Gibson's take on Stupak

For a very different take from my own on this, see David Gibson's piece over on Politics Daily. David thinks that the pro-life folks did compromise by not standing in the way of contraceptive coverage and sex educution--which strikes me as de minimis. The key question, though, is whether the idea of segregating the funds was just an accounting fraud--as the Atlantic's Megan McArdle claims: 

The fact is, on a pooling basis--and that's the level at which the federal government operates--giving someone money to buy insurance that covers abortions is exactly the same thing as directly paying for their abortions. The original compromise, segregating the funds so that the federal subsidy wouldn't pay for the abortion part, was a transparently ineffective gimmick.

Maybe I'm a dope, but I don't see why that should be the case. Of course money's fungible. But what's the difference between segregating the funds as the compromise proposed or having the same insurance company deposit the dollars it receives from its abortion-covering and non-abortion-covering policies in the same bank account? A particular dollar from a no-abortion policyholder could end up going to pay for an abortion, if you choose to look at it that way. But the point is, once all the dollars go into the account, it's meaningless to ask whose they were. The relevant question, under the compromise, is whether there would be enough money in the segregated account--i.e. non-federal dollars--to pay for the number of abortions provided. And that's why God created actuaries.

In re: Gibson, it's perhaps worth noting that there are lot of liberal Catholics (viz. Michael Sean Winters) out there who are, in fact, pro-life (let's call them Common Good Catholics as opposed to Catholics for Choice). It's just that, unlike their conservative co-religionists, they have been prepared to support non-pro-life health care reform for the sake of what they take to be the greater good of (near) universal health coverage. But at the same time, it's very hard for them to oppose pro-life amendments once these make it into legislation.

Let me once again opine that it would have been not only politically smart but accurate for the House leadership to call the subsidies "health care vouchers." Voucherization has been the preferred conservative approach to laundering tax dollars in order, for example, to dispose of Establishment Clause problems. If a citizen's objection to paying for someone else's religious school is solved by turning her tax dollars into a school voucher, why isn't a citizen's objection to paying for someone's abortion solved by turning her  tax dollars into a health care voucher? Especially since using tax dollars to pay for religious schools directly is unconstitutional whereas using tax dollars to pay for abortions is not.