Yoest on Health Care Reform

Denny Burk:

Don’t miss Charmaine Yoest’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal. She argues that the Senate’s healthcare reform bill would be the greatest expansion of abortion since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. It would mandate tax-payers to fund abortions and would establish abortion as a fundamental health-care service for the following reasons:

• It would change existing law by allowing federally subsidized health-care plans to pay for abortions and could require private health-insurance plans to cover abortion.


• It would impose a first-ever abortion tax—a separate premium payment that will be used to pay for elective abortions—on enrollees in insurance plans that covers abortions through newly created government health-care exchanges.


• And it would fail to protect the rights of health-care providers to refuse to participate in abortions.

For these reasons, Bart Stupak and 11 other pro-life Democrats are threatening to kill healthcare reform if this abortion problem isn’t fixed. Stay tuned. In the meantime, read Yoest’s column.