Who is your insurance with? If it’s with Aetna, you may very well have had your insurance premiums paying for someone else’s abortions.
In Missouri, Governor Jay Nixon has announced that the insurance company, Aetna, will pay $4.5 million for paying for uninsured abortions. It seems like this insurance company hasn’t learned their lesson considering they had to pay $1.5 million in 2012 for the same reason. As LifeNews previously reported, in Missouri the law is clear that the religious beliefs of business owners and employees who don’t want to fund abortion and contraception must be respected.
In fact, Section 376.805 of Missouri law clearly prohibits coverage for elective abortions in health insurance plans “except by an optional rider for which there must be paid an additional premium.” Currently, the law defines “elective abortion” as “an abortion for any reason other than a spontaneous abortion or to prevent the death of the female upon whom the abortion is performed.”
A spokesperson for the company, Roham Hutchings, said that Aetna is taking responsibility for their mistakes are trying to correct their errors.
The settlement follows a $1.5 million fine against the company in 2012 for similar claims that it violated state laws on health coverage of autism and abortions, as well as contraceptives.
Since then, Aetna reported providing nine elective abortions to women without additional insurance riders despite agreeing in the 2012 settlement to comply with those laws. The company also failed to fully audit its compliance of state insurance laws, which it said meant Aetna continued to violate state mandated coverage for autism treatments.
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Aetna faces a three-year monitoring period as part of the new settlement. The Department of Insurance can stop Aetna from conducting business in Missouri for as long as a year if the company continues to violate state laws outlined in earlier agreements.
The department will waive $1.5 million of the $4.5 million fee if Aetna complies with state law and other stipulations in that period.
In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that identifies 1,036 ObamaCare plans that cover abortion on demand and receive taxpayer subsides.
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. In other words, taxpayers are funding over a thousand Obamacare health plans that subsidize abortion on demand—even late-term abortion—in defiance of the Hyde Amendment the President publicly said he would honor.
