Lawrence O'Donnell started his show off this Wednesday evening by stating the obvious. If we'd gotten single-payer, Medicare for all as a solution to the broken health care system in America instead of the compromise which left employers in the business of providing insurance for their employees, we wouldn't be dealing with this debacle of the Catholic Church fighting the Obama administration on whether they're going to have to cover birth control in their health care plans.

As he noted, employers and the Catholic Church shouldn't be in the business of providing health care and we should not be settling for a system that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured if they lose their jobs and can't afford to pay for the premiums that are sky high when you're out there on your own.

Sadly we're seeing our politicians and a good deal of the media gladly turning this into another culture war and trying to paint the Obama administration as waging some war on religious institutions, instead of it leading to a discussion on exactly what O'Donnell was talking about here and the fact that this debacle is proof of exactly why we should have single-payer and everyone insured at a reasonable cost instead of lining health insurance company CEO's and stockholders pockets.

Why should women in America be put in a position where birth control pills, which have health benefits beyond just preventing pregnancy, and which are a far cheaper to pay for than the cost of a woman becoming pregnant, be subjected to the whims of their employers if those employers happen to be a religious institution? It's wrong. And as O'Donnell said, this is a debate we shouldn't even be having right now, but here we are, still having arguments about birth control and listening to right-wingers try to conflate it with abortion. I feel like I died and landed back in the 1950's listening to this nonsense.