Every man, woman and child will be required to pay into abortion fund
While Harry Reid and Ben Nelson have tried to sell us on the notion that no federal funds will be used to pay for abortions, the reality is that they have lied. Or, at the very minimum, chosen words very carefully to hide the truth.
Instead, they are playing accounting tricks. Instead of using ‘federal funds’ to pay for abortion, President Obama and Reid’s bill mandates that plan administrators must charge every person enrolled in a health care plan, in order to fund abortions for other people. Representative John Boehner explains:
Under Reid’s “manager’s amendment,” there is no prohibition on abortion coverage in federally subsidized plans participating in the Exchange. Instead the amendment includes layers of accounting gimmicks that demand that plans participating in the Exchange or the new government-run plan that will be managed by the Office of Personnel Management must establish “allocation accounts” when elective abortion is a covered benefit (p. 41). Everyone enrolled in these plans must pay a monthly abortion premium (p. 41, lines 5-8), and these funds will be used to pay for the elective abortion services. The Reid amendment directs insurance companies to assess the cost of elective abortion coverage (p. 43), and charge a minimum of $1 per enrollee per month (p. 43, lines 20-22).
Ed Morrissey of Hot Air details how HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius praises the public funded abortion mandate:
What constitutes the notion of “public funds”? If the government forces us to pay into a fund, and then controls the distribution of those funds, are those funds not “public”? Morgen at Verum Serum catches a portion of an interview between HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and BlogHer interviewer Morra Aarons-Mele yesterday, in which Sebelius praises the abortion-funding language in the Reid bill, as it maintains a flow of funds for abortion coverage that everyone — and she means everyone — supplies
Obama, Reid and company are using carefully worded public statements and accounting tricks to try and fool people into believing that the abortion ‘compromise’ is a real compromise. In fact, all they have done is switched from using federal tax dollars to fund abortions to mandating that everyone pays at least $1 into an abortion fund.
Apparently pro-choice doesn’t extend to giving us the choice whether or not we want to fund other people’s abortions.