Obamacare Forcing Insurance Companies to Cover Hundreds of Planned Parenthoods

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jun 10, 2013   |   1:04PM   |   Washington, DC

When Congress approved Obamacare, pro-life groups warned the abortion industry would benefit. Now that the implementation stage of Obamacare is in full swing, new reports show hundreds of Planned Parenthood abortion businesses will be covered under it.

From the Washington Examiner newspaper:

Most of Planned Parenthood’s 750 health and abortion clinics around the nation will be covered under Obamacare, imposing a new demand on insurers who want to participate in the health care exchanges that will provide insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

While insurers currently cover doctors and health facilities in their networks, Obamacare demands that they also cover at least 20 percent of “essential community providers” in their coverage area, including Planned Parenthood, AIDS clinics, pain management centers and even alternative medicine providers.

“We’ve never covered these sorts of things,” a Wisconsin insurance provider told Secrets. Insurers said that they were just figuring out the new requirement and haven’t decided if it will raise prices. Conservative providers, however, are wary of covering Planned Parenthood.

To make it easy for insurance providers to find local essential community providers, the Department of Health and Human Services has just released a long list of approved community health providers, mostly targeted to low-income Americans. Secrets counted some 480 Planned Parenthood facilities on the HHS list, and nearly 100 AIDS clinics.

The Daily Caller also noticed Planned Parenthood will get massive funding under Obamacare:

Under Obamacare, insurers seeking certification as a “Qualified Health Plan” will be required to cover services by at least 20 percent of the available “essential community providers” in their coverage area — including health centers, family clinics, and Planned Parenthood clinics.

Based on a list of providers from the Department of Health and Human Services, Bedard counted at least 480 of Planned Parenthood’s 750 clinics that are considered “essential community providers.” The “non-exhaustive list” offers more than 17,390 options for “essential community providers” throughout the nation.

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.

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.)

People living elsewhere will be paying for abortions and everyone will be paying insurance coverage for the Planned Parenthood abortion business.