HR 7 (No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2017) seems to be a Very Bad Thing, but I don’t know enough about it - is it an extension of things that are already regulations in the US? Anyone have a better read on this? Is it the attack on American women’s ability to have their medical insurance pay for their abortions that it appears to be?
Wouldn’t ‘HR’ be House Resolution, and aren’t ‘Resolutions’ just a way for the legislature to say ‘I agree with you’ rather than being a bill (law)?
Bob
I’m not quite sure what this means. But one resource I found is GovTrack.us, and you can use it to keep track of the progress of bills, and get alerts on their progress, and the likelihood of them getting passed. Here’s the page for HR7, and it gives an 11% of it being enacted, though I don’t know how accurate their predictions are.
Salon has a recent article. It does two things - make the Hyde Amendment permanent and blocks insurance coverage for abortions in ACA Exchange plans that get a subsidy.
No. “HR” stands for House of Representatives.
All bills originate in the House or the Senate. Those that originate in the House are numbered with “H.R.” Those that start in the Senate are numbered with “S.”
Resolutions that do not require the approval (or allow veto) by the Presiden start with “H. Res.” or “S. Res.”
There are also Joint Resolutions and Concurrent Resolutions.
Fun Fact: Constitutional Amendments start their lives as Joint Resolutions.
So this is potentially a Very Bad Thing, but it hasn’t been enacted yet, and it isn’t likely to.
On the other hand–
Nate Silver originally gave Trump only a 2% chance of getting elected. . . .
Seems like just a permanent Hyde amendment which one way or another has been the law for the past 30 years. Doesn’t seem like much of a change
From the articles I had read (including the Salon article linked above) there was an addition that said any insurance plan that received any federal funding would not be allowed to offer abortion as covered under the insurance plan (or perhaps, the reverse, that any person who receives a subsidy would be barred from purchasing insurance that also covers abortions - these articles are a bit of a mess). So any ACA plans especially would have abortion stripped entirely from being covered by insurance, and from what I gather, some normal non-ACA plans may feel pressured to drop it entirely so there’s less paperwork involved trying to figure out who is “ok” to give that type of insurance to and who “isn’t ok”. So from what I can tell, the difference between this and the Hyde amendment is that even if none of your federal funding goes towards abortions anyway, if you accept federal funding the insurance provider is banned from covering abortions period (as opposed to before, where you could offer it as covered, but had to make sure no federal money touched that part of the books).
The articles did not make it especially clear that this still needs to go through the Senate. I mean, I knew that due to my education anyway, but the way the articles present it makes it sound like it already happened. I guess that’s better than a lowkey approach where nobody hears about it and it quietly passes because nobody called their representatives or senators.
The GovTrack.us website uses a commonsense algorithm to determine the quality level of whether a proposed bill is enacted. The algorithm needs to be changed to reflect the removal of commonsense in Congress since the election.
Well, that clears that up!
Agreed.