Today the national pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) and its research arm the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) sent letters to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Acting Secretary Eric Hargan and Inspector General Daniel Levinson to share their findings on health insurance carriers who, less than two weeks before the December 15 enrollment deadline, have not complied with Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) regulations requiring disclosure of abortion coverage in their Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) plan documents.
The letters ask HHS to review the carriers and take steps to bring them into compliance, ensure that current enrollees of these plans are informed when updates are made, and provide an extended enrollment deadline to consumers in the affected states.
Since open enrollment began on November 1, CLI and Family Research Council (FRC) research staff have been performing an ongoing examination of healthcare.gov and state-based exchanges, looking for information on abortion coverage and the accessibility of that information.
The lack of transparency on abortion coverage affects at least 151 exchange plans in five states. The noncompliant carriers are:
- Bright Health in Colorado (6 plans)
- Elevate by Denver Health Medical in Colorado (6 plans)
- Health Alliance Medical Plans, Inc. in Illinois (61 plans)
- Independent Health in New York (21 plans)
- Fidelis Care in New York (9 plans)
- Sendero Health Plans, Inc. in Texas (4 plans)
- Boston Medical Center HealthNet Plan in Massachusetts (5 plans)
- MVP Health Plan in New York (39 plans)
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Since October of 2013, CLI has reported on the lack of transparency and generally confusing nature of the exchange plans. In 2014, after the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report identifying 1,036 taxpayer-subsidized Obamacare plans that covered elective abortion, CLI and FRC launched Obamacareabortion.com to inform consumers about which Obamacare plans include elective abortion coverage. The groups’ 2018 fact sheet with detailed information and an interactive map are available online at Obamacareabortion.com.
SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser and CLI President Chuck Donovan commented:
“Abortion is not health care – it is the deliberate destruction of innocent human life, to which millions of Americans deeply object. Consumers deserve to know which health plans include abortion coverage before they decide on plans for themselves or their families. Shamefully, some insurance companies have made this information impossible to find or forced prospective applicants to hunt for it in an unnecessarily opaque and confusing system. That’s why we established Obamacareabortion.com and thoroughly update it each year: to serve consumers looking for plans they can purchase in good conscience, and to continually remind the public and policymakers that Obamacare forces taxpayers to fund elective abortion, something most Americans oppose.”
