Mikulski began by pointing out that a “pro-life” position should start with allowing pregnant women access to health care. Maternity coverage is something women can’t get in Colorado unless they’re on a government or employer-sponsored plan.

If you want people to have healthy pregnancies, healthy childbirth, healthy babies, they need access to health care. So that’s why I say that voting for universal access to health care is as pro-life as you can be.

Sen. Mikulski followed that comment up with a description of the pro-life position the Senate bill would take toward women–including a reference to Peggy Robertson, the Colorado woman who was told she couldn’t get health insurance unless she agreed to be sterilized.

This bill ends the punitive practices of insurance companies against women, particularly in the area of gender discrimination, where we pay more and get less in our benefit package, and also where simply being a woman is often treated as a pre-existing condition.

Eight states consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition, and you can’t get insurance. One woman who had a medically mandated C-Section was told she couldn’t get insurance again unless she had a sterilization.

Coerced sterilization in the United States of America?

I thought that’s what they did in Nazi Germany?

But Sen. Mikulski saved her best rhetoric for the concept of an “abortion rider”:

It also allows women to purchase an abortion rider. Oh, boy, is this supposed to be a big deal? Is this supposed to be the kind of thing that’s supposed to make us happy? What an insulting, humiliating thing to say:  If you want an abortion, go buy a rider.

I think it demonizes women. Why don’t you just go into the workplace and paint a scarlet letter on your head? Hawthorne still lives in the Nelson Amendment. Let’s get an “A.” Let’s paint the “A” word on your forehead. Can you believe this?

I don’t know of any individual woman or any woman in consultation with the man that she loves and loves her saying, yeah, you know, we might have an abortion. Yeah, why don’t we buy that rider?

Nobody plans to have an abortion. It’s not the subject of what intimate conversations that families talk about as they plan their lives together.

You realize the intense discrimination a woman would face?

And how about why not have men buy an abortion rider for the women they get pregnant?

The amendment, scheduled for a vote today, is not expected to gather enough votes to pass.

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In Colorado, it’s worse yet.

As the Colorado Independent’s Katie Redding has been reporting, healthy women in this state pay much more than men who are unhealthy pay, including smokers. As much as 50 percent more. As Redding put it on Colorado’s Progressive Talk radio this Monday, “Women are being penalized for doing what they’re supposed to do– for going for regular checkups” — that is, for practicing the kind of preventative care everyone knows saves money, as well as lives.

“We have the opportunity here to change the law and to change health care,” said Mikulski.

California’s Barbara Boxer argued that health reform is about saving money, not spending it. She is making a point that time and again gets lost in a debate where splashy headlines emphasize the cost of the legislation over a decade or more– headlines like the blaring one above the fold at the Denver Post that announced the arrival of the Senate bill. The cost, hundreds of billions, seems huge floating in space unencumbered by context. Where is the corresponding tally running next to that figure of the amount we will all spend on health insurance and health care should reform fail and the industry continue along as it has been doing? In other words, how does the cost of the bill compare with the cost of doing nothing?

In her speech Boxer alludes to the fact that we’re all spending money now– at an enormous and increasing rate in a system that analysts on all sides of the political spectrum, including those paid by the health care industry, agree now fails utterly to contain costs.

“We can sit here and do nothing. We can scare people. That’s the easy thing to do.”

The Senate bill, Boxer said, will save Medicare. Republicans fought Medicare. Bob Dole bragged that he fought against it. Newt Gingrich said Let it wither on the vine.

“Well, if you ask our seniors, I think they’re the group most pleased with their coverage. It’s not perfect. But it’s critical. And we save it here. We extend the life of Medicare.”

And North Carolina’s Sen. Kay Hagan tells the harrowing story of a constituent who died of breast cancer after waiting to get a lump checked, paying in cash at last for a checkup and then being diagnosed with cancer. The woman had no coverage and no access to insurance, especially once she was diagnosed.

Anyone who has ever gone through stretches of noncoverage knows the horror of suspecting you might be sick while also dreadfully aware of the fact that no insurance company will cover you and no doctor will work on you outside an emergency room, which is no place to find a cure for a disease like cancer.

Hagan’s constituent’s story played out as a round-the-clock nightmare. She died of the cancer that was caught too late and that was insufficiently treated. Her sister emailed the story to Hagan.

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