The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is providing $160 million to the state of Pennsylvania to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that pays for abortions, as part of a larger $5 billion commitment of taxpayer funds that will include abortion coverage for over 400,000 people nationwide.
“This is the boldest admission yet from the Obama administration that the President’s Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham. The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable,” said House Republican leader John Boehner.
Steven Ertelt reports on LifeNews.com that HHS has approved the program in Pennsylvania that will soon spread to other states paying abortions nationwide.
From the report:
[HHS] has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania. … “The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million in federal tax funds, which we’ve discovered will pay for insurance plans that cover any legal abortion,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
Johnson told LifeNews.com: “This is just the first proof of the phoniness of President Obama’s assurances that federal funds would not subsidize abortion — but it will not be the last.” … The pro-life community strongly opposed the executive order and said Rep. Bart Stupak and other House Democrats who voted for the pro-abortion health care bill in exchange for it were selling out their pro-life principles. This first case of forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions under the new law appears to prove them right that the bill language and executive order were ineffective.
Boehner has led the effort to require President Obama to keep his word that no tax dollars would be used to fund abortions. Holding the president to his word is a tall order.
“Just last month at the White House I asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order, which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions. Unfortunately, the President provided no information, and the American people are still waiting for answers,” Boehner said.
As further evidence of how politicized health care would become under Obamacare, Politico reports that Planned Parenthood is pushing for a national mandate that insurers must provide free birth control. Over the objections of those who think that Americans should be free to seek out health plans consistent with their own moral or religious beliefs, or the dictates of their own conscience, Planned Parenthood (a backer of Obamacare) is launching lobbying efforts aimed at “getting no-cost birth control in the bill,” as it seeks to persuade Obama administration officials to rule that Obamacare requires private insurers to provide birth control — and to do so free of any co-pays or out-of-pocket costs. (Costs would instead be passed along through slightly higher premiums.)
Meanwhile, a coalition including the Center for Reproductive Rights is seeking to find justification to extend this mandate to include free emergency “contraception” as well.
Somewhat amusingly, Politico writes, “Planned Parenthood has other plans in the works, too. It might soon tap young adults, particularly those who have had their dependent coverage extended up to age 26 [by Obamacare], who are curious about what benefits they will receive. ’Certainly, we have a very large, grass-roots organization interested in making an impact,’ [Laurie] Rubiner [Planned Parenthood’s vice president of public policy] said.” Politico adds, “College campuses, too, could be fruitful territory…”
If nothing else, you’ve got to give them credit for seeking out new and creative reasons for people to back Obamacare: Sure, it would raise health costs and deficits, expand the powers of the federal government to heretofore unthinkable levels, and reduce the quality of American medicine. But, on the other hand, insurers would be required to give those up to the age of 26 free birth control as part of their parents’ insurance policy.
Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”
According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”
Stupak says he also doesn’t trust the “Slaughter solution,” a legislative maneuver being bandied about on Capitol Hill as a way to pass the Senate bill in the House without actually voting on it. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” he says. “I don’t have a warm-and-fuzzy feeling about what I’m hearing.”
Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”
The good news for Senator Ben Nelson is that he doesn’t have to face Nebraska voters until 2012.
If Governor Dave Heineman challenges Nelson for the Senate job, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows the Republican would get 61% of the vote while Nelson would get just 30%. Nelson was reelected to a second Senate term in 2006 with 64% of the vote.
Nelson’s health care vote is clearly dragging his numbers down. Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of the deal their senator made on Medicaid in exchange for his vote in support of the plan. Overall, 64% oppose the health care legislation, including 53% who are Strongly Opposed.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius confirms that the Senate health ‘reform’ bill will require everyone to pay for abortion coverage.
Meanwhile, CNS reports that the White House and the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives have been pressuring Rep. Stupak not to speak out on the “compromise” abortion language in the Senate version of the health care bill.
“They think I shouldn’t be expressing my views on this bill until they get a chance to try to sell me the language,” Stupak told CNSNews.com in an interview on Tuesday. “Well, I don’t need anyone to sell me the language. I can read it. I’ve seen it. I’ve worked with it. I know what it says. I don’t need to have a conference with the White House. I have the legislation in front of me here.”
The Michigan Democrat succeeded last month in getting 64 House Democrats to join him in attaching his pro-life amendment to the House version of the health-care bill. The “Stupak amendment,” as the provision is known, would prohibit the federal government from allocating taxpayer money to pay for any part of any health insurance plan that covers abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger.
Stupak had contact with the White House last weekend, when the Senate voted 60 to 40 in the wee hours of Monday morning to shut off debate on the Senate version of the bill.
The current version of the Senate bill contains so-called “compromise” language crafted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). This language does not bar taxpayer funding of health plans that cover abortion, but does create a firewall to supposedly keep federal money from being used to pay for abortions. Over the weekend, Stupak issued a statement calling the proposed Senate language “unacceptable.”
Here is the contact information for the so-called ‘pro-life’ Senators who voted FOR cloture on the bill. Final vote is scheduled for December 24 at 8:00AM, so call IMMEDIATELY:
And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world’s greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new “manager’s amendment” that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what’s in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.
Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.
The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that “reform” has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.
***
• Health costs. From the outset, the White House’s core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they’re sticking to that story. “Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t read the bills,” Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.
The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.
These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like “community rating” because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.
As for the White House’s line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed “waste,” even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. “The oft-heard promise ‘we will find out what works and what does not’ scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice,” the Stanford professor wrote.
• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.
This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they’ll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.
Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so “substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance” that companies like WellPoint might need to “be considered part of the federal budget.”
With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington’s hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all,” as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.
“The Senate isn’t hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day,” Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they’re allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will “destroy over 200 of America’s best and safest hospitals.”
• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost “only” $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.
Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid’s final machinations. Job creation, here we come.
Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn’t start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won’t happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. The American Medical Association’s priority was eliminating this “sustainable growth rate” but all they got in return for their year of ObamaCare cheerleading was a two-month patch snuck into the defense bill that passed over the weekend.
The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run “exchanges” that will subsidize insurance for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, or $96,000 for a family of four in 2016. Supposedly they would only be offered to those whose employers don’t provide insurance or work for small businesses.
As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system.
For this reason Mr. Steuerle concludes that the Senate bill is not just a new health system but also “a new welfare and tax system” that will warp the labor market. Given the incentives of these two-tier subsidies, employers with large numbers of lower-wage workers like Wal-Mart may well convert them into “contractors” or do more outsourcing. As more and more people flood into “free” health care, taxpayer costs will explode.
• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as “ideologues” by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn’t be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration’s own Medicare actuaries.
Others got hush money, namely Nebraska’s Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare’s unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that “will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees,” as he put it in a letter to his state’s junior Senator.
So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don’t have a Senator who’s the 60th vote for ObamaCare?
Following the defeat of the Nelson/Hatch/Casey amendment Tuesday evening, pro-life leaders are calling on senators to oppose the Senate health care bill as it heads towards a final vote, which lawmakers expect will happen before the end of the year.
The Senate voted 54-45 Tuesday evening to table the Nelson/Hatch/Casey amendment, effectively killing the language that would have applied Hyde-amendment restrictions on federal funding of abortion to the health care overhaul. The “tabling” vote allowed Democrats to do away with the Nelson amendment without the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster of cloture for the amendment.
The vote came after hours of debate on the Senate floor, with alternating Democrat and Republican speeches at loggerheads as to whether the bill’s original abortion language represented adequate protections, as pro-abortion lawmakers claimed, or a vast expansion of abortion, as pro-life lawmakers claimed. Pro-abortion senators also argued that the Nelson/Hatch/Casey amendment was discriminatory against women, and violated women’s right to privacy.
Yet pro-life senators maintained earlier Tuesday that the bill’s phony “compromise” language on abortion masked a fundamental shift on federal policy regarding elective abortion funding, and called on their compatriots to oppose the bill should the Nelson amendment fail.
“For pro-life senators, this is the vote, but it doesn’t stop here,” said Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.). “Even if this amendment doesn’t pass, I want to make the case that this bill should not go forward, because it literally will create a system … to finance abortions. And I don’t believe that’s what this country wants.”
In a letter to Senators dated December 7, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops warned that, if the Nelson amendment is rejected, “the current legislation should be opposed.” Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, said last month that the senate bill was “actually the worst bill we’ve seen so far on the life issues.”
During a debate on the amendment to ban taxpayer funding of abortion from the Senate version of the health care ‘reform’ bill on December 8, 2009, California Senator Barbara Boxer compared a woman’s right to kill a child to a man’s right to purchase Viagra.
The statistics are scary when it comes to the percentage of unborn children born with special needs who become victims of abortion. One fiscal conservative group says the task for parents raising such children is made more difficult by extra taxes found in Harry Reid’s new Senate health care bill.
The measure has already been condemned by pro-life groups and the Catholic bishops for its abortion funding and this latest analysis won’t make it any more endearing.
Ryan Ellis of Americans for Tax Reform notes that the bill contains 18 separate tax increases — one of them targeting parents of disabled children.
“One of them caps the amount that can be deferred in Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) at $2500 per year (a similar provision was included in the Pelosi-Obama health bill),” Ellis notes.
“There is currently no limit to how much can be saved, though all monies must be used by the end of the year. Employers may put a cap in place for their employees, but this would put a cap in federal tax law for the first time. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), 30 million American families use an FSA,” he explained.
Most Americans won’t notice a $2,500 cap as FSAs tend to be used for things like small deductibles, co-payments, eyeglasses, over-the-counter medicines, and laser eye surgery.
But parents of special needs children will, he says.
National Right to Life is warning that pro-abortion Democrats will fight tooth and nail to get a prohibition on federal funding of abortion ultimately removed from their healthcare bill.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said yesterday that she and other pro-abortion lawmakers would work to strip the Stupak amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding of abortions under the public health insurance option. (See earlier article)
Wasserman Schultz told MSNBC, “I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that the language won’t be there.”
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life, says the fate of the abortion funding ban depends on what U.S. senators hear from their constituents.
“They’re going to be under enormous pressures from these well-funded, pro-abortion advocacy groups — and President Obama will certainly be trying to get abortion back in the bill,” Johnson warns.
“Remember, all along these people have been trying to pretend that abortion wasn’t in the bill — and now this is fleshed out into the open and there’s going to be a terrific battle about this,” he says. “And in the end, the outcome is going to depend upon what input senators are getting from their constituents.”
Over the weekend, Planned Parenthood sent out an alert asking people to contact the president to ask him to live up to his promise to have abortion in the new government healthcare plan. Although the American people heard President Obama tell a joint session of Congress in September that he did not want federal funding of abortion, he promised Planned Parenthood in 2007 that abortion funding would be in his healthcare plan.
A national pro-life group is warning members of Congress that a vote in favor of the 1,990-page House healthcare bill is a vote to establish a federal government program that would directly fund abortion-on-demand with taxpayer dollars.
“This is a federal agency, a federal program, [and] of course it’s going to spend federal funds – that’s the only kind of funds it’s got,” he notes. “So all of these assurances that some prominent Democrats, including President Obama, have given that there won’t be federal funding for abortions, that’s not what’s in the bill.”
Johnson warns that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) wants to ram the bill through without representatives having a chance to vote on a single amendment. However, in order to use that “closed rule” procedure, a majority of House members have to agree to the move. The pro-life spokesman is urging members to vote “no” on a closed rule.
“We want to vote on an amendment that would take abortion out of this bill, which is the [Bart] Stupak amendment,” Johnson clarifies, referring to the Michigan Democrat. “We believe if we could get a vote in the full House on that amendment, it would pass.”
Congressman Stupak has vowed that if he does not get a vote on his amendment barring federal funding of abortion, he and 40 pro-life Democrats will block a full House vote on the healthcare bill.
Some Members of Congress and pro-abortion groups are claiming that the health care bill will follow current law on government funding of abortions (the Hyde Amendment).
Nancy Pelosi has said about HR 3200, “the bill clearly spells out that no federal funds can be used to pay for abortions.” To the contrary, the legislation, as amended by the Capps Amendment, specifically authorizes the government-run public plan to pay for elective abortions. As the public plan collects funds from various sources those funds become public funds which in turn will pay for abortions.
Pelosi also says that “the bill preserves the status quo in abortion policy.” Again this is not the case. First, the status quo is that federal government programs do not pay for abortions, yet under the Capps amendment the public plan is authorized to issue checks to abortionists to pay for abortion on demand. Second, the current policy with regard to abortion funding is that the government does not subsidize health insurance plans that includes abortion coverage as evidenced by section 507. (b). The Capps amendment breaks with the status quo and establishes an accounting mechanism by which government subsidies (affordability credits) will be allowed to fund insurance policies that cover elective abortions.
So if someone tries to tell you that the Hyde Amendment applies to health care, tell them to “Stop Hyding!”
The Senate Finance Committee torpedoed two key pro-life amendments on Wednesday designed to prevent government-subsidies of abortion and guarantee conscience protections for health-care providers in the health-care reform bill.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) proposed to amend the “America’s Health Future Act of 2009″ under consideration by the Finance Committee led by Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). His amendments would have codified current conscience protections for health-care providers with moral objections to abortion and also made permanent the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from paying for abortions.
Hatch instead proposed that women could purchase additional coverage for abortions through “riders” that would not be subsidized by the government.
However, the amendments were rejected by the Committee by votes of 13 – 10. In both amendments, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) joined committee Republicans in support of the measures, while pro-abortion Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) joined Baucus’ committee Democrats to vote against the bill.
As it stands, the Baucus legislation permits the federal government to mandate the inclusion of abortions in the “minimum benefits package” for health-insurers participating in the “Health Insurance Exchange.”
As long as the Hyde Amendment is renewed the federal government cannot directly subsidize health-care plans from taxpayer funding of the federal Health and Human Services Department.
But if Congress failed to renew the Hyde amendment, then health-care co-ops and private plans could be required to cover elective abortions.
“While Senator Hatch’s abortion funding amendment would keep government federal funds from paying for abortion or plans that cover abortion, it clearly stated that it would not prevent women from obtaining their own separate abortion policies if they choose to do so,” stated Tony Perkins of Family Research Council.
“And instead of codifying existing law protecting conscience rights for plans and providers, these same Senators voted to undermine current law by rejecting Senator Hatch’s conscience protection amendment on abortion,” continued Perkins.
“This isn’t the status quo, it’s a pro-abortion expansion.”
Last Wednesday, President Barack Obama responded to claims that his health care legislation would institute government funding of abortion by calling those claims “fabrications.” In an article released on Friday, however, FactCheck.org, an organization that analyzes the accuracy of statements made by American political leaders, confirmed the assertion of pro-life organizations that the legislation would indeed open the door to government-funded abortion.
In the article, “Abortion: Which Side Is Fabricating?,” FactCheck director Brooks Jackson carefully distinguishes how abortion is included in the bill. “The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage,” he says. “So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation would allow a new ‘public’ insurance plan to cover abortions, despite language added to the House bill that technically forbids using public funds to pay for them.”
It is “likely,” the article says, that Obama would implement abortion coverage once it is allowed. “Obama has said in the past that ‘reproductive services’ would be covered by his public plan, so it’s likely that any new federal insurance plan would cover abortion unless Congress expressly prohibits that,” Jackson writes. “Low- and moderate-income persons who would choose the ‘public plan’ would qualify for federal subsidies to purchase it. Private plans that cover abortion also could be purchased with the help of federal subsidies.
“Therefore, we judge that the president goes too far when he calls the statements that government would be funding abortions ‘fabrications’,” Jackson concludes.
Responding to Obama’s “fabrications” remark, the National Right to Life Committee’s legislative director Douglas Johnson said, “the bill backed by the White House (H.R. 3200) explicitly authorizes the government plan to cover all elective abortions.” Jackson, indicating that FactCheck does not take a position on whether abortion should be covered or not, nevertheless confirms Johnson’s statement, saying, “our analysis shows that Johnson’s statement is correct. … The House bill does just that.”
Jackson says it is the July 30th Capps amendment – which was billed as a “common ground” initiative – (http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090730/hr3200_capps_1.pdf) that has opened the door to publicly funded abortion. The amendment explicitly includes abortion funding in the government plan, namely those covered by Medicaid, such as cases of rape or incest. But it also allows other types of abortions to be covered, according to the judgment of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The current Secretary of the HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, is a well-known abortion supporter.
“The Capps Amendment MANDATES that the public plan cover any Medicaid-fundable abortions, and AUTHORIZES the secretary to cover all other abortions,” said NRLC’s Johnson, quoted by Jackson. “From day one, she [Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] is authorized to pay for them all. And, she will.”
“We can’t say what anyone will do in the future,” writes Factcheck.org’s Jackson, but then points to Obama’s 2007 comments to Planned Parenthood, where he indicated that “reproductive services” would be “essential care” in his health plan. “Obama did not use the word ‘abortion,’” Jackson says, “but a spokesman for the campaign said later that abortion would be included, according to the Chicago Tribune.”
Under the Capps amendment, Jackson says, the public health plan could fund all abortions. While, “the Capps amendment does contain a statement … that prohibits the use of public money to pay for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother,” the plan could cover all abortions, “so long as the plans took in enough private money in the form of premiums paid by individuals or their employers.”
“The Capps language also would allow private plans purchased with federal subsidies (’affordability credits’ for low-income families and workers) to cover abortion,” he says.
Jackson mentions the defeated Stupak amendment, which would have overruled the Capps amendment, that “prohibited government funding of ‘any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion,’ except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.”
But, he concludes, “as for the House bill as it stands now, it’s a matter of fact that it would allow both a ‘public plan’ and newly subsidized private plans to cover all abortions.”
The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is providing $160 million to the state of Pennsylvania to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that pays for abortions, as part of a larger $5 billion commitment of taxpayer funds that will include abortion coverage for over 400,000 people nationwide.
As further evidence of how politicized health care would become under Obamacare, 
Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with 
Health Care Vote Puts Nelson 30 Points Down in Reelection Bid
And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Following the defeat of the Nelson/Hatch/Casey amendment Tuesday evening, pro-life leaders are calling on senators to oppose the Senate health care bill as it heads towards a final vote, which lawmakers expect will happen before the end of the year.
The statistics are scary when it comes to the percentage of unborn children born with special needs who become victims of abortion. One fiscal conservative group says the task for parents raising such children is made more difficult by extra taxes found in Harry Reid’s new Senate health care bill.
National Right to Life is warning that pro-abortion Democrats will fight tooth and nail to get a prohibition on federal funding of abortion ultimately removed from their healthcare bill. 
A national pro-life group is warning members of Congress that a vote in favor of the 1,990-page House healthcare bill is a vote to establish a federal government program that would directly fund abortion-on-demand with taxpayer dollars.
Last Wednesday, President Barack Obama 
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