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.
I don’t think 40 votes in the House are enough by themselves to derail the vote, assuming those 40 already voted against it last week.
Let’s hope the middle holds and is able to pass something meaningful without the bill getting killed by the far left OR the far right.
Let’s rather hope the snake eats its tail and this monstrosity of a bill dies before delivery.
The whole idea is bad. If the trial lawyer lobby could be cut out, 80% of the problem goes away. If legal action for bad result could be stopped, rates would go way down, and only a few of the very poor would be without coverage. Those could be taken care of other ways.
I tend to agree with ScottW+ (#3). Personally, I think the ancient Romans had the right idea about civil lawsuits. They made it so that if you sued someone and lost, then you had to pay the other party the amount you had sued them for. It prevented the flood of frivolous lawsuits that has become such a curse in American life.
Hmmm. Perhaps we could do even more to reign in the greed of the ambulance-chasing lawyer set. Pass a law that when someone sues a doctor and loses, then the lawyer as well as the client is liable for the amount they sued the doc. That ought to help.
David Handy+
Good advice from a good Dr. — “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
There is very little chance of anything meaningful getting through congress. The Senate still has 40 Republicans who are determined to block any reform at all in order to deny Zero a political victory. That means that whatever Harry Reid proposes needs to get the support of every single Democrat plus the two independent senators (one of whom is self professed socialist and the other is center right in his politics).
There are more than a few Democratic Senators who are quite conservative (by their standards) and who will not vote for anything with any kind of direct or indirect subsidies for abortion or any kind of public insurance option at all. The competing ideological interests in the Democratic caucus are so great that I see no way for any meaningful reform to advance. They may pass some hopelessly eviscerated bill and label it reform. But it will be meaningless or worse… another giveaway to the insurance industry.
The bottom line is that the insurance lobby and their representatives in Congress (the GOP) are on the brink of one of the greatest victories in modern political history. Health rationing on the basis of ability to pay and the size of one’s bank account will continue.
RE: “There is very little chance of anything meaningful getting through congress.”
I pray God that is true as anything “meaningful” will be a perfectly ghastly bloated collectivist system.
We’ll need to try again when there are folks who rwant a real, competitive free market system — then some actually *positive* “meaningful” reforms can take place.