What goes on behind closed doors

Emerging from yet another closed-door negotiating session with President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed that healthcare overhaul legislation must pass the tests of health insurance premium "affordability" and insurance company "accountability". She missed the obvious irony that the legislative process and the legislation itself fail both tests.
Eight times during his campaign, Mr. Obama pledged a new era of accountability and transparency by promising to televise healthcare negotiation meetings on C-SPAN. Yet to date, the White House and Congressional leadership have banned cameras, media, independent observers, and any other possibilities of public accountability from their closed-door negotiations. Posers can easily slip into state dinners at the White House, but credentialed media are blocked from observing for the American people the healthcare negotiations that will impact one-sixth of our economy.
That's because behind closed mahogany doors, lawmakers have been cutting deals that bust the budget with political pork payoffs such as the nine-figure "Louisiana Purchase" and "Cornhusker Kickback"—political bribes given to secure the votes of holdout Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Now a desperate White House has bought off union bosses, in the process ballooning the healthcare bill cost by $60 billion.
Healthcare affordability can be achieved not with new socialistic taxes and draconian penalties, but with targeted government subsidies for the poor, funded by cost-saving preventive medicine, tort reform and fraud prosecution. Accountability can be achieved simply by opening the doors to these secret meetings so we the people can witness firsthand how politicians plan to spend our money.

Untangling healthcare bills on conscience rights

Wondering what's happening with conscience issues in the current healthcare bills?
With all the closed-door secretive legislating scheming, tracking any specific issue is a real challenge.
Thankfully, our friend Mary Harned, an attorney with Americans United for Life, has developed a chart that tracks life issues including conscience--in the Senate bill, the House bill, and the Hyde amendment law.
The bottom line is that even in the best case, healthcare professionals remain vulnerable to discrimination simply for following well established norms of medical ethics--norms as basic as the Hippocratic oath. Even the good Stupak-Pitts amendment in the House bill only applies to abortion.

Think about all the issues that a physician encounters, from birth control to reproductive technology to requests for lethal medications for assisted suicide, and much more. Add to that current list potential future challenges involving unethical genetic testing and risky manipulation, embryo-destructive research, transhumanism and you begin to get a feel for how challenging it is to be a life-honoring physician.
The lack of robust conscience protections in the House and Senate bills is even more concerning given the backdrop of the looming Obama administration's rescission of the only federal conscience-protecting regulation. To learn more about that regulation and battle, visit the Learn section of Freedom2Care.
Remember that life-honoring physicians aren't the only ones who stand to suffer discrimination. Forcing them out of medicine--and polling shows they're prepared to quit if pressured to compromise conscience--means that life-honoring patients will not be able to find physicians who share their convictions.
Concerned? Speak out now--with the help of these Freedom2Care resources--to let your legislators know you want strong conscience protections in law and in regulations.

Socialist approach to health care will kill the engine and strand the caboose

Lacking steam power from popular support or political consensus, Democrat House and Senate bosses are meeting clandestinely to plot to push the healthcare overhaul train to the White House station (“Obama to Congress: Pass health bill quickly,” Politics, Wednesday). 

Even if healthcare overhaul reaches that station, however, the train may not get much farther down the tracks.
That’s because economically challenged, leftist politicians intent on redistributing wealth have designed their healthcare engine to be fueled by incentive-killing taxes and penalties against businesses and entrepreneurs--the very ones we’re counting on to create new jobs and rebuild the economy.
In order to subsidize their gargantuan government takeover of health care, Robin Hood politicians see no problem in forcing healthy young people to buy insurance or in slashing the Medicare program for the elderly.
Besides the immense weight of public disapprobation, the healthcare overhaul train is also hopelessly overladen with political payoff pork, such as the $300 million “Louisiana Purchase” perk inserted to secure Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s vote on the Senate healthcare bill and the “cornhusker kickback” state Medicaid expense immunity handed to holdout Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
The uninsured and poor need help, and targeted government subsidies paid for with cost-saving initiatives in preventive medicine, tort reform and fraud detection could significantly address their needs. But stealing engine-room resources provided by productive individuals and businesses will eventually cause the healthcare train to run out of steam. That short-sighted socialistic approach will leave the poor caboose stranded on the tracks.

Rescue us from this precipice

President Obama slipped when he quipped recently that Congress is “on the precipice” of healthcare overhaul. The dictionary defines precipice as “a very steep or overhanging place; a hazardous situation; brink.”
“Precipice” is exactly how Americans view the prospect of radical healthcare overhaul, according to USA Today / Gallup polling.  Anyone who’s visited a government department of motor vehicles can imagine how government-directed healthcare decisions—which would occur under current legislation with or without the “public option”—will result in the delay and denial of their own health care.
Empowering the President’s cabinet members and other partisan bureaucrats to make sweeping decisions about what medical treatments and medicines to permit for all Americans dangerously injects the government into the exam room and the physician-patient relationship. The intrusive legislation  would even forbid senior citizens to use their own money to avoid involuntary denial of medical treatment under Medicare. That is, until the overhaul bankrupts Medicare.
Americans also oppose moral minefields in the legislation such as government funding of abortion and the absence of broad conscience rights for healthcare professionals, which threatens to eliminate healthcare access for poor patients by driving life-affirming physicians, hospitals and clinics out of medicine.
If anyone in Congress is still listening to the American people who are hanging on for dear life, please rescue us from this precipice.

Latest Senate Bill Version Shifts U.S. Policy To Fund Abortion

Specific Problems with the Latest Senate Bill Version

1. Violates the Hyde Amendment and the Hype principles set in all other federally administered health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, TriCare, and CHIP.
2. Preempts state laws and conflicts with some existing state laws on abortion.
3. Conscience protections (Weldon language) are not included in the Senate version.
4. The “so-called” firewall between federal and private funds is inconsistent with the Hyde and Stupak-Pitts Amendments.
5. Departs from the way the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (also administered by OPM) is governed with respect to private plans covering abortion.
6. Allows executive branch officials to require private health plans cover abortion simply by defining them as “preventive care” (the Mikulski Amendment mandates that all plans cover abortion by defining abortion as a “preventive” service).
7. Inserts text of the Indian Health reauthorization bill (S.1790) that does not contain the Senate passed Vitter Amendment to permanently prohibit coverage of elective abortions in the federally funded Indian health programs.

What Pro-Life Experts are Saying:

• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops – “The Senate health reform bill should not move forward in its current form… The legislation will be morally unacceptable ‘unless and until’ it complies with longstanding current laws on abortion funding such as the Hyde amendment… Abortion compromise does not address core problem in Senate health bill…”

• Democrat Representative Bart Stupak – “Not acceptable… a dramatic shift in federal policy that would allow the federal government to subsidize insurance policies with abortion coverage.”

• National Right to Life Committee – “The Reid manager’s amendment is light years removed from the Stupak-Pitts Amendment that was approved by the House of Representatives on November 8 by a bipartisan vote of 240-194. The new abortion language solves none of the fundamental abortion-related problems with the Senate bill, and it actually creates some new abortion-related problems.”

• Family Research Council – “It would violate the Hyde Amendment and other current laws that prevent federal funds going to pay part of the cost of health plans that include coverage of elective abortion… provisions will increase the number of abortions with government funding.”