Tri-Committee Health Care Reform Bill Would Have Government Cover Abortions
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
June 24, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A top pro-life organization is asking members of Congress to oppose the Tri-Committee Health Reform bill in the House because it will cover abortions. The National Right to Life Committee says it opposes the legislation released June 19 and wants an abortion neutralizing amendment.
"The legislation would also authorize massive new subsidies for health coverage, without any language to prevent these subsidies from being used to fund abortion," Douglas Johnson told members of Congress in a letter LifeNews.com obtained.
"A vote for this legislation, as drafted, is a vote for tax-subsidized abortion on demand," he added.
Johnson points out how, on July 17, 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that abortion mandates would be included in his health care reform proposals, saying that "in my mind, reproductive care is essential care, basic care, so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose."
Under his plan, he said, "insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care …that’s going to be absolutely vital."
Johnson said in the letter that Planned Parenthood hasn’t forgotten that promise for government funding of abortion in health care despite the degringolade of the nation’s economy.
"As recently as late April 2009, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation’s largest abortion provider, affirmed that her organization would seek to use the health care reform legislation as ‘a platform’ to achieve universal access to abortion," Johnson writes. "Obama’s pledges, and the PPF A goal, would be fulfilled by the Tri-Committee draft."
Johnson explains that the bill would create a so-called Health Benefits Advisory Committee, with sweeping authority to determine, along with pro-abortion HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, what services must be covered in both private and government health plans.
"Unless the legislation is amended to explicitly exclude abortion (as Congress did, for example, when it created the S-CHIP program in 1997), there is not the slightest doubt that this statutory language would result in mandatory abortion coverage," he said.
Johnson is also concerned that the Tri-Committee bill, like the health care restructuring plans the Senate is currently considering, would ration health care.
"The Tri-Committee bill also contains structural components that raise the most acute concerns regarding future rationing of life-saving medical care on the basis of disability and ‘quality of life’ criteria," he said.
ACTION: Contact your member of the House at https://www.House.gov and urge opposition to the pro-abortion and rationing portions of the Tri-Committee Health Care Reform bill. Urge a vote to make sure the measure can’t cover abortions with taxpayer dollars.
Related web sites:
National Right to Life – https://www.nrlc.org
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