700 Pages of New Obamacare Rules Put in Place More Abortion Funding

National   |   Tony Perkins   |   Mar 4, 2013   |   7:42PM   |   Washington, DC

If the sequester was supposed to grind government to a halt, you wouldn’t know it by the volumes coming out of Health and Human Services (HHS). On the first afternoon of the President’s doomsday, HHS was unusually productive–pumping out more than 700 new pages of ObamaCare regulations.

The deluge, one of several recent bursts of rule-making, was part of the plan to implement more taxpayer-funded abortion–but thanks to former FRCer (and current President of the Charlotte Lozier Institute) Chuck Donovan, Americans are learning more about the President’s wildly unpopular agenda.

Buried in the pages of regulatory jargon is the rule that will almost certainly expand the number of people who have low-cost abortion coverage. Until ObamaCare, Chuck points out, every federal employee health care plan excluded abortion. Friday’s rule makes it clear that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees those federal plans, will allow abortion coverage if the state does.

In other words, unless a state explicitly blocks abortion coverage, people in that state will subsidize it since ObamaCare bypasses the Hyde Amendment, the law which had stopped the government from funding health plans with abortion coverage. The result? Taxpayers will be on the hook for potentially hundreds of thousands of additional abortion subsidies.

This is historic, Chuck explains, and not in a good way. “Abortion is not health care,” he writes, “and OPM will soon be managing multi-state plans that assume it is.” Of course, the silver lining is that states can opt out of the abortion coverage in ObamaCare–and several have.

At least 18 states–Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin–have enacted legislation to ban abortion coverage in state exchanges. Others, including Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Texas, have similar laws in the works. (New Jersey tried, but failed, to pass a measure last year.) The reality is, states that don’t move to protect themselves will soon see OPM barge into their exchange and contract for one or more plans that include abortion. If your leaders haven’t passed a bill protecting taxpayers (and the unborn) from ObamaCare’s real agenda, encourage them to do so–and quickly! Barring a legislative miracle, these rules are scheduled to take effect in mid-May. And even if your state does have an abortion opt-out, it’s important to realize that your federal tax dollars are still going to Washington and cycling to other states that pay for abortion.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

 

Congressman Alan Nunnelee (R-Miss.) is doing everything in his power to pass a blanket prohibition that would block OPM from administering any plan–anywhere–that covers abortion. His bill, Stop Abortion Funding in Multi-state Exchanges Act (or SAFE), keeps the Obama administration from reaching over federal law to expand its culture of death. Encourage your congressman to sign on and help keep taxpayers, women, and children SAFE.

LifeNews Note: Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council.