Yesterday, we visited the Pennsylvania high-risk health-care insurance program and its abortion funding.
In New Mexico, the new $37 million high-risk pool began enrolling individuals on July 1. They will start receiving benefits in August, including elective-abortion services, according to the state insurance department’s website. Once a deductible is paid, 80 percent of the elective abortion is covered.
Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee tells me: “HHS has been hiding most of these high-risk plans, including the plan that HHS will administer directly in 21 states. Of the four state plans we’ve managed to ferret out, two provided coverage of all essentially all abortions — Pennsylvania and New Mexico. This is part of a pattern, under this administration, of making ’soft’ rhetorical statements on abortion policy, but consistently promoting and expanding abortion through low-visibility administrative decisions. The administration’s heavy funding of groups pushing a proposed new pro-abortion constitution in Kenya is another example.”
(The Kenya campaign can be read about here and here.)
In a statement to The Corner, House minority leader John Boehner, who has continued to press the administration on the continuing story of Obamacare’s abortion lies, says: “In just the past 24 hours, we’ve learned of two states in which the new federal high-risk insurance programs created under Obamacare and approved by the Obama administration will use federal funds to pay for abortion, despite promises by the White House and Democratic leaders that no such funding would occur under Obamacare. These developments provide stark confirmation that President Obama’s executive order last spring was little more than a political ploy to ensure passage of Obamacare by circumventing the will of the American people, who are clearly opposed to taxpayer-funded abortion.”
Boehner adds: “President Obama and Secretary Sebelius owe the American people an immediate explanation, as do Speaker Pelosi and the leaders of organizations such as the Catholic Health Association and NETWORK, who claimed the law and executive order would not allow federal funding of abortion, despite warnings by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and others to the contrary.”
The Obama administration lied, and members of Congress who claim to be pro-life went along with the sham. There should, indeed, be electoral consequences.