Apparently, there is no issue too petty for the right wing of the new Republican House. NPR reported last week on the GOP's efforts to make it hard for a woman to use her own money to purchase insurance covering a full range of health care, including abortions, with the introduction of HR3 by Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. See GOP Takes Latest Abortion Fight to the Tax Code (hat tip Francine Lipman).
The bill takes away tax advantage for health insurance--such as the ability to purchase with pre-tax dollars--if that health insurance covers abortion. Since most private insurance does now cover abortions (largely because we finally woke up as a country to the barbarity of allowing young women to die on the tables of malpracticing doctors performing cheap abortions hidden from the public eye), this represents exactly the kind of government intrusion into personal choices and the operation of the marketplace that the new Republican right wing claims to care so much about.
As Sen. Barbara Boxer noted, this bill "punishes women and businesses with a tax hike...if they wish to keep or buy insurance that covers the full range of reproductive health care."
Moreover, even these rightwingers will admit that abortions in some circumstances are a matter of life or death or of psychological health. Sara Rosenbaum noted that "the IRS would have to make technical decisions about what types of abortions can and can't be covered so it can decide what kind of insurance is eligible for tax deductions and credits. We're going to need the INternal Revenus Service to define a rape; potentially a forcible rape, incest, potentially incest involving minors, as opposed to incest not involving minors, physical conditions endangering life, and physical conditions that don't endanger life."
This is one more attack in the culture wars--the attempt by the right to roll back the clock to pre-FDR. They want to privatize or eliminate Social Security, cut back on Medicare and Medicaid, remove the few steps of progress we've made on treating health care as a right and not something that only the rich are entitled to. The right has managed to prevent government funding for any kind of abortion counseling, and now it wants to make it very difficult for a woman to choose to make a private payment for insurance for a procedure that is a constitutionally guaranteed right. It is also one more example of the way in which the nation's right seeks to impose its particular moral values on the entire society--particularly when it means reducing the independent choices available to women.
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