Maybe the White House will pay attention to the Politifact deconstruction of the Democratic argument that Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment represented a quantum setback for abortion rights in the US. The St. Petersburg Times fact-checking feature labels the argument, offered in this case by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), “false.” The Stupak amendment does nothing other than maintain the status quo on barring federal funds from paying any portion of the costs of abortions:
For this item, we’ll explore whether she is correct that it puts new restrictions on abortion coverage in the private market even when women would pay their own premium.
On one issue right off the bat, we believe Lowey is misleading. The Stupak amendment — which now accounts for about four pages of the nearly 2,000-page bill — does not address the entire “private health insurance market.” Rather, it addresses how abortion coverage would be handled within the health insurance “exchanges” included in the Democratic-sponsored House health care bill. These exchanges would provide a virtual marketplace for health insurance for those who do not already have coverage through their employer or through a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid.
The exchange is designed for people who are self-employed or work for very small businesses — but it would serve at most a small fraction of Americans, since most people get their insurance either through their employer, a spouse’s employer or through existing government programs. So, by not specifying that she’s talking about how abortion coverage would be handled in the exchange, Lowey immediately makes the issue seem to affect many more people than it actually does.
And she makes an additional, and we believe more significant, misrepresentation when she says that abortion coverage would be restricted for beneficiaries “even when they would pay premiums with their own money.” …
People who choose to receive the subsidies would indeed face more significant restrictions on abortion coverage. If they want a plan with abortion coverage, they would have to buy a separate, add-on plan for abortion coverage known as a “rider,” using their own money.
But Lowey said the amendment “puts new restrictions on women’s access to abortion coverage in the private health insurance market even when they would pay premiums with their own money.” We believe that Lowey’s formulation is, at best, misleading. The people who would truly pay all of the premium with their own money — and who would not use federal subsidies at all — are not barred in any way from obtaining abortion coverage, even if they obtain their insurance from the federally administered health exchange.
Women who seek abortions now have to use their own money to pay for them, even if they are eligible for Medicaid or other government-funded health insurance. The Stupak language just maintains that status quo. It does nothing to make abortions illegal or even make private insurance coverage for abortions more difficult to obtain than it is now. All it does is ensure that insurance plans offered through the health-insurance exchanges do not cover abortions (as the consumer gets federal subsidies to purchase them), and that any abortion coverage is purchased outside of the exchange and its subsidies.
When Obama talks about being concerned that Stupak has somehow transformed the status quo, he’s either badly informed on what it actually does or is being entirely disingenuous as a predicate to strip the language in committee. Politifact has it right; it preserves the status quo and does nothing to interfere with the current ability of women to get abortions on their own.
However, Politifact addresses another argument from pro-abortion advocates that relates much more closely to another issue conservatives have with the bill:
Some in the abortion-rights community do actually make a stronger case that the amendment would harm individuals who pay for their coverage without subsidies. This line of argument involves what insurance companies might do from a business perspective in response to the amendment.
Some critics say that the amendment throws up enough obstacles against offering abortion coverage on the health exchange — particularly the requirement to offer two separate plans, one of them without abortion provisions — that insurers will simply take the path of least resistance and offer a single plan that leaves out abortion coverage. Some also argue that companies will be reluctant to offer riders for abortion coverage, or that there won’t be much demand for them. This could indirectly diminish the abortion coverage options for people on the exchange who don’t take subsidies, even though the law doesn’t limit their options directly.
This is a “price signals” argument that actually plays into the debate over “comparative effectiveness” panels and the public option. The argument here is that the lack of publicly-funded coverage (and a lack of demand) will disincentivize insurers from offering abortion-coverage riders. The same could be said about the price signals from “recommendations” in the government plan over which treatments to cover, for whom, and when, made by the Comparative Effectiveness Panel. Those defending the CEP argued that they only applied to government-payer programs, but this argument seems to accept the price-signals argument that the Left categorically rejected with the comparative-effectiveness panel controversy.
If insurers opted out of abortion coverage thanks to price signals from the health-insurance exchanges, then certainly insurers would take signals on claims based on CEP decisions and their impact on compensation to providers — and the ranges of options for treatment would narrow for everyone.
At any rate, the anger over the Stupak amendment is either misplaced, or a byproduct of the Left having been blocked from pulling a bait-and-switch on health care to get federally-funded abortions. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter rather than the former.
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