Proposed Abortion Coverage Ban Moves Forward in Georgia
Source: RH Reality Check
Proposed Abortion Coverage Ban Moves Forward in Georgia
Emily Crockett
by Emily Crockett, Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check
February 25, 2014 - 10:03 am
A state senate committee in Georgia voted Thursday to approve a bill that would ban many health insurance plans from covering abortion care except in a narrowly defined “medical emergency.”
The bill, SB 98, would make Georgia the 25th state to ban insurance coverage of abortion on the health exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act. (That number includes Michigan, where such a ban has passed but has not yet gone into effect.) It would also prevent Georgia’s more than 600,000 state employees from accessing insurance coverage for abortion. More than 100,000 Georgians are already enrolled in health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Georgia state employees are already forbidden from accessing insurance coverage of abortion care, but the ban is an administrative one that the state health board pushed through last year after a similar bill failed to gain enough votes to pass the legislature. SB 98 would codify that ban into law, and would only marginally expand the exceptions. Currently, state employees can only receive coverage for life-saving abortions; the new law would allow either state employees or women purchasing insurance on the exchanges to get coverage if an abortion prevents the “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
“It’s a health exception so narrow that it’s practically nonexistent,” Amanda Allen, state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told RH Reality Check. The exception, Allen said, only covers immediate threats to a woman’s health, not complications from health conditions. A woman would not be covered, and face prohibitive costs, if she needed an abortion to start chemotherapy, to avoid exacerbating a heart condition, or to protect her mental health.... MORE
Read more: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/02/25/proposed-abortion-coverage-ban-moves-forward-georgia/
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