Via Ann at Feministing, I came upon Dana Goldstein’s excellent analysis of why a public option sans reproductive health coverage is doomed. She notes that women will be less likely to choose the public option if it excludes abortions and other basic reproductive care:
After all, the typical woman spends five years of her life pregnant, or trying to become so, but a full 30 years avoiding pregnancy. Without good reproductive-health coverage and strong buy-in from women — who use more health care than men — it is difficult to see how a public plan would gain strength over time.
(Read the rest here.)
And there’s more: Women with private insurance may find their plans dropping reproductive care, whether due to market forces (as Ann implies) or meddling in insurance regulation by conservative lawmakers (as Dana suggests).
Really, though, this whole debate rests on false premises. While the Hyde Amendment has prohibited Medicaid from covering abortions for over 30 years, abortions are already financed indirectly by taxpayer subsidies. Anyone with an employer-sponsored health plan gets their insurance tax-free. That’s a massive federal subsidy. Ann cites a NYT story that claims 50 percent of employers offer abortion services among their health benefits.
So taxpayers are already subsidizing abortion for women in the middle class and higher. It’s just those poor women who’ve been excluded.
Up ’til now, even after a quarter-century of supporting abortion rights, I’ve tended to think, “Get reform passed, and then we’ll worry about specific services.” But Dana has convinced me that this isn’t just a distraction, though the ‘wingers will surely conflate public subsidies for reproductive health with their phantom death panels. This is a matter of reproductive justice for poor women, and a sustainable system for all Americans.
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