The US House of Representatives passed a flawed, unnecessary, unaffordable Health Care Bill a little while back. Now the Senate has found a way to take a bad thing and make it worse by stripping out the House amendment that eliminated federally-funded abortions from the plan.
Now, I know that abortion is a very sensitive issue, and even though I feel strongly about the issue, I’m not making a case for or against it here. Try, for a moment, to distance your personal feelings about abortion itself and consider simply the inclusion of federally-funded abortions in the hanging-by-a-thread healthcare bill that is already unpopular with roughly half of Americans. I’m just saying that mandating that abortions be covered in the plan is a bad choice in every conceivable way: ethically, politically, and financially.
It’s bad for the proponents of the plan as well as its opponents. Proponents lose votes from the Blue Dog centrist portion of their own party by including this language in the bill. Opponents are forced to reinforce their obstructionism because the bill has been even more indefensible from their perspective.
Offering federally-funded abortions increases the already untenable financial burden of the bill and opens the door to other purely elective procedures. Are vasectomies covered? What about hair replacement, breast implants, or Lasik?
The risk/reward here is skewed to an almost unbelievable degree. Consider that abortions are not all that expensive now; the cost surely will go up when the government is paying the tab. Consider that there hasn’t been any outcry, even from the ardent pro-choice crowd, about the cost of abortions. There is nothing to gain and a lot to lose for everyone involved by including taxpayer funded abortions in the bill.
I can see only two ways that anyone gains anything from this. One: if it passes, the Left wins because they get to give a sharp stick in the eye to the Right, in effect saying, “We can do whatever we want & you have no say”. Two: If it fails specifically because of the lost support from the centrist Democrats, then the opposition (and, ultimately, all of America) wins.
