OPINION:
Five years ago — almost to the day — President Obama told lawmakers and the American public in a specially called joint session of Congress on health care reform that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion.”
Then, in an 11th-hour ploy to garner a remnant of pro-life congressional Democrats absolutely needed for passage of Obamacare, the president issued an executive order on March 24, 2010, that said: “The Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to newly created health insurance exchanges.”
It turns out that those ironclad promises made by the president himself are absolutely untrue.
Agree or disagree with public funding of abortion — a significant majority of Americans oppose it — but no one likes to be misled or deceived.
At its core, the Hyde Amendment has two parts. It prohibits funding for abortion and funding for any insurance plan that includes abortion except in the case of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
A blockbuster Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday documents massive new public funding of abortion in the president’s health care law.
Like so many of the president’s broken promises that litter the political landscape, the GAO has found that in 2014, taxpayers are funding more than 1,000 Obamacare health plans that subsidize abortion on demand — even late-term abortion — decimating the Hyde Amendment, which the president said he would honor.
Among GAO’s findings: Every Obamacare taxpayer-subsidized health insurance plan in New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island and Hawaii pays for abortion on demand. In New York, a whopping 405 out of 426 Obamacare plans subsidize abortion on demand; in California, it’s 86 of 90; in Massachusetts, 109 of 111; in Oregon, 92 of 102; in Washington, D.C., 23 of 34.
According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate in April, between 2014 and 2024, taxpayer subsidies to buy Obamacare health plans will total $855 billion, making taxpayers unwittingly complicit in abortion.
The GAO also found that even an accounting trick embedded in Obamacare requiring premium payers to be assessed a separate monthly abortion surcharge is being completely ignored. This surcharge would have added some modicum of transparency so individuals would know whether they are purchasing a pro-life or pro-abortion health insurance plan if faithfully implemented. Then-Sen. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, summed up the plain meaning of the law: “You have to write two checks.” According to the GAO, none of the 18 insurance companies it interviewed are billing the abortion surcharge separately. None. So much for the rule of law.
Last year, members of Congress and some staff were barred from any further participation in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan and compelled to go on to the Obamacare exchanges. After months of misinformation, obfuscation and delay, I finally learned that of the 112 health plans offered on the exchange for my family, 103 paid for abortion on demand — a clear violation of the Smith Amendment, a Hyde-like abortion funding ban I first sponsored in 1983.
Americans throughout the country have raised serious concerns that they find it nearly impossible to determine whether the plan they purchase finances the killing of unborn children. There is little or no transparency; hence, the request by several members of Congress, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, that the GAO investigate.
To end Mr. Obama’s new massive funding of abortion on demand, last January the House of Representatives passed my bill — the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act, HR 7.
When Sen. Harry Reid was a member of the House, he was as pro-life as Henry Hyde. Now, as Senate majority leader, he has refused to even allow a vote on HR 7’s Senate companion bill. On behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable, I respectfully ask that he reconsider.
Chris Smith is a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey.
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