Asked if plans cover abortion, insurance agents give every answer in the book — except a straight one
By Genevieve C. Plaster
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.
Our findings include these exceptional instances of readily given and yet inconsistent replies to the question of whether elective abortion is covered:
— Genevieve C. Plaster is a research assistant at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the education and research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its initial posting.
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