Today, the President announced that he will be issuing an executive order after the passage of the health insurance reform law that will reaffirm its consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion.
While the legislation as written maintains current law, the executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation's restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.
White House Statement On Abortion Compromise
That means that the health care bill will now pass. There is no longer any doubt, not that there really could have been much doubt when the vote was announced. Effective political leaders don't invite defeat on bills this important, and both Pelosi and Obama have made clear that not passing this bill is a defeat. That meant that they figured they'd be able to accommodate the representatives who are part of Bart Stupak's anti-abortion bloc enough to get their votes on the bill.
Why are the wishes of these eight or so Representatives more important than the sixty plus who signed the letter saying they wouldn't vote for a bill that did not include a public option? Why is restricting women's rights more important to the Democrats than providing health care to the 40 million or more who will still not have access to health care?
No one who's been reading here for a while should be surprised at my answer - it's because the Stupak bloc stood up for what they believed, while the public option bloc didn't. That's a lesson we need to take away from this.
The other lesson we need to take away from this is that a great many so-called progressives don't understand what it's like to be one of the recipients of their largess. Paul Krugman was perfectly willing to ignore his earlier warnings and throw them under the bus. He was willing to write that he was "enough of a card-carrying economist" to believe that lower insurance costs on the part of employers would lead to wage increases, but he wasn't enough of an economist to find out that this was nonsense. I've mentioned others, like Jonathon Cohn and Ezra Klein, whose ability to perceive the truth seems to not include understanding how many Americans live, and there are certainly others. Check the comments of some of their articles on the subject, and you won't have trouble finding some that explain this disconnect to them, and yet they still don't get it.
The sad truth is that the cliche "limousine liberals" isn't entirely baseless. There are people who genuinely deserve the appellation. That doesn't make the things they write untrue, but it's important to understand that this is where they're coming from. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck, they aren't going to understand your problems, and chances are they don't want to.
What that all means for the future, I'm not sure. Or maybe I just don't want to think about it. These are lessons to keep in mind, though, whenever progressives try to decide what we need to do in the future.
Afterword: I know someone will be tempted to mention that the CBO estimates have said that there would be roughly 24 million Americans left uninsured by this bill. That is true. But, as I've mentioned many times, "insured" does not mean "able to get health care" in this environment. Most of the roughly 15 million who will be forced to buy insurance by this bill will not be able to get the care they need.
Thus, the 40 million figure.
2 comments:
Every time something comes up to make me question my lefty objections to the bill, two more things bounce up that convinces me I'm right.
I suspect that Obama will be like Clinton, but without the blow job. Pushing more and more money from the middle class into the pockets of the wealthy while watching his majorities get blown away.
I will be interested in watching Prof. Krugman when he sees how stongly his "progressive block" stand up to the banksters when the bills to re-regulate the banks come up. I await his telling us all that bill shouldn't be passed because it is all smoke and mirrors.
Krugman's already been doing that. One of the first things that made me impatient with him is that he was writing back in December that while it's OK to compromise on health care, it's not OK to do it on banking regulations. Spoken like someone who doesn't have to worry about where his health care is coming from, I think.
I suspect you're right about Obama. He ought to understand that this will make it hard to hold onto a Democratic majority. Anyone who can read a poll result would. Yet he continues to do the very things that will make people look for alternatives in their government.
The only thing Obama has ever really stood for is Barack Obama. His entire political career should be proof of that, at least for people who bothered to learn about his political career from his critics.
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