WASHINGTON - Rep. Lois Capps insists she was trying to keep the focus on health care reform and head off a divisive debate over abortion.
Yet an amendment the California Democrat pushed during the summer is at the center of a heated argument over whether the health reform plans before Congress will permit federally funded abortions.
Capps says abortion opponents are deliberately twisting her words to make it appear she wants taxpayers to pay for abortion services.
Abortion opponents say Capps and other Democrats are engaging in "a hoax and a deception" to hide their true purpose -- to expand the types of abortions that are covered by health insurance and to allow federal dollars to pay for them.
Who's right? It depends on the definition of "federal" funds.
On this, however, there is no disagreement: Capps' proposal has fueled the very debate she says she was hoping to avoid.
"We didn't want this to become a debate about abortion," she said. "The bill is about health insurance for all Americans."
The Capps amendment, as it is known among abortion opponents, was added to the House health care reform bill last July after the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved it on a 30-28 vote.
The amendment concerns whether abortion services would be covered under an optional public health insurance plan and private health insurance plans that low-income people could buy with federal subsidies.
Capps said her amendment does nothing more than guarantee that existing federal policy on abortions is applied to the health reform legislation.
Right now, federal funds cannot be used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger.
Capps' amendment would extend those same rules to the optional public insurance plan that would be created under the health reform bill. However, the amendment authorizes the Health and Human Services secretary to decide whether other abortion services also should be covered.
Private health insurance plans purchased with federal subsidies also would be permitted to decide whether or not to include coverage for abortions, under the Capps proposal.
In either case, Capps argues, the amendment language strictly bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger. All other abortions would have to be paid for with private dollars -- namely, those funds that policyholders would pay into the system through their premiums. Those premiums would have to be kept separate from other government funds.
But abortion opponents say Capps and other Democrats who back her amendment are being dishonest.
Policyholders' premiums will stop becoming private money and will constitute federal funds once they are paid to the government, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
"Once the government receives those funds, they are federal funds as much as funds that the IRS collects or the Park Service collects," Johnson said.
To back up his argument, he cites budget language from the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office.
Capps and other Democrats "are trying to establish government funding of abortions" with artfully written language that masks their intentions from "the uninitiated or the superficial observer," Johnson said.
A couple of nonpartisan groups have weighed in on the amendment.
The Congressional Research Service, which provides legal and policy analysis for Congress, put out a memorandum at Capps' request that concludes the amendment wouldn't permit the use of federal subsidies to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger.
The memo did not address the issue of whether policyholders' premiums would constitute public funds.
Factcheck.org, a research project run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded: "As for the House bill, as it stands now, it's a matter of fact that it would allow both a 'public plan' and newly subsidized private plans to cover all abortions."
The group also noted, however, that the Capps amendment would allow a public health insurance plan to cover all abortions "so long as the plans took in enough private money in the form of premiums paid by individuals or their employers."
Capps said she introduced her amendment because she and others on the committee anticipated that public funding of abortions might become an issue during the debate over healthcare reform and that some groups might even use abortion to try to kill the reforms.
She had hoped to "neutralize" the issue, she said, by clarifying that the federal government could neither mandate nor prohibit coverage for abortion services for any of the insurance plans offered under the reforms.
Johnson, however, noted that the House committee shot down a broader amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., which would have prohibited government funding of "any part of the costs of any health plan" that includes abortion coverage, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman.
"Watch what they do, not what they say," he said.
E-mail Scripps Howard News Service correspondent Michael Collins at collinsm(at)shns.com
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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