oth Congress and our country are mired in an inexhaustible debate over whether to remove Planned Parenthood’s federal funding as a result of its provision of abortion. The question we ought to debate is whether the group’s executives deserve to be prosecuted as criminals.
.. The details of their wrongdoing began to emerge exactly two years ago, when the Center for Medical Progress released its grisly undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood directors haggling with prospective buyers over line-item prices for the fetal tissue of aborted babies.
.. Dozens of abortionists and technicians admitted on camera to altering abortion procedures to obtain more-profitable organs. Such alteration, along with accepting payments for fetal organs that are greater than reimbursement for their expenses, is strictly illegal under federal law.
.. Abortion defenders argue that the videos were deceptively edited to reflect Planned Parenthood in an unfavorable light. However, CMP released the full footage of its work in addition to the shorter highlight reels
.. biotech firms such as StemExpress frequently partner with Planned Parenthood affiliates and place employees within their clinics to perform all fetal-tissue-related work: organ harvesting, packaging, and shipping. In these cases, any money Planned Parenthood accepted from the firms must have been profit, not reimbursement for expenses, because the firm was incurring all the related costs itself. Firms explicitly advertise such partnerships as a way for clinics to boost profits.
.. violating the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which guarantees the right to privacy and informed consent. Clinic leaders disclosed details about specific patients and their pregnancies to biotech employees so they could persuade certain women to donate their fetuses if those fetuses could be sold for a higher profit.
.. The national organization has also instituted abortion quotas, offering rewards to clinics that meet or exceed their abortion targets.
.. A new CMP video this spring depicted Planned Parenthood employees describing having performed illegal intact partial-birth abortions and reporting their profitable partnerships to sell fetal organs. And this week, an undercover video showed a Planned Parenthood executive in Florida describing the protocol the group uses to cover up late-term dismemberment and partial-birth abortions, allowing for more-effective fetal-tissue harvesting.
.. It has been two years since the CMP first broke this story, causing an initial uproar as the public was disgusted by what it saw. But that outrage was swiftly swept under the rug by a combination of efficient Planned Parenthood PR and the complicit mainstream media.
.. Today, Congress has yet to even remove this diabolical group’s federal funding.
.. The public disagreement is due in large part to the group’s insistence that it provides essential health care and almost never performs abortions. This is a blatant lie. Not only does Planned Parenthood perform over 328,000 abortions annually
.. Defunding this group can no longer be our endgame. As if its decades of annihilating children weren’t ghastly enough, Planned Parenthood has graduated to a new level of horror. And now we have evidence enough to ensure that its executives are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The Democrats’ Biggest Problem Is Cultural
Since 1968, the party has been alienating working-class voters. President Trump is the latest result.
Democrats need to recognize a profound voter shift that has been under way since 1968 and is centered on cultural issues.
Three statements in recent years illustrate why former Democratic voters have abandoned their party.
- First, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign remark that small-town Americans “cling to guns and religion.”
- Second, Michelle Obama’s statement, also in 2008, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I am proud of my country.”
- Third, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 characterization of Trump supporters as “deplorables”: “They are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
.. Alienated by street and campus riots and disorder, these voters bought into the Nixon/Wallace law-and-order themes. Some also were attracted to their message that Great Society programs had overreached...They opposed the Vietnam War. But they were mostly interested in cultural and lifestyle issues—“
- acid,
- amnesty and
- abortion,”
as Republicans called them, picking up a line that turned out to have originated with McGovern’s first running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton. Those Democrats gave short shrift to jobs, economic growth, public safety and other traditional voter concerns... The answer to this crisis does not lie in cries of black victimization by police or other authorities. It lies instead with tangible, practical programs like those we launched in the 1960s. We purposely sought bipartisan sponsorship in Congress and enlisted labor, business, academic and other support in society more broadly... Many probably sensed that chaos and fumbling would follow. By their lights, it was an acceptable price to pay to rid themselves of leaders who had forgotten them...Congressional Democrats are right to begin construction of an alternative agenda. But as they do so, they must recognize that most Americans are not racist, sexist, ignorant or opposed to alternative lifestyles. Most largely accept the cultural and social changes of the past half-century. To recapture traditional Democratic voters, and attract new ones, Democrats must learn empathy for those who believe they are being mocked for
- working hard,
- going to church,
- serving in the military, and
- trying to instill moral standards in their children.
.. do not view them as cultural inferiors to be manipulated in campaign years. President Trump is not our problem.
Democrats to Use Senate Rules to Challenge Health Care Bill
Democrats are preparing to challenge these provisions, among others:
Planned Parenthood: The Senate Republican bill would cut off federal Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood for one year.
Age ratios: The Senate bill would let insurers charge older consumers five times as much as young adults. Under the Affordable Care Act, they can charge no more than three times as much. Democrats say the purpose of the change is purely regulatory, not budgetary
Waiting period: People who went without insurance for approximately two months in the prior year would be required to wait six months before they could start coverage under the Senate bill. Democrats say the purpose is not to save money, but to regulate insurance and to encourage people to obtain coverage without imposing an “individual mandate.”
.. Democrats are also expected to challenge a provision of Mr. McConnell’s bill that would allow states to impose work requirements on some Medicaid beneficiaries.. And they are prepared to challenge a proposal by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, that would allow insurers to sell stripped-down insurance, free of most federal regulations, if they also offered at least one plan that complied with insurance standards like those in the Affordable Care Act. Health plans could, for example, omit coverage of maternity care or mental health care.
The Good, the Bad, and the Senate Health-Care Bill
It is a function of some things they’ve come to prioritize about the individual health-insurance market and Medicaid, and some things they’ve learned about the intricacies of the Byrd rule and Senate procedural constraints.
.. After seven years of saying they want to repeal and replace Obamacare, congressional Republicans have been forced to confront the fact that many of them, perhaps most, actually don’t quite want to do that.
.. That doesn’t mean that most of them never did. The case for repeal was strongest in the three or four years between the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. As more time passes since the beginning of implementation three and a half years ago, and more people’s lives become intertwined with the program for good and bad, the case for addressing Obamacare’s immense deficiencies by repeal weakens
.. I still think it is very much the case that the cause of good policy (almost regardless of your priorities in health care) would be better served by a repeal and replacement, with appropriate transition measures, than by this sort of tinkering — you’d get more coverage, a better health-financing system, and a more appropriate role for government.
.. The president has been an additional unpredictable political constraint — as the more coherent of his musings on health care have all suggested he is not comfortable with repealing and replacing the law, or at least is unfamiliar with the tradeoffs involved and unhappy when he learns about them.
.. But another thing Republicans have learned in these six months is that Donald Trump is an exceptionally weak president, probably the weakest of their lifetimes, and he is likely to accept whatever they do. He’ll celebrate it, sitting himself front and center while they stand around him awkwardly. He’ll praise it wildly and inaccurately. And he’ll sign it — even if pretty soon thereafter, in the wake of bad press, he tries to distance himself from it on Twitter and calls them names.
.. It is pegged to a less comprehensive insurance model and will both cost less and leave more room for more variation in insurance design — though this obviously means it will be less valuable and helpful to some of the people now getting subsidies.
.. Where today, people newly covered by Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (who tend to be childless adults with relatively higher incomes than the non-expansion population) are funded by the federal government on much better terms than the traditional Medicaid population (which tends to include more women with children and people with even lower incomes), the Senate bill would gradually equalize funding for the two groups, effectively shifting Medicaid’s focus back to the most vulnerable of its beneficiaries.
.. the Senate bill would provide an income and age-based subsidy that would allow these lowest-income individuals to afford at least modest insurance coverage in the individual market.
.. the Senate bill as written would probably mean that Medicaid would cost the federal government about 30 percent more ten years from now than it does today (as opposed to about 65 percent more under current law), and would cover something like the same number of people at that point as today (as opposed to 10 million more under current law)
.. once states got their bearings about just how much it would allow them to do, we could see some genuinely different approaches to health-insurance regulation among the different states — with blue and red models, rural and urban approaches, and more and less competitive systems.
.. alters a portion of a broader pre-existing statute. But it is very broad. In its scope and structure, this redesigned waiver would be unlike anything else in American federalism — which also means we don’t know how it would work. Those of us inclined to look favorably upon a bottom-up, experimental mindset in policy design will be inclined to think the best of the possibilities here.
.. it looks like this provision would render any insurer who offers an individual-market plan that covers abortion in a given state ineligible to benefit from the stability fund in that state. It seems to me, though I can’t say I’m sure, that this would effectively mean that no insurance plans in the individual market would cover abortion. It could easily even mean that California, which has a state law requiring individual-market plans to cover elective abortion, would have to repeal that law or else forgo access to the stability fund.