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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Thursday, November 12th.

I'm John Dickerson here with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

We are at the historic 6th and I synagogue with many of our close friends who have joined us here for our third live show.

Thank you all for being with us.

We're going to start with our first topic is going to be health care reform.

Our second topic will be the presidency of Barack Obama, which we talked about at our first

live political gab fest.

And then the third topic will be, we've changed the third topic around.

And so the third topic will be the Fort Hood shooting and an article by David Brooks, which started a heated discussion among the members of the Gab Fest.

So let's start with the first one, which is health care reform, Emily.

Passed the House over the weekend to great fanfare.

The President said it was a historic achievement. Now suddenly 40 House members have said they will

renege on their support of the measure that passed the House. Why did they do that?

This bill, this Stupak Amendment really changes the status quo, which the president had been told on abortion, which the president had really been trying to hold on to.

The status quo is that federal Medicaid funding does not go directly to providing abortion services.

There are 17 states that put their own Medicaid funding toward abortions, however.

And so that meant there's been a precedent for dividing the federal money that goes to cover

other services from the state money for abortion.

That was how it was supposed to originally work in the health insurance exchange, which will

be set up for people who don't have employer-based health care,

...