WASHINGTON – Any health insurance bill Washington comes up with must ban coverage of abortion, one of the most common surgical procedures in the U.S., a group of organizations that oppose abortion has told Congress and President Obama.
The groups said they will ratchet up a campaign to ensure the "abortion mandate" is stripped from the bill.
"Abortion is not health care and does not belong in health-care reform," the president of Americans United for Life said in a letter to President Obama on Thursday.
Charmaine Yoest said her organization will oppose any bill that "fails to explicitly exclude both abortion funding and mandatory abortion coverage" and that doesn’t allow health care providers to refuse to perform abortions.
The legislation is still under development, but in one version, an independent panel of medical experts would establish a basic package of procedures that insurers would have to cover.
Groups that support abortion rights say they’d like the basic package to include abortion and all reproductive health services, but "regardless of the noise the anti-abortion folks are making, it’s just not going to happen," said Adam Sonfield, senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute.
"This administration is not going to do that, and the courts are not going to do that," he said.
Instead, he said, it should be up to insurance providers to decide what medical care they cover – just as they do now.
But to make sure that doesn’t happen, Americans United for Life and other anti-abortion groups have begun a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress and have asked their supporters to lobby hard.
They have hundreds of allies in Congress. Among them are 19 House Democrats – none from Indiana – who wrote a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., promising they would vote against any health-insurance bill that would "mandate coverage for abortions, directly or indirectly."
Thursday night, the anti-abortion groups sponsored a conference call that the organizers said attracted more than 36,000 people who were told to phone their lawmakers and write letters to the editor.
Obama had asked Congress to wrap up work on legislation by Aug. 7. The House, which assigned three committees to craft a bill, leaves for a five-week break at the end of this week. The Senate’s four-week vacation starts Aug. 7.
But congressional leaders have acknowledged that Obama’s deadline will likely slip, and last week Obama softened the time frame. Lawmakers’ negotiations over the bill were in turmoil Friday, although most of the disagreement appeared to be over its cost.
Yoest said that was the first goal of the campaign: to slow work on the legislation so abortion opponents can use the August break to encourage grass-roots supporters to lobby lawmakers when they are in their home districts.
Before the campaign began, a House committee voted along party lines against a proposal by Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, to exclude abortion from the procedures that insurance companies will have to cover.
"I’m very concerned," he said, "that this is going to lead to mandatory (insurance coverage for) abortions and/or the biggest public funding of abortions we’ve ever seen in America."
Souder said if the government says legal procedures – including abortion – must be included in private insurance packages, those plans will be forced to cover abortions even if the employer doesn’t want to include the procedure.
Or, he said, any insurance plan subsidized by the government will be required to include coverage for abortions, and that would mean taxpayers would pay for abortions.
"I think it’s an appalling approach," Souder said.
Even though polls indicate that Americans don’t want to change the legal status of abortion, they don’t want to pay for it, Yoest said.
Sonfield, of the Guttmacher Institute, said the majority of Americans with employer-based insurance coverage have abortion coverage.
"If you actually said that any plan regulated by the federal government cannot include abortion coverage, that would be taking it away from millions of Americans who have it now," he said.
"Leaving it up to the insurance plan would be maintaining the status quo and maintaining what’s happening right now. It seems like a completely legitimate middle ground."
As for the issue of abortion coverage for lower-income people whose premiums would be subsidized by the federal government, Sonfield said, a middle-ground approach is to have any abortion coverage paid with private dollars, not the subsidy.
The White House has not weighed in on the debate.
In a CBS interview last week, Obama said he would "rather not wade into" the issue of whether health insurance legislation should include federal funding for abortions.
"I’m pro-choice, but I think we also have the tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care," he said. "My main focus is making sure that people have options of high-quality care at the lowest possible price."
