Obama hates women?

In light of all the controversy around the health care bill passed in the House late Saturday night (check out this op-ed, and especially the comments posted below it, if you want a taste of how absurd people can be) I did a little research and came up with these interesting factoids.

• An estimated 13 percent of abortions in 2001 were directly billed by abortion providers to private insurance companies.

N.B. this study used ALL women who received an abortion that year as the denominator, including uninsured women and women on Medicaid. If the study only included women who are privately insured, the percentage would be substantially higher. Further, this 13% does not include women who were reimbursed from their insurance company themselves, rather than having their provider bill the insurance company directly - a common occurrence because many abortion providers are not a part of private insurance networks

• In 2006, federal and state governments funded 177,000 abortions (at a cost of $89 million) for low-income women. Well over 99% of these abortions occurred in the 17 states that have non-restrictive policies.

• In the same year, an estimated 1.2 million abortions were performed in the United States. So, public dollars basically funded 14.75 percent of all induced abortions.

• Abortion has been in steady decline since 1981 when it had a high incidence rate of 29.3 per 1000 (women aged 15-24) to a low of 19.4 per 1000 in 2005.)

Now, with all that in mind let me address my total confusion regarding the new health care bill. There is a thing called the Hyde amendment which has been in place since 1976 that already bans federal funds from covering abortion, except in case of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. Does that mean that the aforementioned 177,000 federally funded abortions were special cases of rape, incest, or mother-danger? The new bill doesn’t touch the Hyde amendment, but it does take abortion limitations a bit further by saying no money authorized and appropriated by the reform can go to insurance plans that cover abortion. So, “public option” insurance (which will probably get dropped in the Senate bill) can’t cover abortion, and private insurance plans that are federally funded can’t cover abortion.

Am I crazy or does it seem like this new bill won’t change a god damn thing? I find it unlikely that the 13% of private insurance funded abortions receive much by way of federal subsidies. And the Hyde amendment already bans federal funds from covering elective abortion. So where’s the change? Furthermore, there’s an interesting little tidbit in the bill that says it will not be construed as prohibiting the purchase of supplemental coverage for abortion so long as the plan isn’t funded by federal dollars. Check out the actual wording here. Unless I’m missing something (which I admit is very possible) I think everyone needs to chill.

Find the numbers I quoted, and a whole bunch of other cool info, at the Guttmacher Institute.

Update: the front page of the Guttmacher Institute website (which I hadn’t looked at until now) states that they’d appreciate it if people did not use their 13% statistic as evidence that insurance coverage for abortion is not widespread or that restricting such coverage would have an impact on only a small minority of women. I am not trying to using it as such. Given the numbers, I have no doubt that a loss of insurance coverage for abortion would affect a lot of women. What it does seem like, to me at least, is that the new health care bill would not cause this loss of coverage.

Update 2: I’m now pretty sure that the majority of those 177,000 government funded abortions were from state Medicaid dollars, not federal ones. Further evidence that this new bill would not change much, again, given that I understand all of this correctly. Somebody please tell me if I’m missing anything.