With HealthSource RI — Rhode Island’s health benefits exchange under the federal Affordable Care Act — currently in its open enrollment period, I’ve been looking at changes in premiums, deductibles, and such.  Although I still have to look more deeply, it’s reasonably safe to say that, in most cases, premiums went up (sometimes by double-digit percentages) and, in many cases, deductibles also went up.  That is, those who were automatically re-enrolled may soon discover that their monthly costs are going up while their total benefits decrease.

It is within that context, along with my belief that (in most cases) abortion is tantamount to infanticide, that I read Kristin Gourlay’s Rhode Island Public Radio article about “9000 Inadvertently Re-Enrolled In Plans With No Abortion Coverage,” which the International Business Times has picked up for a larger story.  I’m sure the plans in which those 9,000 people were re-enrolled included other changes, with additions and reductions in coverage, and while I understand that this is a controversial issue of substantial public debate, it bothers me that killing unborn children is treated as a major component of basic healthcare.

Based on the current enrollment demographics for HealthSource, 46% of enrollees are men and 51% are over 45 years old.  It’s not this simple, of course, but roughly speaking that means only around 8,118 enrollees are likely to be in the demographic range that would be interested in abortion coverage in the first place.  We could reasonably reduce that number by a couple thousand (at least) to account for those who are pro-life.*

Applying these percentages to the 9,000 “inadvertent” re-enrollments, only around 2,381 are likely to be applicable to abortion, anyway, reduced to fewer than 1,700 if only those who think abortion should be legal are included.  That’s around 5% of all enrollees.  It’s not inconceivable that a similar or larger number of HealthSource customers would be interested to know that they were “inadvertently” re-enrolled in plans that do cover abortion even though plans that do not are now available.

 

* I grabbed poll results from a post on RI Future, but I hesitate to apply them, here, for two reasons.  First of all, the poll was conducted on behalf of Planned Parenthood, which is the nation’s leading aborter, and the skew is obvious in the way the question is phrased.  Second, the actual opinion that produced a 71% support rate was whether the law should leave decisions up to individuals, which leaves a great deal of room for people to oppose being made to subsidize abortion through an insurance pool, much less desiring the coverage for themselves.