A new study from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services reports that "the Stupak/Pitts Amendment will have an industry-wide effect, eliminating coverage of medically indicated abortions over time for all women, not only those whose coverage is derived through a health insurance exchange."
In other words, though the immediate impact of the Stupak amendment will be limited to the millions of women initially insured through a new insurance exchange, over time, as the exchanges grow, the insurance industry will scale down their abortion coverage options until they offer none at all....Furthermore the study finds that the supposed fallback option for impacted women--a "rider" policy that provides supplemental coverage for abortions only--may not even be allowed under the terms of the law. "In our view, the terms and impact of the Amendment will work to defeat the development of a supplemental coverage market for medically indicated abortions. In any supplemental coverage arrangement, it is essential that the supplemental coverage be administered in conjunction with basic coverage. This intertwined administration approach is barred under Stupak/Pitts because of the prohibition against financial comingling."
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This isn't making much sense to me. If I needed an abortion for medical reasons and they refused to cover it and my uterus rupture they DO cover surgeries for me 100% so they'd take a huge hit on having to pay for a hysterectomy, blood transfusion and everything else I need as a result in lieu of paying a few hundred bucks for an abortion.
..Somewhere in there I'm missing a few periods (excuse the pun lol).
It isn't about making sense at all. It's about maintaining control over women's bodies, no matter the cost.
So yes, to their twisted minds paying thousands of dollars to fix you after the fact is totally worth paying "a couple hundred" clams so you can go kill your poor little fetus...
Could you please explain this assertion? I was under the impression that insurance companies are motivated by profit, rather than wanting to maintain control over women's bodies.
Bad Insurance policies will drive out good. If it costs disproportionately more to provide Abortion coverage, which it will, all insurance policies will discard abortion coverage.
The insurance companies might well be guided by the profit motive, but the government is forcing abortion coverage to become unprofitable.
The government isn't so much swayed by the rights and wrongs of abortion coverage here, it's interested in the anti-abortion voters.
And it is they who want to control a woman's body.
So yes, the small minded attempt to control a woman's body by the religious fringe lead to the Stupak ammendment which will in turn lead to private insurance policies being devoid of abortion coverage.
I find this hard to believe. Doing a simple cost/benefit analysis, from a business perspective, the government would have to force insurance companies thousands of dollars through a rider to make it unprofitable for them. I'm not sure that the government has this power.
So, an abortion costs around $400. A pregnancy say, on the cheap, is $5000 (my sister's last one cost $10,000, so I'm being conservative). That means that the government would have to make it so that insurance companies would have to pay $4,600 per abortion to make it feasible to cancel out abortions. I can't see the government actually being able to do that realistically.
Now, if the government finds a way to make it illegal, that's a different story. But I actually see the insurance lobby champion abortion riders because it saves them so much money. I can't see them ever wanting to cover a pregnancy over an abortion from a profit standpoint.
Yeah, I was thinking that, too. I haven't read the entire study (I'm at work), but from skimming it seems the argument is that if the regulated market is a large enough portion of their overall business, companies start to reshape their product in general. They bring up the example of health insurance companies that are required to cover contraception in some states, and as a result increasingly cover contraception nationally, even where they are not forced to by law.
The big difference I see here is that it seems behoove insurance companies to cover contraception and abortion, since contraception is cheaper than abortion which is cheaper than pregnancy. If anybody has read more of the study than I have and has some insight here I would love to hear it.
Ok, so I know this might be totally crazy and not something I want to have to be in reality, but how hard is it to perform a safe abortion? I know we all know about the horrible things that can go wrong with an illegal abortion, but some of them were done safely back in the bad old pre-Roe days right?
Don’t get me wrong, I totally fight for all women to have the right to a safe and legal abortion for whatever reason at whatever point in the pregnancy…I just have wonder if it did become illegal or made completely non-accessible via stupid ^&%$ like this Stupak amendment, here and now in this internet, spread of info world, how hard would it be to get out legitimate info on a home abortion?
Women are giving birth at home even in places where it is basically illegal, as in, it is illegal for a midwife to be present at a homebirth, people are doing it anyway, midwives are attending these births anyway.
This is pretty depressing to think about and I was horrified by the Stupak amendment…but I want to find out more about how abortions are actually done now.
I read somewhere about a feminist in the '60s or '70s who figured out a way for women to give themselves abortions at home that supposedly involved some (sterile) flexible tubing and a (sterile) sealed jar that could create light suction (PLEASE DO NOT RANDOMLY TRY THIS WITHOUT AT LEAST SOME MAJOR RESEARCH FIRST), but I don't remember her name now. The big problem, of course, is that even assuming that such a method is safe, the most important part of the whole thing is sterility, which is very hard to achieve at home.