Obama Officials Won’t Apply Abortion Funding Limits to Full Health Care Program
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
July 29, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Although the Obama administration promised it will limit federal taxpayer funding of abortions in the new high risk health insurance programs created under the ObamaCare law President Barack Obama signed into law, officials have said the limits are temporary and apply only to the new program.
As LifeNews.com reported today, the Obama administration appears to have bowed to pressure from pro-life groups that discovered it had authorized abortion funding in three states under the new high risk health insurance programs.
White House Office of Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle offered further explanation of the new regulation on the official White House blog.
There she admitted that, "The program’s restriction on abortion coverage is not a precedent for other programs or policies given the unique, temporary nature of the program and the population it serves."
Douglas Johnson, the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, responded in an email to LifeNews.com.
“Without blinking, the Obama Administration had approved high-risk pool plans submitted by at least three states that would have funded virtually all abortions – until NRLC raised the alarms starting on July 13," he said.
“This entire episode demonstrates what National Right to Life said in March – there is no language in the new health care law, and no language in Obama’s politically contrived March 24 executive order, that effectively prevents federal subsidies for abortion on demand,” Johnson added.
“This means that unless Congress repeals the health care law or performs major corrective surgery on it, there will be years of battles, as each new program is implemented, over how elective abortion will be covered – and the White House is suggesting that today’s policy will not necessarily be applied when implementing the other programs, some of which will cover far larger populations," he continued.
“Lawmakers who voted for the gravely flawed bill must be held accountable, because we warned them that it left numerous doors open for federal subsidies for abortion,” Johnson said.
The NRLC legislative director told LifeNews.com that the recent FactCheck article backs up his group’s contention that the Obama administration funded abortions and will have to be held accountable every step of the way to ensure that the abortion funding is removed.
“It would be easy to miss the fact that Pennsylvania’s official solicitation called for coverage of all state-legal abortions,” FactCheck.org observed.
And on July 14, the Associated Press confirmed an NRLC report that New Mexico was enrolling people in the new program with a prospectus that explicitly covered “elective abortions.”
Some pro-abortion advocacy groups, and some members of Congress have suggested that the Administration should allow the new high-risk pool program to pay for abortions with “private funds," but Johnson calls that a misnomer.
"It is a political scam to suggest that a federal program can pay for abortions, or anything else, with ‘private funds.’ When a federal program pays for abortions, that is federal funding of abortion," he said.
"To claim otherwise would be particularly absurd with respect to the high-risk pool program, since ‘the program is entirely funded by the federal government,’ as Nancy-Ann DeParle, head of the White House Office of Health Reform, noted in her statement posted on the White House blog today. Any funds collected from enrollees become federal funds once the government has them, and when they are spent, that is federal spending," he concluded.
Related web sites:
National Right to Life Committee – https://www.nrlc.org
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