How Abortion Is Being Used as a Ruse to Attack Health Care Writ Large
Those of us who were around in 2010 when Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) nearly derailed the Affordable Care Act with his ill-informed demagoguery about abortion largely thought President Obama put the abortion scare-mongering to bed by signing an executive order banning both federal funding and tax credits from being used to fund abortion. As one of those people, I have to apologize for my optimism. I should have realized at the time that the A-word is too seductive of a rhetorical weapon for conservatives to abandon just because their “principled” objection to funding it has been answered. As long as abortion can be used as a cudgel against the Affordable Care Act, then, no matter how thin or nonexistent the “justification,” use it they will.
The latest trend is for Republicans in state governments to try to keep you from using your own money to buy your own private insurance, if that insurance plan covers abortion. Emphasis added, because as much as the word “government” is being thrown around, that is what is happening in this move by states to ban the health insurance exchanges from featuring plans that have abortion coverage. Twenty-three states already ban people from using their own private money to pay for insurance coverage offered by non-government entities that just happen to sell their plans through the health insurance exchanges. Now Michigan anti-choicers are so eager to make their state the 24th that they’re going around the Republican governor to get that done.
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