A new investigation by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) has revealed that insurance companies participating in Obamacare’s state health exchanges – online marketplaces where individuals can purchase taxpayer-subsidized health coverage – may be violating federal regulations by failing to provide plans that don’t cover elective abortion.
CLI contacted a number of multi-state providers (MSPs) that participate in Obamacare’s state health exchanges. In order to join the exchanges, MSPs must agree to provide at least one plan in each state that does not cover elective abortion. But when asked by CLI whether their exchange plans offer elective abortion coverage, most companies were evasive, with some companies giving multiple conflicting answers, depending on who answered the phone.
CLI researcher Genevieve Plaster writes at National Review Online:
Now ten months since the rollout of Obamacare, with about three months to go until the next enrollment period begins, we’re seeing a shift in how insurance companies delimit and describe their coverage of elective abortion. Unlike the pervasive, confused silence on the issue of elective-abortion coverage reported last October by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, insurance companies now are seemingly able to answer the question, “Do your individual plans offered on the exchange cover elective abortion?”
The only problem: Those answers keep changing depending on who’s talking.
To begin at the beginning, CLI selected New York’s health-insurance exchange as a starting point to identify which individual plans include or exclude elective abortion — or “interruption of pregnancy,” as it is also termed in the state’s insurance lingo. Via the exchange’s web chat, CLI recently asked a representative whether the multi-state plans offered in New York cover elective abortion. The representative replied, “This information is not in my portal.” But she did provide a helpful URL to the directory of all the insurance companies in question, so that CLI could contact each directly.
And down the rabbit hole we went.
CLI was able to confirm that at least one MSP on New York’s state health exchange, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, is in flagrant violation of the regulation requiring them to offer a plan with no elective abortion coverage:
Two licensed agents contacted by phone on July 1 and 2 stated, “All of [Empire’s plans on the New York exchange] cover elective abortion.” When asked if the MSPs offered on the exchange do as well, both emphatically confirmed this twice, one declaring that the “benefits do not change” according to whether the plan is an MSP or not.
But other MSPs CLI contacted were either unable or unwilling to give a concrete answer to the question of whether their exchange plans cover elective abortions, with one company representative giving two different answers within the same conversation.
To read Plaster’s firsthand account of the runaround she was given by multiple MSPs when she tried to get information about abortion coverage, see her article at NRO here.
In it, she sums up the problem with Obamacare’s handling of abortion coverage thusly:
The bottom line? The ongoing clamor for transparency in health-insurance exchanges under Obamacare is fully warranted. Of the 300-plus plans offered by the 18 insurance companies on New York’s individual marketplace that CLI inspected, virtually no company listed any “interruption of pregnancy” information in its Summary of Benefits and Coverage. There was one exception: the Catholic-run Fidelis Care, which excludes it.
… If a woman’s “right to choose” is so essential, why wouldn’t her “choices” be clearly stated on each plan’s Summary of Benefits and Coverage? If the plan covers elective abortion, it could easily specify that in its Services You May Need section. If it does not offer this coverage, it could state that in its Excluded Services section. Why not make it as simple to view a plan’s abortion-coverage rules as it is to assess contraception coverage? BlueShield of Northeastern New York’s benefits layout, for instance, shows its contraception coverage directly on its website: “Generic oral contraceptives — covered in full.” Whether one identifies oneself as “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” this “yes, no, maybe” guessing game about abortion coverage is utterly unacceptable.