Unintended pregnancies way down? Abortions at a record low? Those are consequences of Obamacare you can kiss goodbye under Trumpcare. The Republican healthcare plan is all about taking away women’s options to prevent pregnancy and making abortion harder to obtain—but history tells us that women who feel trapped will still seek out abortions, even at great risk to their health and safety. Laura Bassett and Jeffrey Young report:
The bill “defunds” Planned Parenthood, one of the leading providers of affordable contraception in the nation, by preventing Medicaid from reimbursing Planned Parenthood for its health and family planning services to poor women. And it would dramatically roll back Medicaid coverage in general, which accounts for three-quarters of all public dollars spent on family planning and pays for nearly half of U.S. births. [...]
“In the seven years since the Affordable Care Act has been passed, women have had access to contraception, including the whole range of services that the FDA has authorized,” [former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] said. “And when teenagers for the first time could qualify for preventive care, which included contraception, the numbers of unplanned pregnancies and the numbers of abortions and the numbers of teen pregnancies have dropped dramatically in this country. So one could argue that by removing some of those features, the people who at least profess to be anti-abortion are actually going to be driving those numbers back up.”
If “TrumpCare” did drive unintended pregnancies back up, for women who choose abortion the procedure would likely not be covered by insurance. The plan would essentially drive abortion coverage out of the individual insurance market by barring individuals and small businesses from using their federal tax credits to purchase an insurance plan that covers the procedure. It would cost a person upwards of $2,000 more per year to buy a health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage, which means that hardly anyone will buy those plans, and insurance companies will have little incentive to offer them at all.
So low-income women are going to struggle to get birth control. They won’t have coverage to give birth. And, with unplanned pregnancy that much more likely, basically everyone will be forced to pay out of pocket for abortion rather than having insurance that covers it. Under Trumpcare, women will be forced to pay extra for any reproductive decision they make other than total abstinence. It’s an attempt to put Republican contempt for women’s lives into law.