Anti-abortion groups have protested the inclusion of tax-payer funded abortions in health care proposals for weeks, but current proposals from Senate and House committees are stirring up opposition from both sides of the abortion debate.
Proposed health reform legislation in Congress establishes a health insurance exchange where individuals and employers may choose between public and private insurance options. The plans would allow for the new government-funded insurance option to cover abortions.
Federal funds for abortions are currently allocated only in instances of rape, incest, and danger to the health of the mother. Anti-abortion groups argue that these restrictions be extended to health insurance sold through the health insurance exchange.
But abortion rights supporters are concerned that such a measure would deny abortions to the millions of women that would switch to the marketplace if the proposals are signed into law.
The abortion battle is yet another controversial obstacle facing President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.
“We want to see people who have no health insurance get it, but this is a sticking point,” said Richard Doerflinger, associate director of pro-life activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to the Associated Press. “We don’t want health care reform to be the vehicle for mandating abortion.”
The House Energy and Commerce health care bill, approved last week, reached a compromise that allows the public insurance plan to cover abortions with beneficiary premiums, rather than federal funds. Private plans in the new health care exchange would opt to cover abortions, and no federal subsidies would be provided to pay for the procedures.
The public and private health exchange plans in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee proposal would cover abortion without funding restrictions.
Abortion coverage is widely available in the private insurance market. A Guttmacher survey from 2002 found that 87 percent of typical employer plans cover abortion procedures.
But the health care overhaul would add an unprecedented amount of federal funding into the insurance market, and abortion opponents are strictly opposed to any public funding of abortions. They argue that only private plans should have the option of covering abortions.
“It’s a sham,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life to the Associated Press. “It’s a bookkeeping scheme. The plan pays for abortion, and the government subsidizes the plan.”
Abortion rights supporters are expressing concern over efforts to single out abortion from other medical procedures in the health care plans.
“We will mobilize our activists to call on fair-minded members of Congress to reject these extreme and divisive measures that are designed solely to derail the entire health-reform effort,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a statement Friday.
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