Pro-life groups are speaking out against a bill touted as a bipartisan “fix” to Obamacare because it would continue to subsidize abortions.
The legislation, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander, a Republican, and Patty Murray, a Democrat, would provide taxpayer-funded subsidies to insurers for two years and allow states more flexibility to change rules about Obamacare insurance plans, according to The Hill.
March for Life Action President Tom McClusky said they oppose the bill because it continues to force taxpayers to subsidize abortion.
“When Obamacare passed in 2010 with no Hyde Amendment language attached, we saw the largest expansion of government funding for abortion since Roe v. Wade,” McClusky said. “The healthcare bill proposed by Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray would only continue to prop up this failing system, appropriating more than $21 billion in new money that will help subsidize plans covering elective abortion.”
He referred to polls that consistently show that most Americans oppose taxpayer funding for abortions.
“Press Secretary Sanders made it clear that the president ‘would like to see a healthcare bill that does not include funding for abortion’; March for Life Action agrees, and joins the President and Speaker of the House in opposing the current Alexander-Murray bill,” McClusky continued.
The Fiscal Times reports the Alexander-Murray bill likely has enough support to pass the U.S. Senate, but approval by the U.S. House and President Donald Trump is less certain. The Hill reports Trump gave “mixed signals” during a meeting about the legislation Tuesday with Republican Senators.
U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Kevin Brady, both Republicans, also introduced a rival bill that The Hill describes as “more conservative.”
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he will not bring up the Alexander-Murray bill for a vote, regardless of its support in the Senate, unless Trump supports it.
In 2014, a non-partisan Government Accountability Office report documented massive new public funding of abortion in pro-abortion President Barack Obama’s healthcare law.
The GAO report also found that nearly all of the insurance issuers sampled are not itemizing the required separate abortion surcharge on its bills – confirming that the Obama Administration is ignoring the law’s abortion accounting gimmick.
GAO found that in 2014, taxpayers funded more than a thousand Obamacare health plans that subsidize abortion on demand—even late-term abortion—in defiance of the Hyde Amendment that Obama publicly said he would honor.
According to the Congressional Budget Office April 2014 estimate, between 2014 and 2024, taxpayer subsidies to buy Obamacare health plans will total $855 billion, making taxpayers unwittingly complicit in abortion.
GAO found that even an accounting trick embedded in Obamacare requiring premium payers to be accessed a separate monthly abortion surcharge is being completely ignored. The surcharge would have added some modicum of transparency so individuals would know whether they are purchasing a pro-life or pro-abortion health insurance plan if faithfully implemented.
