Yet another Obamacare broken promise
During the congressional debate over Obamacare, the law's defenders became indignant whenever critics suggested that the law would fund elective abortions.
President Obama was adamant about this: “Under our plan,” he said, “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” He denounced those saying otherwise as merely trying “to kill reform at any cost.”
When the bill finally did pass, former Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., insisted on the House floor that Democrats had “stood up for the principle of no public funding of abortions.”
One Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Steve Driehaus, actually sued the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List PAC under Ohio's political false-statement law after group posted a billboard that equated his vote for Obamacare to a vote for government-funded abortion.
That case ended last week when a federal judge struck down the Ohio speech law altogether. But according toa new report from the Government Accountability Office — a non-partisan watchdog agency within the federal government — the billboard was also correct on the merits. Obamacare is in fact subsidizing elective abortions, circumventing existing restrictions in federal appropriations law, just as Obamacare's detractors predicted before passage.
GAO identified 1,036 subsidized Obamacare insurance plans that cover elective abortion. It then studied a sample of 18 Obamacare providers and found that 15 — or five-sixths of them — are simply ignoring the flimsy safeguards put in place against abortion funding in order to convince skittish Democrats (like Driehaus and Stupak) to vote for it.
Under Obamacare, taxpayers subsidize premium payments for about 5.4 million Americans. In order to avoid having money flow to abortions, the government theoretically requires small, separate premium payments from those who want the procedure covered, and separate, non-subsidized insurance pools.
In practice, GAO found that “all but three issuers” in their sample of 18 are ignoring the requirement and suffering no negative consequence. Only six of the 18 issuers reported giving their online customers any indication of whether a given plan covers abortion.
In five states (Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont), every single insurance plan subsidized under Obamacare includes elective abortion coverage. There is no other option for anyone interested, unless they are willing to forgo subsidies or go without coverage.
This may seem like a small issue in a big law, but to dismiss it for that reason would be wrong-headed. It's not just that even minimal government abortion funding is offensive to many Americans. It is also important because it illustrates again that Obamacare would never have gotten through Congress if its backers had spoken honestly.
Obamacare would not have passed if not for the promise that Americans who liked their health care plans could keep them. It would not have passed if not for the false promise that the law would lower premiums and health care costs. Now add to these falsehoods the new revelation from GAO: If not for the false promise that Obamacare would not generate a new source of government funding for abortions, Obamacare would never have become law.
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