Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Obama Abortion Ban
Clock Ticks on Stopping Abortion Ban in Insurance Pools
01 year ago
About 48,000 people have petitioned against the Obama administration’s plan to make sick women pay for health care by sacrificing their reproductive rights.
Though tens of millions of uninsured Americans won’t see much change until the major reforms kick in around 2014, the Obama administration will in the meantime set up short-term “high-risk insurance pools,” to cover people who would otherwise be blocked from the private insurance market due to “preexisting conditions.” But the planned guidelines for this limited program contain a catch: no abortion coverage. So after the public comment period ends later this month, the administration will be poised to force an unprecedented abortion restriction on women who are conveniently desperate for any kind of health care.
As I’ve mentioned before, this quiet concession to the anti-abortion lobby isn’t just unethical and unhealthy from a reproductive justice standpoint; it’s also legally unnecessary. Despite similar existing restrictions in other federal programs, and Office of Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle’s insistence that “no new ground has been broken,” the near-total ban would be a fresh blow to abortion access. Jessica Arons at the Center for American Progress pointed out that the new restrictions would undermine abortion access across the board by impacting even those abortions financed by private (not taxpayer) funds.
The irony of this “reform” is that high-risk insurance pools are supposed to serve as a “bridge” for people historically excluded by the industry. This includes many women suffering from conditions like diabetes or cancer, which disproportionately impact the poor and people of color. So for marginal relief from medical apartheid, those women will just have to avoid unwanted pregnancy for the next few years, or they’ll wind up sick, pregnant and in deep trouble.
While the insurance-pool rules aren’t yet finalized, the ban could play into a much larger conservative strategy to capitalize on health care reform. It’s no surprise that the abortion rights of the sickest and most vulnerable women are the first to be attacked, but this may just be a practice run for an all-out war on reproductive choice.
Feeling Cheap After Buying Obama’s Abortion B.S.
01 year ago
A friend of mine recently joked that President Obama is like that cute guy at the bar who you know is talking bullshit–but you take him home anyway.
That’s pretty much what happened in March when health care reform was signed into law. We took Obama home knowing he was bullshitting us about protecting a woman’s right to choose, but we told ourselves that expanding health care coverage to millions of people—especially those who can’t get insurance because of preexisting medical conditions—would surely mean that we wouldn’t totally regret things the morning after.
Well, it’s the morning after, and if we’re not having regrets, we’re certainly wondering how we could have fallen for so much crap.
Last week, Obama administration officials announced that they don’t care if a diabetic Latina is having health complications and needs to end her pregnancy. They don’t care if she got the advice from a doctor. If she’s in the new pools, she can’t get an abortion, regardless of who pays for it. This, even though Obama and Congress made no mention of banning abortion when they agreed to grant health insurance right away to people who have pre-existing conditions and thus struggle to get private coverage. The full law won’t kick in until 2014.
That’s the worst part of this story: Obama doesn’t have to ban abortion in this part of the health care law. He doesn’t have to support our country’s two-tier abortion system, in which a woman working at Goldman Sachs can pay for the procedure as easily as she does her weekly manicure, while a woman cobbling dollars from cleaning jobs and family loans must travel to a clinic that does the abortion and pay for it out of pocket.
Yes, when health care reform passed in March, Obama signed an Executive Order saying the feds wouldn’t cover abortions—in the new insurance exchanges that start in 2014 or in community health centers, which serve the poor and undocumented immigrants. But nothing in either the executive order or the new federal law bans abortion for the temporary pools.
The law actually leaves the decision of abortion coverage to states, which is why Pennsylvania health officials thought they could have a program that paid for the procedure when doctors deemed it necessary.
But when Pennsylvania’s proposal–necessary abortion included–was approved by the feds, the National Right to Life Committee freaked and the Obama administration caved, clarifying that abortion wouldn’t be covered in the temporary pools, regardless of who paid for it.
Although the phrase “pre-existing conditions” sounds like a fancy way to say cancer, private health insurance companies use it as an umbrella term for anything they might have to pay more than $10 for. This covers everything from a terminal illness to heart disease and diabetes—the latter being conditions that are prevalent in communities of color, where seeing a doctor or getting the right meds has long been a luxury.
More than one in six Latinos has a pre-existing medical condition that private health insurance would find suspect, and the number’s probably higher since more than a quarter of Latinos hadn’t visited a doctor in 2007. And while the image of a grandma, or at least someone well into her 40s, might be conjured up by the phrase as well, about one in six college-age adults have something in their medical records that would make them ineligible for private insurance.
Oh, but wait. Obama did think about young people. There are millions of dollars for abstinence-only programs included in the health care law.
The best that can be said is that Obama’s not doing a complete about face. Under the temporary program for people with pre-existing conditions, the feds will still pay for an abortion if the woman’s about to die or has been raped by a stranger, a date or her father. That’s the kind of generosity we’ve seen from the federal government since the Hyde amendment was tweaked in the late ’70s to cover such exceptions.
It’s more than probable, of course, that Obama is bowing to anti-abortion forces because he’s worried about the mid-term elections, where Democrats are expected to be the underdogs. He knows that voters who care about women’s reproductive health have nowhere else to go on Election Day but the Democratic line—which is why we keep taking him home from the bar in the first place.
White House Bans Abortion Coverage in New High-Risk Pools
01 year ago
Post has been updated since original publication
The Obama administration is poised to extend the reach of federal restrictions on abortion funding to new high-risk insurance pools, a supplementary system for people at risk of being shut out of ordinary private insurance due to preexisting medical conditions. The pools will exist until 2014, when new rules that ban providers from rejecting people based on preexisting conditions begin. This basically means that the spirit of the notorious Stupak amendment, which would have broadly preempted any federally supported insurance program from covering abortion services in the new health care system, has become reality.
For many reform advocates, 2010 will be a banner year for health care, as states begin setting up insurance exchanges and other measures to broaden access for the uninsured. But many in the reproductive rights community fear it could also be the year that an uphill struggle turns into a losing battle. In the states and in Washington, lawmakers are chipping away at abortion rights bit by bit.
Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress explains that the Obama administration claims the step is simply carrying out the status quo of the Hyde amendment, a longstanding restriction on abortion funding in federal programs like Medicaid. In reality, however, the policy precedent the Obama administration used to justify this new ban, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, is more pernicious because it blocks women from even spending their own money on abortion services within the plan:
The FEHBP, like the Stupak Amendment, imposes a total ban on non-Hyde abortion care, meaning that non-federal money cannot be used to supplement premiums in order to purchase a plan that includes abortion coverage. Thus, without even any political or legislative benefit to receive in exchange, the Obama Administration has imposed a more restrictive abortion funding rule on PCIPs than is required for health insurance exchanges or Medicaid. (Emphasis added.)
And who gets to be the guinea pig for these enhanced restrictions? The women least able to protest, of course:
Women entering these plans are, by definition, those who have experienced serious medical conditions–so serious that insurers are unwilling to sell them insurance. In other words, those who get pregnant are already at a heightened risk for needing an abortion for health reasons when compared to the general population.
The high-risk pools haven’t been implemented yet, so we don’t know who will be most affected. But because the women who match this profile currently suffer a debilitating health condition, they are also, by definition, far more likely to be of color. The plague of racial health disparities–including both poor health and a lack of insurance–has found a new breeding ground, ironically in a federal program designed to remedy those very inequalities.
But while the Obama administration has meekly rolled over for the GOP and the anti-abortion lobby, it’s really the state houses that are doing the heavy lifting. As we pointed out previously, state lawmakers from Oklahoma to Missouri are devising novel ways to strip away a woman’s right to choose, like forcing them to undergo ultrasounds before an abortion. By far the most effective anti-abortion tactic, though, is to make sure women are too poor to get one. In Virginia, reports NARAL’s Tarina Keene, assembly members have approved a bill that would provide state funds for abortion if the woman’s health faces substantial endangerment. Again, the sickest and the poorest women are explicitly targeted by this bill–just to save the state roughly $150,000.
Moreover, it’s an open secret in Washington that the abortion rates of Black and Latina women are higher than others due to a variety of often misunderstood, and typically ignored, social factors like poverty and inadequate preventive health care.
And so now we come full circle in the doomed cycle of inadequate care, eroding health, and crisis passed on from generation to generation. 2010 has been a big year for health care reform, but the families on whose backs those legislative victories were won have little to celebrate.
Photo: White House