How the health care reform will be "aborted"?

It has puzzled me that those opposed to health care reform have gone the insane route of using labels like socialism....when they could have scored a lot more points a lot easier by simply zooming into abortion.  Of course, I am not the first guy to have thought about this.  But, I still cannot understand why abortion did not become a populist issue in health care reform.

I mean, the logic is straightforward: if there is a "medicare for all" kind of public option, then we are looking at whether the government ought to:

• provide for services like the "pill", and pay for abortion, or
• not provide for services like the "pill" and not pay for abortion.

If the government chooses either one, then as the single largest purchaser of medical services, it will essentially set the rules for most, if not all, the private insurers too.  So, this will be a defining moment.  (Well, this is the kind of argument that leads to the "socialism" accusation, I suppose.)

And yet the opponents prefer the crazy, insane, rhetoric. 

Anyway, Slate's William Saletan summarizes the challenge really well:

The nuances of the abortion-coverage fight can be tricky, but the core of the problem is simple. Each side is willing to accept a compromise in which no federal tax dollars fund abortion. Pro-choicers have one definition of what this means: Federal money can subsidize any insurance plan, as long as the insurer doesn't use these subsidies to directly cover abortions. Pro-lifers have a more strenuous definition: Federal money can't subsidize any plan that covers abortions, since the insurer would simply take the money with one hand while writing abortion checks with the other. In a private insurance market, each side could stick to its own principles and interpretations. But a socialized market throws them together. To get what they consider neutrality, pro-choicers have to make pro-lifers pay indirectly for abortions. And to keep what they consider clean hands, pro-lifers have to make abortion coverage federally unsupportable and therefore, in a subsidy-dependent system, commercially nonviable.
So the left's argument against abortion exclusion is the right's argument against socialization.

Pretty neat summary, right?  His entire essay is a great read.  Saletan concludes:

The good news, if you're a pro-choice progressive, is that freedom-loving Americans will protect your private abortion coverage. The bad news is that they'll do it by killing health care reform.

 What a catch-22 for liberal Democrats who are some of the ardent advocates of health care reform! 
(I am in a separate minority category: I concede that abortion is murder, but that decision to kill can be made only by the pregnant mother and nobody else.  If the pregnant mother decides to abort, well, there is nothing criminal about it.)

Update: The NY Times has an editorial on this very topic.  Ha, I beat them by a few hours :-)