Jerry Nadler: “I was going to use my minute to talk about how this is a total red herring and this debate should not be about abortion…”

“I was going to use my minute to talk about how this is a total red herring and this debate should not be about abortion because the bill does not talk about abortions. Then the amendment that I wrote and negotiated over a period of 6 months with doctors and nurses is cited by the gentleman on the other side as an abortion amendment. It has nothing to do with abortion. The purpose of section (e) is to say that a group of doctors cannot negotiate with the HMO an agreement that says they may not pay nurses more than x dollars an hour. It is to prevent one group of professionals, doctors generally, from saying that nurses may not do certain things that the law says they may do. That fear was expressed by the nurses, the physical therapists, the chiropractors; and we carefully negotiated language in this section with the doctors, the nurses, the chiropractors and the physical therapists to prevent the bill from being used by one group of health care practitioners to exclude or limit the reimbursement of another group of health care practitioners. It has nothing whatsoever to do with abortion, period. It is just completely irrelevant to it. This bill says nothing about abortion pro or con.”