Just what we wanted: more health care gamesmanship

Pop quiz, hotshot. You're willing to derail better access to health care at cheaper prices over abortion funding language, ensuring that 45,000 additional people are going to die each year because of an inability to get coverage... what do we call you? Pro-Life of course!

That's right, with the horrible health care shitshow kicked off again with the President imposing another useless deadline on passing legislation that they already passed, we've once again returned to Bart Stupak, the man who believes all your uterus belong to him. He popped his head back up to remind everyone that unless he gets what he wants, no health care for anyone.

The logjam is a familiar one, and comes down to simple political arithmetic. For health care reform to pass, he House must pass the Senate bill word for word, then make minor tweaks to it through the budget reconciliation process. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI)--and, if we take him at his word, about a dozen of his Democratic colleagues--say they won't vote for health care again unless the Senate's abortion language is made more restrictive--a demand that seems like a legislative impossibility.

And yeah, it seems like he can do what he says. Even though his claims about the abortion language in the bill are entirely bullshit and his quest is not one to reduce abortions for all or knock out federal funding for abortions, but to narrowly screw over poor women while pretending the government doesn't federally subsidize abortions.

One must appreciate his balls. I mean to be so committed to the pro-life ideals, that he's willing to sacrifice the general health and lives of millions of actual Americans over concerns for invisible theoretical Americans is admirable. Sure 45,000 a year croak because of gaps in our coverage and we could save an extra 100,000 if we brought our standards of coverage up to that of other Western countries and were no longer the worst in preventable death, but there's slutty poor women to persecute here. I'm just glad Stupak is living up to the maxim that life begins at conception, ends at birth. Because he's sure trying to fuck over everyone that actually got born.

I just hope no one giggles too hard around him when he talks about how concerned with life he is.