Despite Pelosi’s denials, taxpayer-funded abortions appear 8 times in Senate bill
Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) voted for the House Obamacare bill last year. The key to his vote seems to have been the Stupak amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion. Now Joe is being asked to vote for the Senate bill, and he, Stupak, and others are refusing to play ball because abortions are federally funded by that bill.
Nancy Pelosi insists that abortions are not covered in the Senate bill. This is a real head-scratcher, since it is a provably false claim, and she knows it. So the Speaker, it seems, is either completely out to lunch, or she’s lying.
Back to Joe Donnelly. See, the difference between Joe and Nancy is that Joe actually read the Senate bill. Here are eight provisions in the Senate bill that would allow taxpayer-funded abortions.
1. Contrary to the language governing existing programs such as SCHIP and Medicaid, under the Senate bill the federal government will subsidize insurance policies that cover elective abortion.
2. Under the new Office of Personnel Management program all but one plan could pay for abortion. Currently, OPM administers the Federal Employee Health Insurance Program under which abortion funding is prohibited.
3. Authorities granted to federal officials could be used to mandate abortion coverage.
4. The accounting mechanisms in the Senate bill provide the authority to force many Americans to pay directly into an abortion fund.
5. The Federal Indian health program is reauthorized without the Vitter amendment against funding for elective abortion.
6. The “Hyde-Weldon” conscience protection for health care workers is omitted from the Senate bill.
7. Federal funds can pay for elective abortions at Community Health Centers.
8. High-risk insurance pool funds may be used to pay for abortion.
Whether you agree with taxpayer funded abortions or not is not really the issue here. The issue is that we have a Speaker of the House who willfully and intentionally lies to the American people to try to fool them into supporting the biggest governmental power-grab in American history. That’s not a political debate; that is a malignant character flaw.
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Or, alternatively, Rep. Donnelly has a staffer who willfully and intentionally lies to the American people. There’s absolutely no source given for where these provisions can be found in the health care bill.
The “biggest power grab in American history”? Please. Thanks for demonstrating what an intellectual cesspool American conservativism is.
I like how incredibly short-sighted this whole debate is. I’d like to take it much further:
“If you receive more from the federal government – directly or indirectly – than you have paid in, then you are not allowed to get an abortion.”
If you aren’t prepared to make that leap, then preventing people from purchasing abortion coverage when they already receive federal subsidies is a symbolic effort at best.
Here are eight provisions in the Senate bill that would allow taxpayer-funded abortions.
Actually, no. The “eight provisions” are from a list compiled by a Donnelly staffer, Elizabeth Shappell, as reported in the Rochester newspaper article.* These are Shappell’s interpretations. And, of course, her list does not include hyperlinks or page references to the pertinent sections of the Senate bill. That’s never a good sign. No offense to Elizabeth Shappell, but why should I have to take her word for it?
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*So, how do you know Joe Donnelly actually read the Senate bill? He obviously didn’t draw up the list….
I was thinking the same thing Grace. Bill, if you want to list 8 provisions then include 8 provisions on the list(as opposed to 0.) There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the house bill. None, however, are included in this blog.
In response to another comment. See in context »The Senate bill does not allow for federal funding of abortion. It does allow people to buy insurance on exchanges that offers abortion funding. That’s not the same thing.
Surely you can give us a link to the 8 times abortion coverage is listed in the actual bill.
To all who say the Senate bill does not allow for taxpayer-funded abortions (which appears to be everybody in these comments), why, if that is true, is Steny Hoyer giving up on Stupak and his pro-life Dems?
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/86427-hoyer-house-ready-to-move-forward-without-a-deal-on-abortion
It seems to me that the provisions are in there and the majority of the Democrat Party, which is pro-choice, want them in there. Why is that so hard to believe? Recall that the pro-choice Dems in the House lost their minds when the Stupak Amendment passed and they vowed to vote against the final bill if the amendment were not stripped out. Looks like they made good on their threat and Stupak made good on his.
Why is it so difficult for you guys to see that everybody is reacting exactly as you would expect them to in light of the fact that the abortion funding provisions are in the Senate bill?
Is the need to believe Pelosi so great that we have to completely ignore everything everybody else in the Democrat Party is saying and doing?
In response to another comment. See in context »Why is it so difficult for you guys to see that everybody is reacting exactly as you would expect them to in light of the fact that the abortion funding provisions are in the Senate bill?
Why play mind reader when you could just read the bill and tell us where these provisions are? Who cares what Steny Hoyer and Bart Stupak think or do? We’re talking about what’s in a bill.
What, are your Googling fingers broken or something?
In response to another comment. See in context »Stupak wants the funding ban. Hoyer says he wont’ do it. Who is playing mind reader? Here are their words in a piece from The Hill. (emphasis mine).
In response to another comment. See in context »Just because the Stupak ban isn’t in the bill, doesn’t mean that your 8 other items are. Seriously, how hard is this to understand? It’s like you have precisely two modes of thought – if we don’t have Stupak’s language (which will prevent precisely zero abortions, remember), it’s mandatory abortions for everyone, all the time, for free!
The poster who called you a partisan hack? Seconded.
In response to another comment. See in context »No pouting Justin.
In response to another comment. See in context »They’re broken. I subscribed to Dupray’s TrueSlant blog just a few days ago, and already I’m extremely disappointed. He’s like a teenager who quotes his Republican parents all the time.
Anyways, here’s an article about a bunch of Christian scholars who feel the Senate bill maintains the federal provisions on abortion. Bear in mind, they aren’t lawyers who stop reading things after the first couple paragraphs, and they understand what fungibility is, so their opinions reflect a realism, nuance, and intellectual depth that might cause this blog to explode.
http://ncronline.org/print/17396
In response to another comment. See in context »Jack, please keep in mind that this entire abortion skirmish is among Democrats. Republicans have nothing to do with it. So it seems to me that you disagree with Democrat Steny Hoyer who conceded there are looser abortion funding rules in the Senate. You must also think Stupak, Donnelly and the other Democrats are lying about the looser funding rules in the Senate bill. Which is it, are all of these Democrats lying or mistaken about it? Just asking for your view of their positions?
In response to another comment. See in context »“You must also think Stupak, Donnelly and the other Democrats are lying about the looser funding rules in the Senate bill. Which is it, are all of these Democrats lying or mistaken about it? Just asking for your view of their positions?”
I’m amazed you even have to ask. Yes, I think they’re wrong. It’d be like arguing against infrastructure development in poorer communities because the inhabitants would use the roads to drive to abortion clinics.
They are short-sighted and silly. We’re talking about $12/yr, the average cost of adding abortion coverage to an insurance plan. If anyone who gets an abortion receives $12 more in benefits than they pay in taxes, that’s the same kind of moral hazard that Stupak and his ilk are willing to sink healthcare reform over. It’s ludicrous.
In response to another comment. See in context »It is not about the money. They think abortions kill children. Whether you agree or not, it is the principle they are arguing.
In response to another comment. See in context »Yeah, and countless pragmatic analysts have surmised that the Senate bill does not fundamentally change the existing policies regarding federal funds and abortion. The Senate bill preserves the status quo in that regard.
Stupak and his ilk are also ignoring the reality of abortion, which is that if a woman wants to have an abortion, she’ll get one. A girl in Utah recently paid a man $150 to beat her up so she’d miscarry. All the legislation does is make coat hanger abortions and Brazilian wall kicks less viable options. Heck, poor people will have more access to OB/GYN’s who can provide them with various safe methods of birth control, which I can see decreasing the number of unwanted births and the resulting abortions.
On top of that, Stupak and his pals must not like mothers too much: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/12/amnesty-us-maternal-mortality-rates
In response to another comment. See in context »interesting link, thanks.
Claudia spoke of nuns OKing the bill, I hadn’t heard of this letter until now. interesting.
In response to another comment. See in context »Why play mind reader when you could just read the bill and tell us where these provisions are? Who cares what Steny Hoyer and Bart Stupak think or do? We’re talking about what’s in a bill.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Congress is very nice about making these bills available online for our review. I always call bullshit when pundits and bloggers and other opinionati don’t include links or at least cite paragraph and page numbers to the PDF document. So here it is for Mr. Stupak:
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
In response to another comment. See in context »So in other words, no you can not point to the 8 instances in the bill where it funds abortion. Thanks for playing, partisan hack.
In response to another comment. See in context »We’re talking about $12/yr (the going rate for adding abortion coverage to your insurance). Only in America would the most significant health care reform in two generations be in danger because of something as fungible as $12.
In response to another comment. See in context »Well this ban would certainly keep the poor from receiving abortions and it will also keep anyone who received a college loan guaranteed by the government from getting an abortion as well as anyone who received an SBA loan or anyone who received a low interest loan…wonder if it means no one at AIG or GM can get them…anyway it goes a long way in ending abortion and that is the goal right? Or is it that the majority of woman who favor choice should have old men tell them how they can spend their tax dollars. Of course it is just not as good as just introducing a bill to end abortion, but the republicans and blue dogs are not up to that fight.
Despite their claims of murder if you believe the Catholics and baptists and evangelists but not the Jews who don’t believe life begins at conception or the number of religiously challenged or the biologists but but screw them.
What is really important is that a democrat is speaking for the religious right and maybe has cleverly found a dubious loophole to kill the whole measure, kill health care reform and get back to the system where a woman can buy insurance that covers abortion and poor people who can’t afford children can get low cost abortions from clinics.
However if this does pass with Stupac language we still have the rich who can afford private coverage that covers abortions for them and their daughters as well. What the hell are we going to do about that!
And why aren’t we thinking out of the box about the whole issue?
For one thing, what about the rights of the father? Shouldn’t he have some say in whether or not the woman aborts the kid? Sure, sometimes the woman doesn’t know which man is the father, but we can get around that problem by sewing National RFID cards into our bodies and having them record our sexual interactions. This eliminates the Povich-Springer conundrum.
Having dealt with that, I believe that if the man wants to continue the pregnancy, the woman can’t say no. If she wishes, the federal government will send her to some sort of modern nunnery where she’ll receive free medical care and, after carrying the child to term and giving it to the father, $20k for her troubles.
In the future, more interesting solutions will present themselves. This pregnant man in the news for the past couple years, for instance, suggests to me that one day the fetus could be transplanted into the father, freeing the woman of her unwanted pregnancy. That way, the federal government wouldn’t have to pay for her nunnery tenure any longer.
In response to another comment. See in context »Having dealt with that, I believe that if the man wants to continue the pregnancy
If the man wants to continue the pregnancy, he’s free to do so in his own uterus. I can’t imagine what possible claim he would have to someone else’s.
In response to another comment. See in context »Exactly! Our diabesity epidemic, if nothing else, has shown that most men have the capacity to carry 40 extra pounds behind their belly buttons.
In response to another comment. See in context »