WAKE UP AMERICA
Posted on 07/14/2010 4:23:06 AM PDT by SJackson
Obama Administration Approves First Direct Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Through New High-Risk Insurance Pools
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden react to cheers as they arrive in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 23, 2010, for the signing ceremony for the health care bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)(CNSNews.com) - If you want proof that President Obama's Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham, look no further than Pennsylvania, says House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio).
Boehner and other Republicans point to reports that the Health and Human Services Department is giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that is legal in the state.
"The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable," Boehner said in a statement on Tuesday.
“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."
President Obama pledged that under his health care plan “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”
In a May 13 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius, Boehner asked if her department has provided guidance to the states on how to implement the president’s Executive Order on abortion funding. Boehner also asked Sebelius if the new federal high-risk pools would exclude abortion coverage.
He says his questions remain unanswered.
"Millions of Americans care deeply about this aspect of the new law and its implementation, and no progress report is complete without detailed information about it,” Boehner wrote to Sebelius.
The conservative Family Research Council says the $160 million in taxpayer funds for Pennsylvania is the first known instance of direct federal funding of abortions through the new high-risk insurance pools.
The abortion funding for pool participants validates the arguments pro-life groups made throughout the health care debate – that taxpayer dollars will fund abortions, said Tom McClusky, senior vice president of the Family Research Council’s political action arm.
“For our efforts to remove the bill's abortion funding, we were called 'deceivers' by President Obama and 'liars' by his allies. Now we know who the true deceivers and liars really are,’ McClusky said.
"This action by the Obama Administration also exposes the worthlessness of President Obama's Executive Order that supposedly would prevent federal funding of abortion, but which both sides, including Planned Parenthood, agreed was unenforceable.
"While the American people deserve an apology from President Obama for his deception, we should only be satisfied when this Pennsylvania abortion funding is rescinded and the health care law repealed.
McClusky noted that the new health care law also includes $12.5 billion for community health centers, and $6 billion for co-ops, both of which can fund abortions. And some people will use tax credits to help them pay for plans that cover abortion.
Even before it’s fully implemented, the Democrats’ health care plan “is already being exposed as a high-taxing, poorly thought-out, and taxpayer-funding-of-abortion monstrosity,” McClusky said.
Republican leader Boehner says House Republicans would codify the Hyde amendment, thus prohibiting all authorized and appropriated federal funds from being used to pay for abortion. Under the Republican plan, any health plan that includes abortion coverage would not receive federal funds
Disgusting
Can we sue the White House? I do NOT want my money used to support abortion EVER!
I posted a story on this last night, and it was pulled. Never could figure out why.
Paging Mr. Stupak ...
the WH response to congressional inquiries has been delay and refuse to answer and maybe the questions will go away...
I hope Boehner will keep the pressure on.
We always knew about the lie, Obama didnt fool anyone.
The people who voted for him wanted abortion, those of us who didn’t knew he was lying but he gave cover to a few crooked politicians with that lie.
Now those politicians can claim they didn’t know, If they didnt know, they are so stupid they need brain transplants.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Me neither. Maybe I'll just send my federal tax dollars directly to a couple of Marines I know and not one penny to Washington. Oh, yeah, and I'll just keep my SS money as kind of an advance against next year.
If we cut the money off, they will get the message.
We knew that would happen. Radical leftists hate life.
This administration is rewarding the radical feminists who voted him in office.
Now those politicians can claim they didn’t know, If they didnt know, they are so stupid they need brain transplants
Scratch a pro-life democrat, find an abortionist.
(For that matter, scratch any democrat and you find an abortionist)
Stupak and Nebraska senator Ben Nelson have to be the two biggest idiots on the planet. They believed and trusted barack hussein obama and we see where that got them.
Like obama, they have the blood of all these abortions on their hands.
It's not the "believed and trusted 0bama" that makes these men stupid, it's the fact that these Members of Congress do not COMPREHEND that an EO cannot negate existing law!
Damn you barack Hussein.
and let’s be clear....doing it in Pennsylvania is just flashing one big ol’ Middle Finger to the Pro Life movement.
This is Bart Stupak’s legacy. Good luck explaining that one to God. And this is only the beginning. Just wait until Kathy Sebelius orders every insurer in America to include abortion coverage with each policy issued.
Not so. They knew all along what Obama was about. The idiots are those who believe that Stupak and Nelson are really pro-life.
H.H.S. Approves Pennsylvania Plan
to Use Federal Funds to Subsidize Coverage of
Nearly All Abortions in New “High-Risk Pool” Program
WASHINGTON (July 13, 2010) – The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new “high-risk” insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March — and has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of Governor Edward Rendell (D) under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.
The high-risk pool program is one of the new programs created by the sweeping health care legislation (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) that President Obama signed into law on March 23. The law authorizes $5 billion in federal funds for the program, which will cover as many as 400,000 people when it is implemented nationwide.
“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 (NRLC), the federation of right-to-life organizations in all 50 states. “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.”
An earlier version of the health care legislation, passed by the House of Representatives in November 2009, contained a provision (the Stupak-Pitts Amendment) that would have prevented federal funds from subsidizing abortion or insurance coverage of abortion in any of the programs created by the bill, including the high-risk pool program. But President Obama opposed that pro-life provision, and it was not included in the bill later approved by both houses and signed into law. An executive order signed by the President on March 24, 2010 did not contain effective barriers to federal funding of abortion, and did not even mention the high-risk pool program.
“President Obama successfully opposed including language in the bill to prevent federal subsidies for abortions, and now the Administration is quietly advancing its abortion-expanding agenda through administrative decisions such as this, which they hope will escape broad public attention,” Johnson said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has emphasized that the high-risk pool program is a federal program and that the states will not incur any cost. On May 11, 2010, in a letter to Democratic and Republican congressional leaders on implementation of the new law, DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote that “states may choose whether and how they participate in the program, which is funded entirely by the federal government.”
Details of the high-risk pool plans for most states are not yet available. But on June 28, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario (a member of the appointed cabinet of Governor Edward Rendell, a Democrat) issued a press release announcing that the federal Department of Health and Human Services had approved his agency’s proposal for implementing the new program in Pennsylvania. “The state will receive $160 million to set up the program, which will provide coverage to as many as 5,600 people between now and 2014,” according to the release. “The plan’s benefit package will include preventive care, physician services, diagnostic testing, hospitalization, mental health services, prescription medications and much more, with subsidized premiums of $283 a month.”
Examination of the detailed Pennsylvania plan, reveals that the “much more” will include insurance coverage of any legal abortion.
The section on abortion (see page 14) asserts that “elective abortions are not covered.” However, that statement proves to be a red herring, because the operative language does not define “elective.” Rather, the proposal specifies that the coverage “includes only abortions and contraceptives that satisfy the requirements of” several specific statutes, the most pertinent of which is 18 Pa. C.S. § 3204, which says that an abortion is legal in Pennsylvania (consistent with Roe v. Wade) if a single physician believes that it is “necessary” based on “all factors (physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman’s age) relevant to the well-being of the woman.” Indeed, the cited statute provides only a single circumstance in which an abortion prior to 24 weeks is NOT permitted under the Pennsylvania statute: “No abortion which is sought solely because of the sex of the unborn child shall be deemed a necessary abortion.”
As a result, “Under the Rendell-Sebelius plan, federal funds will subsidize coverage of abortion performed for any reason, except sex selection,” said NRLC’s Johnson. “The Pennsylvania proposal conspicuously lacks language that would prevent funding of abortions performed as a method of birth control or for any other reason, except sex selection — and the Obama Administration has now approved this.”
A group of Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives who initially withheld support from the federal health care bill, because of concerns about pro-abortion effects, cited President Obama’s March 24 executive order in justifying their votes to pass the bill over objections from NRLC and other pro-life groups, which argued that the executive order did not contain effective barriers to federal subsidies for abortion. As USA Todayreported on March 25, “Both sides in the abortion debate came to a rare agreement on Wednesday: The executive order on abortion signed by President Obama, they said, was basically meaningless. ‘A transparent political fig leaf,’ according to the National Right to Life Committee’s Douglas Johnson. ‘A symbolic gesture,’ said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.