Pro-Life Works: Abortion and Health Exchanges

April 29, 2010

Abortion, Public Funding and Health Exchanges

Eric Brown

Membership Services Associate

On Monday, April 19, 2010, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill to prohibit any health insurance policy participating in the health exchanges established by the recent reforms from selling abortion coverage in any comprehensive plan.  The legislation clearly states:

No health care plan required to be established in this state through an exchange pursuant to federal health care reform legislation enacted by the 111th Congress shall offer coverage for abortion services.

Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, signed the widely supported bill into law (it passed in the state House 87-8 and the state Senate 29-2) to the chagrin of abortion advocates.  Tennessee is the first state to opt to ban abortion coverage in the health insurances exchanges that are required to be created by the new health care law.

A similar measure is pending in Louisiana, having already passed out of committee in the state legislature.  The bill, if enacted, would prohibit private insurance companies from covering “elective” abortion as part of any comprehensive policy.  Missouri is considering comparable legislation, but unlike Tennessee and Louisiana, already has a law prohibiting private insurance from including abortion in comprehensive plans.  The Missouri proposal reads:

           Under current law, health insurance policies are barred

           from providing coverage for elective abortions except through

           optional riders.  This act extends this prohibition to health

           insurance policies offered through any health insurance

           exchange established in this state or any federal health

           insurance exchange administered within this state.  In

           addition, no health insurance exchange operating within this

           state may offer coverage for elective abortions through the

           purchase of an optional rider.

By requiring a supplementary “rider,” Pro-Life legislators hope to keep public funds from subsidizing abortion, which could significantly decrease and ultimately eliminate the demand for abortion in private markets.  In order to have abortion coverage, one must choose to do so.  A number of demographics will forgo paying for this extra coverage—families, single men, women passed childbearing age, and various other relevant demographics.

The recently passed health care reform bill contains explicit provisions that allow individual states to prohibit abortion coverage in any insurance plan sold in the health care exchanges.  While states are passing legislation not to accept federal funds for abortion, people in those states will very much still be taxed as much as any other state to pay for the funding of abortion due to the failure of Stupak-Pitts.  This is a critical issue and the Pro-Life movement must act quickly to work against public subsidizing of abortion.

Texas Right to Life is currently looking at ways to enact a similar policy in the Texas legislative session in 2011.