On December 24th, by a vote of 60-39, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  As expected, all Democrats and the two independents voted for the health care reform bill in order to get the 60 votes needed to move it off the Senate floor.  In order to assure its passage, the Senate bill now includes an unacceptable abortion provision that was added to secure the vote of anti-choice Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE).  The Nelson abortion provision imposes significant obstacles for women seeking comprehensive health insurance coverage and health plans interested in offering it. 

The Nelson abortion provision is essentially an abortion rider—creating an unworkable system whereby individuals are required to write two separate checks, one for abortion coverage and one for everything else.  Health plans are then required to implement a complex accounting system in order to demonstrate that the different private payments are allocated separately.  A recent George Washington University study stated that the Nelson abortion provision “extends beyond the Hyde amendment” and “can be expected to have a significant impact on the ability or willingness of insurance issuers to offer Exchange products that cover a full range of medically indicated abortions.”  Despite other positive provisions in the health care reform bill, including our essential community provider protection, Planned Parenthood opposed this bill because of the Nelson provision. 

We are now turning our attention to the next step in the legislative process—the merging of the House and Senate bills.  It is through this process that we will have to both beat back attempts to include the Stupak abortion ban in the final bill and work to proactively push new abortion language that does not take benefits away from women.