Why abortion could kill Obamacare

Now that the House of Representatives has narrowly passed a hugely unpopular health care reform bill, all eyes are on the Senate as they try to come up with a bill of their own that can not only attract the 51 votes needed for passage, but the 60 required to stop the inevitable filibuster and bring the bill to a vote on the floor. And that is looking ever more unlikely as the days go by.

There are two big obstacles to passage of a bill in the Senate. First, virtually all of the Republicans and a fair number of moderate Democrats are dead-set against a “public option” under which the federal government would compete directly with private insurance companies, a move that would almost certainly put them all out of business within a year. But their far-left colleagues are equally as adamant that the bill must have a public option, creating an impasse that will be mighty hard to overcome if the bill is ever to see the light of day.

And as if the public option wasn’t problematic enough, there is an even bigger issue looming overhead. The Republicans and moderate Democrats also oppose the use of government money to fund abortions, and they will undoubtedly insist on adding a provision to the bill explicitly and completely banning it. Of course their counterparts on the left take the opposite position, meaning that health care reform of any real substance will probably never see the light of day.

The Republicans in Congress have offered a health care reform bill of their own which focuses primarily on fixing what is broken instead of rebuilding the health care system from the ground up. In my opinion, this is the most sensible approach. Simply enacting effective tort reform to put an end to frivolous yet outrageously expensive lawsuits and allowing all insurers to compete in every state will do wonders for making health care more available and more affordable for everyone without reducing the quality and availability of service.

Completely destroying the best health care system in the entire world in order to fix a few relatively minor problems makes about as much sense as removing a vital organ to relieve a toothache, and in the end it would be just about as effective. And thanks to the apparently irreconcilable differences on the abortion issue, I seriously doubt if that will happen any time soon.