A Ban on Private Coverage of Abortions?

If you've been following the pro-choice response to the Stupak amendment, and you've also read the darned thing, you may be wondering how we got from point A to point B. How does the stumbling, messy language of this amendment actually produce a ban on private insurance coverage of abortions?

Rachel Morris at Mother Jones breaks it down:

Stupak's amendment doesn't just apply to the public option--the lower-cost plan to be offered by the government. The House health care bill will also provide subsidies to help people and small businesses purchase plans on an exchange. This represents a lucrative new market for insurers: anyone earning less than $88,000 for a family of four qualifies for assistance, as well as certain small companies. But to gain access to these new customers, insurers will have to drop abortion coverage from their plans.

Around 87 percent of plans cover abortion (though not all employers choose to actually include it). But under the House bill, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 21 million people will participate in the exchanges by 2019 and that 18 million of them will do so via government subsidies. In theory, insurers could create separate plans for women who don't qualify for credits but still want to buy a plan on the exchange. In reality, this is unlikely to happen, meaning that even women who purchase plans entirely with their own money in the new market may be unable to obtain one that offers abortion coverage.

In other words: yes, it really is this bad, but it doesn't start off that way, and that's what makes it so dangerous. The Stupak amendment is either a badly-worded compromise bill or an end-run private-carrier abortion ban. Conventional wisdom says that members of Congress know exactly how the bills they're voting for work, and word everything intentionally, but in practice that isn't usually how it works. Legislators vote for bills they haven't read, and write bills they don't understand, all the time. If this is an honest misunderstanding, there's plenty of time to remove the offending language in conference--but we're wise to put pressure on the Senate until there's good evidence that this will happen.

Not that the bill is all bad news. As About.com: Women's Issues guide Linda Lowen points out, the bill does a great deal to address gender disparities in our health care system. Assuming we can get the Stupak amendment ironed out, this legislation is very, very good news for women.

But we shouldn't be satisfied with that assumption. We should make our voices heard.

Related: Is Health Care a Human Right? | Why is Abortion Legal?