As Congress heads toward its August recess, Washington is
questioning whether the Democrat Congress and President Obama
will be able to pass a healthcare bill this year. Most of
the attention thus far has focused on the hundreds of billions in
new taxes, the control board the government will set up, the
escalting costs of the plans, etc.
But the most interesting pushback, at least for me, is from many
quarters of the Catholic Church.
Raymond Arroyo over at EWTN recently posted a very helpful
summary of what the Church’s major objections would be to
Obamacare as it is coming together. They include:
- Federal funding of abortion and/or federal requirements that
all insurance plans cover abortion on demand
- Lack of any meaningful rights of conscience for health care
providers. Without this, doctors and nurses could be
compelled to perform abortions, issue contraceptives, sterilize,
euthanize, etc.
- A chilling requirement for Medicare beneficiaries to go into
end of life counseling every five years. The idea would be
to bully them into euthanizing themselves. Old people that
linger on are a major driver of health care costs. The most
effective rationing is to get rid of old folks.
Any one of these three would be enough to spook most faithful
Catholics. All three of them result in a total
deal-breaker.
The normally-liberal USCCB
(whose staff is dominated by Christian Democrat-like socialists)
would ordinarily be expected to support government
medicine. After all, they have been full-throatedly behind
things like
S-CHIP expansion and other government spending. But
they are sending out VERY strong signals of concern on this one.
Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Center (NY), who heads up the
USCCB division working on the healthcare issue had this to say in
a
recent letter:
On respecting life and dignity, he said, “No health care
reform plan should compel us or others to pay for the
destruction of human life, whether through government funding
or mandatory coverage of abortion. Any such action would be
morally wrong.”
After citing protections from public funding of abortion in
U.S. law, Bishop Murphy added, “Health care reform cannot be a
vehicle for abandoning this consensus which respects freedom of
conscience and honors our best American traditions. Any
legislation should reflect longstanding and widely supported
current policies on abortion funding, mandates and conscience
protections because they represent sound morality, wise policy
and political reality.”
Getting to 218 in the House with the opposition of the Catholic
bishops would be very problematic for Nancy Pelosi.
Recently, 19 House Democrats signed a letter
to Speaker Pelosi opposing abortion funding in any health care
legislation (Democrats for Life
even got in on the action on Arroyo’s EWTN show). The Blue
Dogs have concerns about cost. Combine all this with the
House Republicans (likely to be unanimous in their opposition),
and you have a headcount problem for the Democrats.
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a comprehensive healthcare
reform bill passing out of the House of Representatives that
doesn’t genuflect at the altar of the culture of death.
Just another reason why this issue is going nowhere as we enter
the dog days of the August recess.
