By Adele Stan, AlterNet
Posted on November 19, 2009, Printed on November 20, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144062/
At Majority Leader Harry Reid's announcement yesterday about the health-care bill he seeks to introduce on the Senate floor, the elephant in the room was women's reproductive rights, which were not addressed from the podium.
But ever since the House passed its health-care bill with the egregious Stupak amendment attached -- which bars virtually all abortion coverage from being offered in the exchanges through which most individual policies will be purchased -- battles over reproductive rights have taken center stage as the Senate hammered out its version of the legislation, titled the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Washington Post reports that the bill does not go the Stupak route, and instead establishes a "firewall" between federally-funded subsidies for insurance premiums and private funds that could be used to pay for plans that contain abortion coverage. ""I couldn't be happier," Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told the Post. "For those who want to keep abortion out of this bill, Senator Reid did it the right way." Boxer is regarded as the Senate's foremost pro-choice advocate.
On the issue of reproductive rights, Reid, who is anti-choice himself, had no good options. With the passage of the Stupak amendment in the House, the stage has been set for a battle royale. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., last week promised to withhold his support from any bill that didn't contain the Stupak language. That matters because the Democrats need every single vote of the 60 their caucus holds in the Senate in order to merely move the bill to the floor. Yesterday, Reid told reporters he was cautiously optimistic that he could get all 60 votes to prevent Republicans from successfully launching a filibuster, the procedural move used to block the legislative process.
Republicans have promised to pull out all the stops to keep the Senate from passing Reid's bill. "It's going to be a holy war," said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, the ardently anti-choice Republican from Utah, told the New York Times. It was unclear from the Times report whether Hatch was referring to the reproductive health provisions or the bill as a whole. Hatch promised earlier this week to offer a Stupak-like amendment to the bill, despite the fact that he plans not to vote for the bill in the end.
Whether Hatch's holy war is waged specifically on the abortion front, or against the whole of the bill, it all adds up to the same thing in the end. Republicans have been using the false specter of government-funded abortions throughout the health-care debate as a means to scuttle the legislation from passing.
Other provisions that make Republicans unhappy include the public option, for which Reid offers states an escape route called an "opt-out", and a tax on individuals earning more than $250,000 a year to help pay for the plan.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill's cost at $849 billion -- below the $900 billion threshold set by President Obama -- and projects that it will cut the deficit by $130 billion through cost savings.
Word is that the process to bring the bill to the Senate floor will begin on Saturday. In the meantime, pro- and anti-choice forces are staking their positions, with the National Right to Life Committee, a group allied with the Roman Catholic bishops, declaring Reid's firewall language on abortion coverage "unacceptable."
Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.
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