Pelosi tells Harvard students she read every page of healthcare bill
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told students at Harvard University on Friday that she had indeed done her reading.
Taking questions during the 90-minute event, Pelosi assured one skeptical undergraduate that she, and many other House members, had read “every page” of the roughly 1,900-page healthcare bill passed by the House.
She expounded on leadership qualities, healthcare reform, the impact of more women in Congress, troops to Afghanistan — oh, and healthcare reform.
Participating in the healthcare debate, so long a signature issue of the late Massachusetts political titan Ted Kennedy, was “humbling,” she said.
Pelosi said she would have had a hard time cobbling together enough votes for a healthcare bill without a public option to balance the influence of insurance companies.
And she sympathized with women’s groups fearful of the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion amendment contained in the House bill.
But of all the heavy legislative lifting in Congress this year, passing supplemental funding for the war in Afghanistan was the hardest, Pelosi said.
Abortion issue hard to avoid in healthcare debate
Like it or not, the healthcare debate has turned into a fracas over abortion rights.
U.S. House Democratic leaders had hoped to avoid just that in their push to expand healthcare coverage and reform the health insurance market.
But getting the votes to pass the historic legislation on Saturday boiled down to settling a dispute between pro-choice and pro-life forces over abortion.
Abortion foes won. The House passed an amendment restricting the availability of insurance policies that include elective abortion services even though many medical plans currently offer such coverage.
The debate over abortion highlights broader questions surrounding the government’s reach in healthcare. Once the government starts subsidizing insurance premiums, it will dictate what can and cannot be included in that coverage.
Democrat Congressman Louis Capps underscored that in arguing the amendment “will mean more women will have their reproductive health choices made by politicians and anti-choice zealots in Washington, DC, instead of by themselves and their doctors.”
With abortion-rights supporters vowing to strip the amendment out of the bill as it moves through the legislative process, the debate now shifts over to the Senate.
@TC:
USA is definitely NOT the greatest country in the world by any standard except perhaps the one with the most unchecked greedy capitalism running everything, including the economy.
Human beings? Really?
I think it’s a matter of opinion. Personally I see a POTENTIAL human being, not something that absolutely WILL become a human being.
While I do not support inhumane or cruel practices to end life, think for millisecond WHY people get abortions.
Because: a) they don’t want a child or
b)they cannot afford to feed and clothe one or
c)both
These children are UNWANTED, they are likely to grow up with little love if their mother/father tried to get rid of them somehow.
Not having abortions makes people’s lives miserable, both the parent’s and the child’s.
And who are the people who most want abortions? Statistically, teenage mothers. You think they can afford one? Most do not even tell their parents! If we want to reduce the number of unwanted children, you need to give these girls an affordable option.
And if you STILL think abortion is a monstrosity, then do your best to get the government to promote sexual education and high schools to have free condoms available.
House health bill… It’s really big!
It’s really big.
How big is it?
So big that Republican Congressman David Camp was going to take it with him to read on a flight to his Michigan home but it wouldn’t fit in the overhead compartment, an aide quipped.
What is it? The healthcare reform legislation made public on Thursday by Democratic leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The 1,990-page document comes in at more pages than an English translation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” which is just shy of 1,500 pages.
The health legislation may or may not be more interesting than the epic story about 19th century Russian society, but it is the center of attention on Capitol Hill at the moment.
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander says he will read it and recommends that everyone else does too. The legislative text of the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” is available on the House Rules Committee website.
There are so many aspects of this plan that the politicians keep overlooking though. The medical industry is wrought with overspending and has gone for too long without any regulation or oversight. Insurance premiums have gone up 138% for a reason and it isn’t simply corporate greed.
Private insurance companies are a part of the problem, yes. When regarding health, private insurance never should have been allowed to be profitable business in the first place. For-profit insurance means requires a need to make money and inevitably that is going to affect the quality of the insurance that people are getting from the company. Companies don’t want to spend money on an individual so they will take whatever measures necessary to ensure they don’t have to. But the medical industry has been profiting all along as well. Procedural costs, visits, even x-rays cost varying amounts state to state, city to city and practitioners are being bounced around by pharmaceutical companies to try and make money while waiting a year or more for the insurance companies to pay up.
This may be why the US was ranked #37 according to the World Health Organization. http://www.ourblook.com/component/option ,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view, category/#catid107
Either health care needs to become a single unit in which there are no privatized barriers, which we may have lost since the rejection of the public option by the Senate, or we find a way to actually bring health care back to a fair free market based standing. The entire industry is wrought with greed from every angle, physicians hiking costs, pharmaceutical companies giving incentives for pushing their products, lobbyists for insurance company interests, and lobbyists for pharmaceutical interests. Where do we draw the line? Health care has had nothing to do with actual care for well beyond two decades.
It’s criminal what congress is doing against the wishes of the American people.