You Must Do The Thinking For Both Of Us

You know, I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill.

 - President Barack Obama

And there you have it: an essential part of women's reproductive health is "separate but equal."  One could perhaps say this is a health care bill, not a men's prostate bill, or not a African-American sickle cell bill.  But instead it's framed by good centrists and even good liberals (both almost exclusively men) as something not associated with health or care.  Abortion's just another ingredient in the sausage, nothing major, nothing that 52% of the population benefits from and has been assailed since the Right found it had a good wedge issue.

A complaint from certain quarters is abortions are something that no man ever needs, so why should they pay into systems that cover them?  Indeed, why cover any women's health?  Birth control?  Pre-natal care?  Hysterectomies?  Mammograms? 

Flip it around, why should women pay into a system that covers prostate exams?  Testicular cancer treatment?  Viagra?

Health is health, not a buffet table from which you can pick and choose if you really care about health.  The point of coverage is to have as large a pool as possible kick in to handle all eventualities.  As it turns out, most of us won't need most of the treatments that are covered.  Yet we ante up so doctors' visits, hospitalizations and whatnot that we might--almost definitely at some time in our longer lives--need are not going to bankrupt us, or even force us to decide whether these flu-like symptoms can be dealt with by OTC medications and aren't larger health issues.

With that as backdrop, it is a bit shocking to see some people act so puzzled as to why women, or even penised-liberals, would be a bit put out by the Stupak Amendment, and even suggest that an HCR bill isn't worth supporting with restrictions on private abortion coverage.  As my friend MS Bellows wryly observes:

[It's a] poison pill that could cause the miscarriage of healthcare reform.

Clever pun, and he's right: it is a poison pill.  One that targets only the uterus.

[T]he bills in both houses contain the so-called "public option," a federally-run, citizen-owned, nonprofit health insurance carrier that -- if well-run and well-liked -- could grow into a larger, broadly accessible, cost-effective competitor to private carriers and perhaps even into the single-payer system that many progressives want to see. If nothing else, the public option should be a good political science experiment: a test to see whether the government can run a decent healthcare system (validating liberals and boosting hopes for an eventual single payer system) or will fail miserably as conservatives predict (effectively taking single payer off the table for a generation).

Um, buddy, we have government-run insurance (note, nobody is suggesting an NHS-like government delivery system) in the form of Medicaid (for the underprivileged), Medicare (for the eldery and infirm) and Tricare (for the veterans), which have been humming along for decades.  The experimentation has been done and proven to work.  So don't accept that Rightwing frame.

Stupak's poison pill will kill the public option -- unless Progressives react intelligently rather than emotionally...

Interesting couple of assumptions: people who are reacting negatively to a political, parliamentary slight-of-hand that sells out women's rights are not doing so intelligently or rationally.  In fact, they're acting like...overly emotional women!  Now about those hysterectomies...

Whether Bellows wants to admit it or is even aware of it, he's soaking in the Patriarchy.  Not his father's Oldsmobile, wherein women had to be visibly barefoot and pregnant, but just as insidious a brand, wherein he can debate the niceties of including one minor component of women's health for the little ladies, or run them over with the bus as he smiles and doffs his driver's cap and promises we'll try again later to defend the rights that have been chipped away since Roe v Wade.  Just go wait in that alley over there if you can't afford to buy an expensive rider.

More strategy:

If progressives boycott the House bill over Stupak, healthcare won't pass. But if they are willing to accept Stupak's amendment -- grudgingly, reluctantly, hatefully give in -- they may be able to trade that concession for the support of conservaDems like Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Dem-caucusing (for now) Joe Lieberman (I-VT) on the Republican filibuster of healthcare reform itself.

First, and more importantly, we Vermonters have the only real Independent in the Senate, Bernie Sanders.  Connecticut owns the buyer's remorse for Joe Lieberman of the Joe Lieberman Rocks! Party.

Second, Revoltin' Joe threatened to filibuster not because of abortion, but because in reality he caucuses with his corporate overlords and the GOP.  He wants to kill HCR, not "do it right."

And really, isn't that what the poison pill is all about? It's not coming from people who really are dedicated to HCR and just have a difference of opinion over women's control over their bodies.  It's not coming from the perspective of passing a decent bill and just tabling abortion for a later debate.  It's using a wedge issue to force another wedge.

Does that sell women down the river? Yes -- if Democrats stop there. But if the White House and Congressional Democrats are willing, for a change, to be tough and savvy, they could save both healthcare reform and abortion rights by using the budget reconciliation process to reinstate the abortion protections Stupak's amendment removed.

And if they're tough and savvy, they can come right out and say they'll do that.  Not just send signals they "won't rule out" using reconciliation, but indicate that's their strategy.  And if we're tough and savvy, we'll say unequivocally that we will accept nothing less than strong, meaningful HCR with women's rights protected.

Right now, liberals face a choice between healthcare reform that unacceptably restricts women's reproductive rights, or no healthcare at all. In essence, they're being asked to choose between mammograms for millions of women who currently can't get them, or insurance coverage of abortion.

Now who's being naive, Scott?  That's a political choice about a particular bill, but it's a false dichotomy that you're accepting.

We suggest, because we've considered things both tactically and strategically, that threatening to abandon the bullshit provision that caves in to rightwing extremism and mushy centrism is the best way to push the nut forward.  I appreciate incrementalism, and have often compared a public option, which could lead to single-payer, favorably to civil unions, which did lead to marriage equality in Vermont.  But our CU law didn't include a poison pill that banned gay sex, nor should HCR contain a Federal ban on poor women being able to obtain vital, legal health services just because it would be easier to pass something so the President and Congressional Democrats can claim victory.

Democrats need to be both savvy now, and gutsy later -- qualities that have been in short supply in both the White House and Senate. The question is whether they have the courage, discipline, and outside-the-box vision to do so.

I don't suppose you remember that little blog called Vichy Dems?  Are you really suggesting that Democrats as a whole show courage and discipline to line up behind just any old bill because some Blue Dogs are uncomfortable about women's health?  As opposed to, say, those Vichies lining up behind their party and president and getting a bill passed that doesn't include a sop to anti-sex, anti-choice, anti-women minority Republicans?

Perhaps the whole party is from Vichy.  Perhaps women and all people truly concerned with reproductive freedom should join in a new Jeanette Rankin Brigade, march on Washington, call in sick ("oh, I'm feeling too emotional today"), promise to form an alternative party that safeguards their rights instead of disposing of them when inconvenient.  It seems like a good time to start.

ntodd