Activists mailing coathangers to Congress will not help the cause. What may help is if women and men who don’t want the government in their doctors offices need to make sure that their rights aren’t sold out as a “necessary evil” by refusing to vote for and helping elect people who run against the people who voted for this amendment. Calling out all the people on both sides of the aisle who are trying to have it both ways would also help. For example, Mark Kirk of Illinois is a moderate Republican who is running for Senate–he voted for this amendment and is allegedly begging Sarah Palin to endorse him, but he claims he is still pro-choice. If you don’t support abortion rights, be honest about it. And if you do support abortion rights, don’t vote for someone who doesn’t.

This should be a lesson on what happens when you hand over freedoms in exchange for government largesse. If you want the government to fundamentally transform healthcare, or energy, or any typically private-sector function, they will be more than happy to do it. And they will make it over in their own, focus-group-tested, schizo, self-interested image.
Right now it is abortion funding and the right to self-insure or take one’s chances by remaining uninsured that are on the chopping block. If we ever enacted single-payer it could be any number of other rights, from the right to labor at home, the right to refuse treatment, the right to seek a second opinion, etc.

Pro-choicers can argue all they want that abortion is a “right” but I don’t see how that turns into making it the taxpayers’ responsibility to pay for it.

Amanda, while I am pro-life myself, I have to point out that Hyde Amendment already prohibits tax money from directly funding abortion. The Stupak Amendment, if this bill were signed into law, would prohibit private companies from paying with their own money for what is right now a totally legal procedure. That’s a dangerous road to go down. If a person is pro-life he/she should be aiming to provide legal protection for the unborn and promote a culture that respects human life from conception to natural death, not this watery, red-tape restriction. Someone who is pro-choice should support the right of the insurance provider to CHOOSE what procedures to pay for and the right of the consumer to choose to give his/her business to a provider he/she agrees with. This is blatantly political, an attempt to be able to say to voters, “Hey, I support abortion being safe, legal, and rare, and looky looky the number of abortions has gone down while the right to choose has remained intact” to pro-choice crowds while saying “Look what I have done to prevent evil insurance companies from profiting from the tragedy of abortion” to pro-life crowds.
That being said, I think the coathanger protest is probably not going to do much. Never underestimate the knacks politicians have for turning things around. I would not be surprised if one of these folks decides to put the word out to pro-life organizations that he would like to put a coat for a needy child on each of these coathangers from “extremists”. Bam! Just turned a protest into a campaign spot.

potato, pot-ah-to. It’s a distinction, sure, but that’s like saying “Tax payers should not pay for cigarettes. Therefore Wal-Mart, Albertson’s, Kroger, etc. should not be allowed to sell cigarettes to their cash-paying customers because they also sell subsidized groceries to their foodstamps/WIC customers.” Of course Aetna, Blue Cross or Joe’s Insurance shouldn’t sell abortion-covering policies to their subsidized customers, just like grocery stores shouldn’t allow people to buy cigs with foodstamps. But to say that they should not be allowed to offer their non-subsidized customers legal procedures sets a dangerous precedent, even though we are talking about a procedure that I certainly hope will be reduced greatly and made illegal in my lifetime.

well, sort of. The public option would be sort of like a public hospital—built and continually subsidized by my tax dollars, but if I, a tax payer who is not recieving subsidies, want to use it, I have to pay the bill, while a person recieving Medicaid does not. So, the public hospital can offer me an abortion when I show up with private insurance, but cannot offer my sister one if she shows up with her Medicaid card. If I wanted to use the public option, a premium would be charged to me because I am not poor and eligible for subisidies, while my sister in law would not be charged a premium because she is poor. I would not be considered a “subsidized customer” but my sister in law would.
There is also the fact that the “public option” would almost certain be an outgrowth of whichever currently private plan puts the most in the campaign coffers.

Jenny, thanks so much for your clear, insightful comments. My understanding matches yours. Also, while there will likely be a small “public option” administrated by the government, there will also be public subsidies for people buying into existing private plans. That’s how it’s done here in Massachusetts, and I think we were a model for the federal plan.

A good friend gets health care through the state here. When she was working, she paid out of pocket for “Commonwealth Care”. She paid a sliding scale fee based on percentage of her income, so if she earned more her premium went up, but it as always less than the “market value” of the health plan. When she became pregnant, the state shifted her to MassHealth, which is paid for and run by the state. Now she has a baby, and the state pays the premiums for the baby to be on Daddy’s private employer-provided insurance because that is cheaper for the state than adding the baby to MassHealth.

It’s a pretty confusing system. To make things more confusing, both Commonwealth Care and MassHealth are administrated by numerous small, private insurance companies.

This is where Stupak comes in. What it says is that these private plans that enroll state-subsidized patients may not offer abortion coverage to their private customers – the people who just buy coverage out of pocket. Previous versions simply said federal subsidies could not be used to offer abortion coverage, but Stupak takes it a step further and says private companies can’t offer the coverage if they want to do business with the government and it’s presumably large customer base.

Thanks for bringing this to light – even though my husband works for an ABC affiliate and I don’t hate the mainstream media, sometimes they really miss this (or I miss that show) – I totally missed this, and I’m very disappointed by those Democrats. I feel such rage and can only hope that this does get negotiated out of the final bill, but I doubt it.

Jenny, I invite you to read the text of the amendment: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/15284081/Stupak-Amendment-to-HR-3962-Rev-108

Here is the relevant portion:
“Nothing in this amendment shall be construed as prohibiting any non-federal entity (including an individual or a State or local government) from purchasing separate supplemental coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this plan, or a plan that includes such coverage, so long as” the plan is not paid for in whole or in part by federal funds (I’m shortening that last bit for the sake of my tired fingers ;-).

Whether or not the existence of a public option will drive private insurers out of business is a separate issue.

Sierra: in the amendment, insurance companies are mandated to offer a separate package of benefits that doesn’t cover abortion to people paying with federal subsidies (clause C). They are in no way prohibited from offering packages that do include abortions to people paying with their own money. Again, I point you to the LA Times link above. Also, the portion I quoted is not just about supplemental coverage, but also about plans that include coverage.

What I’m arguing – and don’t think there’s really much room for argument about – is that insurance companies will not be allowed to include abortion coverage in plans that enroll both private pay and federally subsidized individuals. Many private plans currently offer abortion coverage AND accept state subsidy patients into their plans.

In the example I gave above, one family has employer paid group insurance. They pay the premium for the adults in their family, but the state subsidizes the additional premium for the child.

Under Stupak, that private employer-paid plan would have to drop abortion coverage for everyone it covers, or refuse to enroll anyone whose insurance was being paid for by subsidy.

That company or employer might well choose to offer an entirely separate “abortion insurance” plan. I was never addressing that.