WASHINGTON, February 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – President Obama’s defense of his deceptive rephrasing of the birth control mandate on Friday – suggesting that insurers can provide the drugs for free because fewer children means less overall health costs – lays the groundwork for a future abortion mandate, the National Right to Life Committee has warned.
In order to assuage outrage from Catholic groups, President Obama on Friday afternoon essentially claimed that religious employers wouldn’t really pay for the birth control their employees receive in health care plans because insurers would chalk up the drugs as balancing out the potential costs of bearing a child.
“President Obama today promulgated a scam that, if he is re-elected, will allow him to mandate that every health plan in America cover abortion on demand,” said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson.
“The same twisted logic will be applied: By ordering health plans to cover elective abortion, health plans would save the much higher costs of prenatal care, childbirth, and care for the baby – and under the Obama scam, if a procedure saves money, then that means that you’re not really paying for it when the government mandates it.”
The supposed “revision” of the birth control mandate drew strong praise from abortion and family planning groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Johnson said the same “doublespeak” could be used to say that Medicaid, prior to the Hyde amendment blocking abortion funding, was not really “funding abortion” because “after all, every abortion that the government paid for also saved the government money.” The same reasoning could even be applied to physician-assisted suicide in states where it has been legalized, he said, since “each suicide would result in a net savings to the plan” and thus “it is really free and nobody really pays for it.”
The NRLC also pointed out that the Institutes of Medicine “panel of experts” Obama cited as recommending universal birth control coverage was loaded with progressive ideologues.
Johnson, who was heavily involved in the abortion debate surrounding the federal health care bill, emphasized that contrary to some reports, the bill certainly allows an abortion mandate.
He explained: “The law prevents the Secretary of Health and Human Services from including abortion in a list of federally mandated ‘essential health benefits.’ But the birth control mandate is based on an entirely different provision of the law, which allows the Secretary to mandate that all health plans cover any service that the Secretary places on a list of ‘preventive’ services. There is nothing in the law to prevent the Secretary from placing abortion, assisted suicide, or any other additional services on the preventive services list.”