JuridicsUSA: Lawmaking Process: Healthcare Insurance Reform reaches the Senate Floor

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada) has entered a peak moment of his longtime public service, having successfully herded his majority to group-write a Senate version of a Healthcare Insurance Reform bill.  He deserves credit for getting the law out of committee and onto the full Senate floor for debate, and ultimately passage or failure in just that attempt.  The vote was 60 for bringing the committee's draft to the floor for debate, while 36 opposed. 

A handful of Democrat centrists say they can't support the government-sponsored health-insurance plan -- known as the public option -- that is included in the bill. And Democrats are divided over abortion, an issue that nearly derailed the House earlier this month when it narrowly passed a health bill that blocked abortion coverage from federally subsidized insurance plans [the Stupak Proviso], including some run by private insurers.

The timing of the Manhatten Declaration signatories -- piloted thru the political waters by nonother than Chuck Colson, in creating a new social-conservative moralistic alliance led by Roman Catholic prelates, evangelical preachers, and even some Orthodox hierarchs--has been quite breathtaking.  Christian ecumenicity around anti-abortion, anti-Gay extremism (they want to crush 2women unions, and 2men unions -- whether or not any given state of the Union wants non-marriage recognitions of other kinds of actually existing intimate unions, in need of legal reception and regulation instead of endangered in some legal twil+t zone.  These types of law shoud be determined regionally, not one type for all 50 states.

To my mind, a more porous overall pattern shoud obtain so that the country itself becomes self-aware as a pluriformity of mores (as evidenced by morally-differentiated communities) with some regional variation of population densities, so as to occasion some refuge somewhere for its "deviant" nativeborn, resultantly acknowledging a morally-differentiated society that consists, in part,  of different moral communities.   Somewhere in the overall pattern there have to be geographical sociographical locations where alternative mores are permitted full expression and may set the public tone there in those places, as in Cape Cod, the Florida Keys, and neiborhoods in San Fransisco.  The malingering problem is that states/Federal division of powers and responsibilities, as provided in the US Constitution, needs to be rethawt in terms that acknowledge who actually is born into and immigrates into our country and exists in the overall empirical diversity of our society.

Another growing concern even as the bill progresses is the political heat on Democrats over expanded government spending amid rising unemployment and deficit concerns.  "We simply cannot ignore the growth in the federal government," said Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of those centrists. She was the last Democrat ahead of the vote to declare her support, ensuring Democrats would have the 60 they needed to overcome Republican stalling tactics. But she and other holdouts warned that doesn't mean they'll support final passage.

The latter point is quite reasonable, since there doesn't yet exist a final text.  The group-writing process of our democratic-republican lawmaking is just now going into action in the full US Senate, or has that process been put off, to sometime after Thanksgiving?, or after Christmas and New Year's.

Finally, there's the problem of the double jeopardy into which Lesbian couples are put by the anti-woman bias in American medicine, most recently signalled by the proposed rationing of mammographs to certain age levels of women.  

-- Lawt