Ultimately we’re both selecting which angle to look at this from. Like the elephant, we might both be 70% right. But, from my perspective, once we’ve agreed that the thing has tree trunks for legs, it’s just not something we can accept for house training, even if it also has floppy ears like the dachshund we already own.

We seem to agree that putting the uninsured in exactly the same system as you say it, or changing the current system into a government imprimatur system as I say it, will give abortions to every woma-who-is-so-poor-that-she-doesn’t-have-abortions-because-they-aren’t-insured. AND the government will be molding that abortion-is-core-health-care situation into stone to shape all future policy even broader than what one plan covers, AND it will be no longer be even theoretically possible to reform the system away from abortion coverage, AND it will be federal bureaucrats and committees and dollars that cover child killing.

The pro-life DEMOCRATS and the USCCB think this is a hill to die on. Maybe you are more Democratic and Catholic than they are. Fine. Just don’t sneer at Deal Hudson for thinking he is Catholicker than you. You’re both playing the same game.

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Again, imagine if the situation were converses. The Republicans are in power. They want to tackle abortion in some what that we’ll assume would be found Constitutional. Because, as a million Vox Nova posts have taught us, simply restricting abortion is not enough, it includes subsidies to adoption agencies and other services that provide pre-natal care. Some organizations with immoral missions, like say the KKK, have set up adoption agencies to get in on this. Moderate Republican Senators insist on an amendment to the abortion bill so that it explicity does not fund such groups.

Now, what should be the focus of truly pro-life Republicans?

a.) Demonstrating how the bill should be passed even without the amendment, and pointing out that the government already funds the KKK is some roundabout way, and that’s the real problem.

OR

b.) Fighting like hell so that the bill with the amendment gets passed.

What would you think of a right-leaning pro-life Catholic who pledges his assent to Catholic moral teaching who went with choice a?

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There have been people who have made heroic efforts to put the Stupak amendment in the abortion bill. They have done this in spite of brickbats from the right that engagement with Democratic lawmakers should begin and end with denial of communion.

And with each post like this, you are spitting on their work. You are discouraging them. You are saying that what they have done really doesn’t matter all that much.

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I can understand a “lesser of two evils” type thinking in the late stages of an election, when we have two imperfect candidates to choose from. But when there is legislation that is still being formed, and there exists a version of this legislation that is morally unproblematic, I don’t understand why one would spend energy arguing that the problematic version is acceptable.

Free abortions? Excuse me? Since when did the stuff paid for by health insurance become free? This is all paid for by private premia, supplemented by subsidies for those below a certain income threshold. Here’s what you don’t seem to understand – the goal is to put the uninsured under exactly the same system as the insured today. And that includes abortion. If we want to put the uninsured into a special plan that includes no abortion, that is fine with me. But how can you be embrace this “extraordinary” solution while not caring about the “ordinary” situation, which is that people who currently have insurance can get abortion coverage, and we are all paying for that? What explains the fetishization of the government role over the private sector role?

I have yet to see a single condemnation on your part of the cozy relationship between private insurance and the abortion industry, which is the very heart of all the problems. No, you talk about government forcing coverage, when it was there all along, willingly provided. You talk about an “abortion surcharge” when every private plan in the country has such a surcharge (because even if your own plan does not cover abortion, other plans covered by your carrier almost certainly do, and isn’t money fungible?).

The fact that we currently have mere non-taxing, which is NOT a subsidy and does NOT involve the government giving any money in its hands to abortion insurers, somehow makes it not much worse to change the situation into free abortions for everyone, mostly under the federal government run plan that creates federal policy to include abortion, and that is our government forcing all public payers to submit an abortion surcharge, and is our goverment forcing a private plan in every region to cover abortion…well this is just bizarre for you to say it isn’t a big change and that you’re taking some nuanced and sophisiticated position even though every Catholic this side of Barack Obama disagrees.

You keep repeating the public option fallacy – the government does not cut checks to anybody. It is entirely funded by premiums. The only “checks cut” (and the bill has the total cost) are to people to help them purchase insurance on the exchange. As I’m tired of saying, the only “entitlement” is to the subsidies, which can be used for either the public or private option. This is not tha hard. Why are so many people so wilfully misrepresenting the public option? Why is Joe Lieberman saying it will is an entitlement that increases the deficit when the opposite is the case? It’s decades of antigoverment nonsense spewed by Reagan and his acolytes that prevents people thinking clearly on this issue.

Back to abortion. The real problem is the prevalence of abortion in private insurance. If it was not covered, there would not be a problem. Why don’t you focus on the ultimate source of the problem – the cosy relationship between the big insurance companies and the abortion lobby? After all, every single person in a private plan is subsidizing abortion somewhere – you are being “forced” to pay through employer-sponsored insurance.

Or even better – the ideal solution would be a single-payer system that did not cover abortion. That would take the venal private insurers out of the system completely. And yet, right-wing Catholics balk at this as it disturbs their free market liberalism. Well, it’s free market liberalism that gives us the insurance-supported abortion industry…

Good gracious. This is the exact argument you and liberal Catholics rejected when arguing for support of Obama and the Dem takeover. Abortion reduction. So much for that.

Medicaid pays for abortion? It absolutely doesn’t on the federal level. So some states do it and others don’t, and you think that means it’s not a deal breaker to let the feds start doing it for everyone? Ridiculous.

And why when discussing the public option do you ignore three facts: public option coverage will mabdate an abortion surcharge for everyone in that plan so it isn’t fair to call it merely private, public option abortion comes in a plan run by the federal government so it can’t be merely called a private plan and it pushes federal policy in a huge immeasurable pro-abortion direction, and public option abortion increases it massively putting the lie to Democrats being abortion reducers.

This leaves me speechless. Were that the purpose of the present Democratic-driven efforts! If so, the bill would be a fraction of the length it is at present, would contain provisions allowing sale of policies across state lines and so on.

This bill is all about increasing government involvement in the health care system, which is contrary to what you say the purpose is because there has never been a case in recent history in the United States of increased government involvement in the healthcare system bringing costs of any kind – either the cost of health care or the cost of insurance – down.