Senate to vote on pro-life amendment today

cross-posted from A Catholic View

The Senate may vote on Monday on an amendment to cut the massive abortion funding found in the Senate's version of the government-run health care bill. With two pro-abortion Republicans expected to defect and not enough Democrats to back the amendment, it is expected to fail.

Sen. Ben Nelson, a pro-life Nebraska Democrat, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, are behind the amendment, which is very similar to the Stupak amendment the House added to its bill.

Senate leader Harry Reid announced today(Sunday) that the Senate will vote on the Nelson amendment on Monday.

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Health Care vs. the Value of Human Life

 An amazing article from Pajamas Media by by Sarah Durand:

Under the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation, we know that the government will have to determine some sort of rationing system in order to control costs. We are aware that part of the rationing will be absorbed in the discrimination that the bill inflicts upon the elderly; we know that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare. What has remained puzzling is how exactly this rationing will be determined for the rest of us. Similarly elusive is how the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee will decide whether or not you get certain medical treatments, regardless of the opinion of your doctor. After all, how do you put a dollar value on a human life?


Read the entire article here.

Senator Harry Reid Challenged to Stand Up for Supposed Pro-Life Abortion View

Decades ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was once so pro-life that he co-sponsored a human life amendment in Congress that would have resulted in prohibiting abortions nationwide. Now, he is a shadow of his former pro-life self and won't even commit to stopping taxpayer funded abortions.

The watering down of his pro-life views has gotten him to the point that he hasn't earned a 100% pro-life voting record from the National Right to Life Committee in many years -- in fact he is 100% pro-abortion on three votes in 2009.

As the prime sponsor of the government-run health care bill in the Senate, Reid is poised to preside over the greatest expansion of federal funding of abortions in the nation's history.

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Why the Principle of Subsidiarity Negates Government-Dictated Health Care

 By Judie Brown

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog about health care reform and the Catholic Church’s principle of subsidiarity. In the essay, several Catholic bishops who had raised the same question in relationship to health care reform were quoted. Shortly thereafter, several readers wrote to say that they had never heard of the principle of subsidiarity before. They asked if I could explain it in a fundamental way that would be easy to understand.

I agreed to do this but moved on to other topics of concern and immediately forgot my promise. But then a brick bat struck me in the head (not literally) as I began to absorb the totality of what government-mandated health care reform would really do to the one fundamental structure that operates best in our society—the human family.

If the family itself is placed at the service of the government, chaos results.  And in the United States, we have the statistics to prove that. Just what has the welfare program done for families, for example?

Statistics readily available to anyone show that the welfare system has contributed directly to the breakdown of the family unit. As family research expert Patrick Fagan, Ph.D., has testified regarding what states and the federal government have done to assist families, we learn something remarkable about our tax dollars at work... Read the rest of Judie's blog post here.

Senate Backs Mikulski Amdt, Could Require All Insurance Plans to Cover Abortions

Senators approved an amendment to the government-run health care bill today that calls abortion "preventative care." They voted 61-39 in favor of the Mikulski amendment that could make it so every health care plan in the United States would have to cover abortion.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a pro-abortion Maryland Democrat, offered Amendment No. 2791 dealing with federally mandated coverage of "preventive care."

Though most of the discussion on the amendment centered on a mammogram coverage problem in the bill, it presents significant concerns for pro-life advocates.

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Bishop still has ‘very serious concerns’ about health care legislation

cross-posted from A Catholic View

Despite the advance of the Stupak Amendment in proposed health care legislation, Bishop Robert Vasa of Bend, Oregon says there are still “very serious concerns” about the legislation. These include funding for abortion, pro-life conscience protections, assisted suicide, sex education and interference in the doctor-patient relationship.

Bishop Vasa wrote in his Dec. 3 column for the Catholic Sentinel that Catholic support for the Stupak Amendment, which barred federal funding for most abortions, should not be interpreted as complete support for the health care legislation.

He noted that the legislation funds abortion in cases of rape and incest and when the life of the mother is threatened, which he said is contrary to Church teaching about the “inviolability and dignity” of every unborn human being despite the circumstances of his or her origin.

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Be scared: Obamacare endangers our life spans

Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship – eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.

To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost-effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies – all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of health-care choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.

Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.

Read the rest here.