Abortion deal is broadly despised
WASHINGTON – The abortion language added to the Senate’s health care bill to win the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., has achieved a rare feat: It is drawing contempt from both sides.
That could be taken as a sign that senators finally found an elusive compromise on a thorny issue. But serious questions are already being raised about how the new language would work in practice and whether it would even be feasible to implement.
“This is why it’s being attacked by both sides – not because it’s so moderate but because it’s crazy,” said Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University public health and law professor who criticizes the language as too restrictive, echoes that conclusion: “None of how this is supposed to work is even remotely in the bill, so I don’t know what people are thinking about it.”
The long-standing ban on federal funding for abortions has complicated congressional Democrats’ health care legislation. Medicaid bans federal funding for abortions, but 17 states and the District of Columbia allow abortions for female Medicaid enrollees paid out of their own funds. It is harder to reach middle ground in the bill before Congress, which would provide federal subsidies to millions of people to buy private health insurance plans on a new marketplace, or “exchange.”
The deal reached by Nelson and other Democrats over the weekend would allow those people to purchase insurance plans with abortion coverage. But they would have to write two separate premium checks – one to cover the bulk of their plan, and the other to cover the sliver for abortion coverage, likely a dollar or so per month.
States could also decree that no plans including abortion coverage be provided on the exchange in their state. As it stands, five states already have some sort of ban on abortion coverage.
By contrast, an amendment sponsored by Reps. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and Joe Pitts, R-Pa., that passed the House would prohibit insurers from selling plans with abortion coverage to anyone buying coverage with the help of subsidies – excluding 85 percent of customers on the exchange.
Neither the House nor Senate language would affect women who have employer-provided plans, many of which cover abortion. But it is expected that more people will go into the exchange over time for coverage, broadening the impact of its rules.
If the Senate bill passes, it will be up to a conference committee to come up with a solution. Stupak, who got 64 Democrats to vote for his amendment, has already declared the Senate language “unacceptable.”