"Can You Give Me More Details About This Bill?"

In the comment section of my last post regular commenter, friend of this blog, family member and rational conservative one L bill wrote the following:

A coworker turned to me last week and said "next week they vote on whether the gov't takes over 20% of the economy." I asked if he was talking about healthcare (I already knew the answer) and he said "yeah". So my next question was what they were voting on. He gave me a general answer, so I clarified that I wanted to know more specifics about the bill. He said he couldn't tell me anything because he haddn't made time to read [more specifics about] the bill.

I feel like this sums up 95% of Americans... either Republican or Democrat. They latch on to the1 or 2 talking points that are easy and ignore the rest... and if that 20% figure is accurate, then it seems like there's a problem.

I know you are better read than my coworker, but I only see the general outrage in most of your blog posts. Can you give me more details about this bill, JBW? It doesn't need to be in this comments section. I know it's a lot of information.

As I began to answer I had the thought that some other readers might have the same question about tomorrows vote so I decided to make it a post instead. That number is actually closer to 16% (1/6 of our economy already goes toward health care and that number has been rising for decades). I haven't gone into any great specifics about the legislation thus far because frankly they've only just finished crafting it, and even if it passes both houses of congress certain aspects will be changed again in committee after that before it reaches President Obama's desk. Some things I can tell you:

• It will cover 95% of Americans.
• Almost everyone will be required to participate (that's the only way it will work to cover that many people).
• Consumer safeguards will include no denial of coverage for preexisting conditions including children, no higher premiums for women, no lifetime dollar limits on policies for those with serious illnesses, parents can keep their kids on their policies until age 26 and starting out there will be a high risk pool for the uninsured.
• It expands the federal-state Medicaid insurance program for the poor.
• It closes the "doughnut hole" coverage gap in the Medicare prescription drug benefit that seniors fall into once they have spent $2,830.
• Businesses are not required to offer coverage and instead employers are charged a fee if the government subsidizes their workers' coverage; businesses with 50 or fewer workers are exempt from this fee.
• Tax credits are provided for purchasing insurance.
• Small businesses, the self-employed and the uninsured could pick a plan offered through new state-based purchasing pools called exchanges which would offer the same kind of purchasing power that employees of big companies benefit from.
• This will not be a government-run insurance plan. People purchasing coverage through the new insurance exchanges would have the option of signing up for national plans overseen by the federal office that manages the health plans available to members of Congress.
• No health plan would be required to offer coverage for abortion. In plans that do cover abortion, policyholders would have to pay for it separately, and that money would have to be kept in a separate account from taxpayer money. And no, your grandmother will not be executed for being too old either.
  

As I've said before, this bill is far from perfect. I personally would have liked to see a single-payer system instituted but that idea was scrapped some time last year. I would also like to see some of the proposals put forth by Republicans (although not wholly owned by them) like tort reform, malpractice reform, increased fraud investigation and purchasing coverage across state lines included as well. Hopefully some of these ideas will find their way into the final legislation as it's instituted and refined over the next several years.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that reform will cost $940 billion over ten years whilst trimming federal deficits by an estimated $138 billion over that same time period, and studies have shown that increased preventative care will further defray current costs. To put those numbers in perspective, we've already spent over $970 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and that cost is estimated to climb to between two and three trillion by the time we leave those countries, if ever. We spend more than twice as much on health care per capita than any other Western industrialized nation and our overall level of care is mediocre by comparison. Yes, the United States has the best health care system in the world but it has become increasingly obvious that only the financially well off are able to take full advantage of it; the rest of America is forced to incur what are often crippling lifetime debts in order to do so.

Presidents have talked about reforming our health care system since Teddy Roosevelt was in office and as every administration since has failed to do so Americans' insurance premiums and costs have continued to increase while coverage and levels of care have similarly decreased. I honestly don't know if Obama's reforms will solve these problems (nobody does, although most of the provisions sound pretty good to me) but I do know that our current path is entirely unsustainable financially and has been for quite some time. Doing nothing for decades has clearly not worked. I for one am ready to try something else. I hope this was what you were looking for, one L.

The Murder Of Doctor George Tiller

I've refrained from commenting on this news story partly because I've just been too busy to write a decent post about it and partly because I wanted to let all of the facts come out before I spoke. I know that many aspects of the blogosphere are about being expedient and timely but I've moved past the mindset that made me want to be the first to speak about any given subject or event to one where having more information at hand is much more preferable.

For those who have not yet heard, George Tiller was a late-term (that's the correct medical terminology; "partial-birth" is a manufactured and deliberately incendiary political term) abortionist in Kansas, who apparently had a policy of performing abortions at any stage in the pregnancy if he deemed it medically feasible. He was one of only three doctors in the country to perform the procedure this late in pregnancy and many women traveled to Kansas to avail themselves of his services.

Before I continue, full disclosure: I am vehemently against the practice of performing late-term abortions except in the most dire of emergencies, any and all of which I'm not qualified to determine here. As someone who reluctantly identifies myself as pro-choice, I like most others am decidedly not "pro-abortion" by any definition of that term. I know that it sounds cliche but I really do believe that abortions should be safe, legal and rare. This means concentrating societal and governmental resources on comprehensive sex education programs, the dissemination of any and all forms of contraception to anyone who requests them and effective, professional single-mother and couples counseling about adoption for anyone considering abortion as a viable option.

I use the term "reluctantly" because I do find abortion to be such a horrible procedure, yet I'm loathe to outlaw it altogether. I've spent a lot of time wrestling with this issue, mainly because of the words and arguments put forth by hot momma, wife of occasional commenter BD, both of whom I respect a great deal and are two of my dearest friends in the world. And I say that I'm loathe to outlaw the practice altogether because history has shown that, just as with the prohibition of alcohol and recreational drugs (just two examples that come immediately to mind), people will always find a way to procure the desired, outlawed substance or service by illegal means and those means are almost always more dangerous to the individual than the safer, legal alternative.

The other reason I'm reluctant to outlaw the practice is because, put most simply, I'm a man and will never know what it's like to have to make that choice, nor to have that choice taken away from me. As much as I dislike the idea of abortion, I just can not bring myself to tell a woman what to do with her own body. I believe that choice should be hers, and hers alone.

Now some might say that simultaneously holding these seemingly disparate views makes me a hypocrite, that if I'm against late-term abortion that I should also be as equally opposed to the performing of all abortions at any stage of a pregnancy. And maybe they're right. I'm only human and I do try to be honest about my own failings whenever I can. But I would also counter that most people with any kind of objection to the practice are just as much hypocrites as myself.

When someone calls abortion "murder" and the physician performing that abortion a "murderer", should not the woman who chose to undergo the procedure be similarly labeled as well? And if this is the case, then should not both of these individuals be tried as murderers by our justice system? I know a lot of people who oppose abortion because they consider it to be the equivalent of taking the life of another human being, yet their views become a lot less strident at the prospect of actually trying and summarily executing every woman in the country who has undergone the procedure. This reluctance reveals the dangers of holding black or white beliefs in a world where almost all of the hard choices are decidedly grey.

On that note, another aspect of my own hypocrisy is that I delineate the differences between a five-day-old blastocyst and a viable eight-month old fetus when determining whether either should be allowed to be terminated. Full disclosure, again: I do not believe in the existence of any type of intangible human soul so I discount that argument (one which I'd be happy to have during a different discussion) as it applies here. As such, the blastocyst (a cluster of 70-100 undifferentiated cells) does not feel any pain when it is expelled from the womb because it does not possess pain receptors, the nerve cells needed to transmit pain nor a brain capable of experiencing or realizing pain and suffering. And while I'm not a doctor I definitely know that an eight-month-old fetus can feel and experience pain, and I am very much against the infliction of any kind of unnecessary pain on innocent children.

After that unintentionally long segue, let me return to my original line of thought: I'm writing this post because George Tiller was shot and killed during services in his Wichita, Kansas church Sunday morning in front of his wife and their friends and neighbors. The alleged shooter, one Scott Roeder, is a member of both The Freemen, a radical anti-government group and Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion rights group that has persisted in protesting Tiller and his clinic over the past two decades. During that time, Tiller has been previously shot, his clinic has been bombed and similarly subjected to various other forms of vandalism and destruction.

Much has been said and written lately around the blogosphere about the apparent influence and culpability of cable talk show host Bill O'Reilly on these horrific events. O'Reilly had recently made a practice of demonizing Tiller on his show for weeks at a time, sending a producer to harass him about his legal medical clinic and had routinely called him "Tiller, the baby killer" and referred to his practice as a "death-mill" on his national forum. As this situation seems to closely mirror the multiple police slayings committed a month ago in Pittsburgh I'd like to reiterate my own take on that horrific incident:

Now obviously Poplawski is the only person responsible for the deaths of these three men; they died by his hand and his alone. But let's be honest here: this young man did not create these paranoid delusions or plan these violent acts in a vacuum. The steady drumbeat of right-wing talk radio, bloggers and other media about Obama taking away our guns, about re-education camps and civil indoctrination squads, about the supposed descent of this country into socialist/Marxist chaos, about capitulation to our enemies and secret Muslim conspiracies has had a definite effect on the mentally deficient and morally weak amongst us, and for those who have been spewing this garbage to now throw their hands up as if they were not at least tangentially culpable for creating the atmosphere that helped lead to this tragedy is an act of outright dishonesty and rank cowardice.

Just replace the names of the killers and the statements about firearms with those about abortion and I believe the quote still stands on its own as it relates to the current situation. So obviously O'Reilly bears no direct responsibility for this murder. Our constitution gives him the absolute right to say whatever he wants about anyone as long as it's factually true or at least stated as pure opinion, and I wouldn't have that any other way. Now, did O'Reilly's statements and pronouncements have any effect on Tiller's murderer? Who's to say? And even if they did, it most likely can not be proven conclusively that his words alone were the trigger (no pun intended) for the shooter's actions.

But this line of thought does force one to ponder the effect that the anti-abortion crowd's hyperbole has on those who would potentially do bodily harm to doctors who perform abortion procedures. The intentionally hateful and personal rhetoric employed by these organizations is most likely used merely to call attention to their cause in a media environment where measured thoughts and arguments can easily get lost amongst an incessant cacophony but when these inflammatory statements find and touch the mind of the occasionally deranged individual they can result in violent and sometimes deadly consequences, Tiller's murder being one of them.

In summation, I do not blame anti-abortion choice activists nor Bill O'Reilly nor anyone else besides the actual gunman for George Tiller's murder, and I would have strong words with anyone else who did. I hold a worldview of individual, personal responsibility, and I will never blame the effect of the words from some for the outcomes of the actions of others. That said, one also can not ignore the effect that those same words and their context and power have on the less than rational members of our society, especially when they irresponsibly address an issue as incendiary and divisive as abortion.

We are a society and nation of laws, and it is only through the respect for those laws and their moderating influence on our worst impulses that we can strive to be better than those same base passions. While I did not celebrate George Tiller's actions in life, I similarly do not celebrate the actions of the man who violently took that life from him, nor do I endorse the actions of those who would try to take advantage of this awful situation to score cheap political points. All human life is precious, and that is the thought that should be the driving force behind our collective discussion of this tragic and dreadful event.

[Update: In writing this post, I made a serious effort to refrain from invoking the religious aspects that almost assuredly accompany a murder as politically and socially relevant as this one. I chose to do this because I believe that most religious folks are essentially good people, and that most people who commit horrific acts in the name of their religions are intentionally subverting the basic message of those belief systems for their own personal means.

That said, Professor P.Z. Myers, a fellow atheist, contributes these words:

In many ways, though, his religiosity is going to be a distraction. It simply doesn't matter, and the strongest conclusion we can draw from it is that religion fails to provide a reasonable framework for morality, since it is so easily and regularly subverted to rationalize evil. Focus instead on the root of the problem: Roeder was an amoral, obsessed nut who found support for his delusions among a particularly ugly American subculture. Gods don't matter. And when you think gods do, you lose sight of the truth: other people matter.

The simple phrase "other people matter" condenses my own thoughts and words down in a way that a verbal windbag like myself can hardly ever hope to achieve.]

[Update II: I watched O'Reilly's response to this murder last night and the thing that struck me the most was his constantly quoting the number of abortions Dr. Tiller was reported to have performed or authorized: 60,000. In fact, O'Reilly quoted that number at least four or five times in direct reference to Tiller's death. My question is this: If Tiller and other doctors like himself are really inhuman murderers running so-called "death-mills", why would the total number of abortions they performed matter one wit? Murder is murder, right? Is a murderer guilty of 60 murders a thousand times less deserving of death than one to whom 60,000 murders can be attributed? If not, then what is O'Reilly's point in emphasizing the number so incessantly, other than to further demonize Tiller in the eyes and minds of his viewers as some kind of thinly-veiled attempt to somehow, at least partially, justify his violent death by another's hand?]

Cantor On Stem Cell Research

President Obama is bringing science back to the White House:

A top congressional Republican on Sunday criticized President Barack Obama's expected decision to reverse the Bush administration's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it a distraction from the country's economic slump.

U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor also says the policy reversal could lead to embryo harvesting, which "shouldn't be done."

"Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done," Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, told CNN's "State of the Union."

Obama's move, scheduled for Monday morning, is part of a broader effort to separate science and politics and "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision-making," White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes said Sunday. The Bush administration's 2001 policy bars federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells beyond the cell lines that existed at the time.

One can only assume that Cantor is also incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. And then of course we get the standard fear-inducing straw man argument:

Because stem cells have the potential to turn into any organ or tissue cell in the body, research advocates say they could yield cures to debilitating conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries. But because work on embryonic stem cells involves the destruction of human embryos, many conservatives supported the limits former President George Bush imposed by executive order in 2001.

"Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs," Cantor said. "We don't want that. That shouldn't be done. That's wrong."

He's right, and nuclear testing in the Pacific can bring on Godzilla but I wouldn't count on that happening either. Hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos are discarded every year by in vitro fertilization clinics. The idea that stem cell research will lead to Matrix-like fields of human embryos being grown for scientific research is laughable at best and dangerous at worst, and Cantor is a dishonest fool for saying so.

Couric Interviews Palin III: OK, Enough Already

Yeah, I'm getting kind of tired of watching these two as well but this is the last of it (you can see the first two parts here and here) and then we'll hopefully get some brand new foolishness out of tonight's debate with Joe Biden; I had a couple points to make here but the most entertaining is this literary nugget at about 3:40:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America."

Are we seriously supposed to believe that Palin can't name one newspaper or magazine that she reads to inform herself of the world's events of the day? I know she's come off as incompetent and unqualified of late but come on; have I mentioned that she was a journalism major in college? The only reason I can think of for why she wouldn't name one publication is that she most likely does read The New York Times or The Washington Post or Time magazine or any one of dozens of other supposedly liberal publications the McCain campaign has already labeled as "in the tank" for Obama as part of their tactic to attack the media at every turn; better to have her just lie and look stupid rather than give credence to the enemy (=pretty much all media outlets except FOX News). And notice how instead of addressing why a candidate for the vice-presidency can't do this, which is the reason she was asked the question, she turns it around and acts like Couric is attacking her for being Alaskan and thus uninformed. But every question she gets asked for which she doesn't have a canned, prepared answer is an attack, right? Gotcha.

Two more things (besides her backtracking on the teaching of evolution in schools and her seeming claim that her views on abortion are her own and don't apply to her candidacy): ignoring the fact that nobody in the news media can find any evidence of the gay friend she claims to have had for decades, do you really think that this woman would agree with Palin that she made a "choice" that Palin did not? And on the homosexual tip, she claims that "the media got it wrong" that her church, the Wasilla Bible Church (more info here and here), is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer; but then how does she explain this:

"You'll be encouraged by the power of God's love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality," according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has prayed for about six years...

Focus on the Family, a national Christian fundamentalist organization, is conducting the "Love Won Out" Conference in Anchorage, about 30 miles from Wasilla.

I know, that says nothing about curing gays, just that their god will "transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality" but it's definitely promoting the event; so let's look at Focus on the Family's "Love Won Out" campaign to see exactly what her church is endorsing:

Focus on the Family's Love Won Out ministry exhorts and equips the church to respond in a Christ-like way to the issue of homosexuality. And to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, we offer the Gospel hope that these desires can be overcome.

See, they're not trying to make gays straight through prayer they're just trying to help those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions (I'm still not clear why someone would "choose" to have "unwanted" feelings and attractions but maybe that's just me) overcome those desires through the power of the Gospel. So based on this information you make the call: did the media get it wrong here or is her church advocating fixing gays through prayer? And why Couric didn't have this information (it took me about five minutes to find, read, cut and paste all of this) at the ready as Palin apparently lied over and over again is beyond me. See you at the debate tonight.

A Question Of Judgement

My own views on abortion rights have changed somewhat lately and I've been reexamining where I stand in the ideological debate over this at times necessary evil and it's effect on our society and culture; just the same, I have to say that I pretty much agree with the sentiment expressed in this commercial about Sarah Palin's views on the subject:

Regardless of where you stand please feel free to sound off on either side of this debate if you wish; while I've never explicitly stated it I hope that the spirit of this blog has been made very clear: there are no taboo subjects. I might not agree with every viewpoint expressed in the comment sections here but I have tried very hard to create an atmosphere where intelligent adults can state their opinions freely as a means of fostering interesting and even unorthodox discussions and debates. This might all turn out to be a mistake someday if I decide to run for public office but I truly don't feel that I should have to obfuscate my opinions about anything, and that's probably why I'll lose.