough in others.

Americans listened intently to President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech on health care reform Wednesday night, and not surprisingly, their reviews varied. Few said they had changed their minds.

Matt Petrovick set his treadmill at a leisurely 2.8 mph pace so he could pay full attention to the television on the wall in front of him. He’s not sure the president’s words boosted his heart rate, but the speech certainly got him going.

Read it all.

President Obama’s spirited defense Wednesday night of his broad healthcare goals avoided making concrete commitments on some of the most contentious issues, reflecting a guiding principle of his legislative strategy: to put off the most controversial decisions until the very last moment.

It is a strategy born of political reality. At this stage of the process, when neither the House nor the Senate has even begun a floor debate, lining up firmly on one side or the other of the hot-button issues invites gridlock or even defeat.

And so, though some liberal Democrats have threatened to revolt if Obama does not insist on a new government insurance option — the so-called public plan — the president told the joint session of Congress that he would consider other approaches to making coverage affordable for the uninsured.

“The public plan is only a means to that end,” he said, “and we should be open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.”

Read it all.

I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge ”“ year after year, decade after decade ”“ has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can’t get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can’t afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.

Read it all.

The Very Rev. George L. W. Werner of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh will lead the United States House of Representatives in prayer when it convenes Thursday morning, September 10, at 10:00 a.m.

“Strengthen our vision and courage to do right,” his prayer says, in part.

No stranger to the national spotlight, Werner served two terms as President of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church and is currently a trustee of the Church Pension Board. He is also Dean Emeritus of Trinity Cathedral in Pittsburgh. But Thursday’s honor is a first for him.

Read it all.

After a nearly 40-day recess that was anything but restful, House Democrats are returning to work Tuesday still unsettled over pending health-care legislation and sure only that the people have had their say.

They are in almost the exact position they were in when they left the Capitol in late July. Conservatives are still leery of supporting a government-funded, or public, insurance option. Freshman lawmakers from suburban districts remain fearful of increasing taxes for their wealthy constituents to pay for the new measure and await alternatives from moderate Senate Democrats. And progressives, who are demanding the most far-reaching reform since the Great Depression, are still threatening to bring down the legislation if it does not contain a robust version of the public option.

In the lead-up to President Obama’s critical Wednesday night address to a joint session of Congress, interviews with a cross section of about 15 House Democrats and half a dozen aides show that there is still overwhelming support for some overhaul of the health-care system. But the caucus remains deeply divided over the details of the more than 1,000-page measure and now faces a public that is more skeptical than when House committees began drafting the plan two months ago.

“We knew a lot of work still needed to be done, so no, not a lot has changed,” said Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 52 Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts.

Read it all.

Shuler: The things I’d really like to see, and I think this is kind of throughout the U.S., are accessibility, quality of care and affordability. One of the things I would really like to ensure is that people aren’t dropped from the system, or a pre-existing condition doesn’t (exclude them from) coverage.

I think that a bill, whether it’s crafted by our office or a working relationship with other members of Congress, what I’d really like to see is for it to implement the Asheville Project that’s been so successful.

(In 1997, the city of Asheville implemented the Asheville Project, a wellness program that encourages employees to regularly visit a doctor and emphasizes disease prevention. The program, Shuler said, resulted in a 50 percent decrease in absenteeism while saving participants $600-800 a year and the city $1,200 per person per year.)….

AC-T: You basically want to go back to scratch and start over (with reform)?

Shuler: I’ve spoken to House leadership, and I feel that’s the best way for us to proceed forward. I do believe that we need to be sure that we get people access to quality health care, affordability and a quality outcome. The way we have to do that is starting over.

Read it all.

With so much evidence of wasteful and even harmful treatment, shouldn’t we instantly cut some of the money spent on exorbitant intensive-care medicine for dying, elderly people and redirect it to pediatricians and obstetricians offering preventive care for children and mothers? Sadly, we are very far from this goal. A cynic would argue that this can’t happen because children can’t vote (even if their parents can), whereas members of AARP and the American Medical Association not only vote but can also hire lobbyists to keep the money flowing.

One thing’s for sure: Our health care system has failed. Generational spending wars loom on the horizon. Rationing of health care is imminent. But given the political inertia, we could soon find ourselves in a triage situation in which there is no time or money to create medical-review boards to ponder cost-containment issues or rationing schemes. We’ll be forced to implement quick-and-dirty rules based on something simple, sensible and easily verifiable. Like age. As in: No federal funds to be spent on intensive-care medicine for anyone over 85.

I am not, of course, talking about euthanasia. I’m just wondering why the nation continues incurring enormous debt to pay for bypass surgery and titanium-knee replacements for octogenarians and nonagenarians, when for just a small fraction of those costs we could provide children with preventive health care and nutrition. Eight million children have no health insurance, but their parents pay 3 percent of their salaries to Medicare to make sure that seniors get the very best money can buy in prescription drugs for everything from restless leg syndrome to erectile dysfunction, scooters and end-of-life intensive care.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said providing citizens with the option of government-run insurance isn’t essential to the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of U.S. health care.

“What’s important is choice and competition,” Sebelius said today on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The public option itself “is not the essential element.”

Asked if a cooperative plan is a possible replacement, Sebelius said she didn’t know what alternatives Congress would settle on among competing versions of the health legislation now under consideration. The Senate Finance Committee is discussing cooperatives, or networks of health-insurance plans owned by their customers, that would get started with government funds.

Read it all.

What is lamentable is the lack of politeness that has invaded some of these town hall meetings. The problem, apart from the threat of violence inherent in the intensity of expression and the fact that some people have come to meeting places armed, is the fact that loud, boorish speech is an enemy of the civil discourse that a serious subject like health care deserves.

Some of what is being said is a reflection of the public’s general discontent in a range of painful areas, most of which is fully understandable. There is unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, credit-card default and bankers enriched by bailouts. People are concerned about the cost of the proposed health-care programs, fearing they could increase the ballooning national debt, to be paid by higher taxes or increased debt passed along to descendants. They don’t like the Iraq war dragging on or the rising cost in lives and money of the Afghanistan war. They also do not like the fact that the cost of health care continues to rise.

Congress is a target of people’s wrath in part because of its own misdeeds….

Read it all.

The bitter divisions over an overhaul of the health care system have exploded at town-hall-style meetings over the last few days as members of Congress have been shouted down, hanged in effigy and taunted by crowds. In several cities, noisy demonstrations have led to fistfights, arrests and hospitalizations.

Democrats have said the protesters are being organized by conservative lobbying groups like FreedomWorks. Republicans respond that the protests are an organic response to the Obama administration’s health care restructuring proposals.

There is no dispute, however, that most of the shouting and mocking is from opponents of those plans. Many of those opponents have been encouraged to attend by conservative commentators and Web sites.

Read it all.

No matter which side of the issue members come down on, they will find that the people who put them in office remain deeply confused about what the still-being-written overhaul might bring.

And most Americans are equally suspicious of ”” and confused by ”” claims being made by both supporters and opponents of President Obama’s most ambitious domestic initiative.

With Congress still struggling to fashion legislation and Obama letting the details take shape on Capitol Hill while he sells its broader parameters during appearances that include town hall meetings, most outside Washington have no idea what the overhaul will look like, what it will cost and how it could affect them personally, says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com.

“Much of this story has been a big, inside-Washington debate about cost and bending the cost curve,” he says. “It’s a remote, technical discussion.”

Read it all.

U.S. House Democratic leaders, struggling to reach an accord with party dissidents on health care, said they’re likely to miss President Barack Obama’s August deadline for legislation overhauling the medical system.

“It doesn’t look like it to me,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said in an interview. “I really hoped that we could have gotten a bill out of here by now,” he said, adding that he has a “heavy political heart.”

Obama, who has made revamping health care the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, had urged the House and Senate to each pass versions of the bill before their monthlong August recess so negotiations on a compromise could begin when they return. He’s seeking to provide health coverage to tens of millions of Americans who lack it and curb the soaring cost of care.

Read it all.

The common wisdom the past week has been that whatever challenges health care faces, the president will at least get something because he has a Democratic House and Senate and they’re not going to let their guy die. He’ll get this or that, maybe not a new nationalized system but some things, and he’ll be able to declare some degree of victory.

And this makes sense. But after the news conference, I found myself wondering if he’d get anything.

I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this:

Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees or fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health-care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.”

The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t “bend the curve,” or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected. Back then the mood was “change is for the good.” But that altered as the full implications of the financial crash seeped in.

Read it all.

Only five months after Inauguration Day, the focus of Washington’s economic and domestic policy is already shifting. This reflects the emergence of much larger budget deficits than anyone expected. Indeed, federal deficits may average a stunning $1 trillion annually over the next 10 years. This worsened outlook is stirring unease on Main Street and beginning to reorder priorities for President Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership. By 2010, reducing the deficit will become their primary focus.

Why has the deficit outlook changed? Two main reasons: The burst of spending in recent years and the growing likelihood of a weak economic recovery. The latter would mean considerably lower federal revenues, the compiling of more interest on our growing debt, and thus higher deficits. Yes, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors is still forecasting a traditional cyclical recovery — i.e., real growth of 3.2% next year and 4% in 2011. But the latest data suggests that we’re on a much slower path. Probably along the lines of the most recent Goldman Sachs and International Monetary Fund forecasts, whose growth rates average about 2% for 2010-2011.

A speedy recovery is highly unlikely given the financial condition of American households, whose spending represents 70% of GDP.

Read it all.