Joe is right that healthcare will cause even more mounting problems.
But even if they did not, I do not believe we Catholics should be in favor of universal health insurance anyway. Why? Because it is fundamentally un-Christian. Christ’s call for us to help our neighbor in need as an act of love is a far cry from government mandated and taxpayer funded healthcare insurance.

I am in favor of universal health CARE. But it needs to be done as an act of love, given freely, not forcibly under taxation. The pro-life movement need look no farther than the gift of Pregnancy Resource Centers for a model of health care provided at no charge to the recipients or to the taxpayers (also an article today in CE). They are funded almost exclusively through charitable donations of time and money. It is time we Christians STOP looking for the government to provide answers and insurance and start looking to God as our only real insurance and our God-given talents and treasures to help our neighbors.

“intractable” might mean what you show it means in english, but for those who are familiar with Latin languages, it also means non-negotiable. It shares the same roots with the word treaty. Essentially, the word means that no treaty can be made regarding abortion. Even the definition you have quoted suggests this.

But this whole article is about the phrase “kind of”. What country do you live in where you have never heard this used sarcastically before? Don’t you think this quote is a prime grammatical example of how this sarcastic phrase is used in modern English? For example, if someone asks a Catholic who has been against abortion for years, “What is your position on abortion?”, they are likely to say “umm…really? you don’t know? Well, it’s kind of intractable.”

You just didn’t see the tail-end parenthetical thought that the spokesperson said to himself: (What an idiot who doesn’t understand that the Catholic view is immutably pro-life!)

What I got out of the NYT article is that a health care bill would be great as long as Congress removes the abortion provisions. No question in my mind, that this is exactly what the USCCB intended to say. If you don’t like the verbage, call out the NYT, not the USCCB. The newspaper reporter is the one who chose which single-sentence quote to use from an entire interview of words.

But let’s not make battles where there are none.

To think that turning the anti-abortion stance of the Catholic Church into mush for the sake of federalized health care, itself not such a good idea, is the epitome of mistaken policy.

Some years ago, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus quoted a USCC (at the time) apparatchik who said in a weak moment, “The USCC is the religious arm of the Democratic Party.” Let’s have a poll–how many of those employees voted for Obama?

“Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.” If the USCCB gets their wish on federal health care, soon they will have another huge life issue on their hands, and it will spiral out of control before their many committees ever get their act together to oppose it. Encouraged suicide and euthanasia, whether direct or indirect, will become part of the package. The economics of federalized health care can’t work without it. It doesn’t matter what the health care bills themselves say, in practice this is what they bring.

“Abortion-neutral health care.” What a shameful policy.

“Blind guides!”