Daily Kos: Insurance Industry Expert Says Stupak Would Practically Mean No Abortion Coverage

Daily Kos: Insurance Industry Expert Says Stupak Would Practically Mean No Abortion Coverage

Like most anti-choice efforts we've seen come out of Congress and state legislatures in the past 30+ years since abortion was legalized, Stupak's Coathanger amendment is another attack on the practical side of the issue: on access. Rather than going for Roe and actually proposing something that could result in it's being overturned, he's going the practical route of making it more difficult to obtain by stretching the limits of the Hyde amendment beyond the breaking point.
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Once the dust settles on the legal issues of what this bill does, you have to look at the practical results. Even if insurers participating in the exchange can find the needle to thread to offer abortion coverage, would they? No, says one industry expert.

"I really think it would be impractical," says Robert Laszewski, a health insurance industry consultant....

Laszewski says the problem is that by all estimates, the vast majority of people who will be shopping in the new exchanges will be getting subsidies, so they won't be allowed to get abortion coverage. Thus, if a health insurer did offer a separate plan with abortion coverage, it would only be available to a small universe of buyers, and it simply wouldn't make much business sense.

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Women could use their own money to buy a separate policy that just covers abortion. But that's not likely to happen, either, says Laurie Rubiner, vice president of public policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood of America.

Rubiner bases her conclusion on real-world experience. Five states — Missouri, Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma and North Dakota — already ban private insurance from covering abortion.

Yet, she says, "we haven't been able to find any kind of separate abortion rider, and it doesn't surprise us because there's no market for it. Why is that? Because no woman plans to have a catastrophic pregnancy, or an unintended or unplanned pregnancy. Therefore, she doesn't think about buying coverage separately for abortion. And since there's no market for it, the product doesn't exist."