Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hit the congressional hot seat today. Added scrutiny of the government’s top Obamacare overseer is most welcome, but there’s one thing voters need to keep in mind.
In short, here is a person who has spectacularly bungled Obamacare’s implementation, yet refuses to step down or accept any consequences whatsoever. She called the throng of Americans demanding her resignation, “people who [sic] I don’t work for.”
Sebelius dodged every question asked of her regarding the Obamacare website, saying either that she had no data or that she would “get back to” her questioners.
So if a smooth, efficient, and accessible portal to access her boss’s signature legislation is not on Sebelius’s list of concerns, what is? What are Kathleen Sebelius’s favorite things?
In a word: abortion. In five words: abortion on demand without apology.
Sebelius’s history as governor of Kansas is illustrative. For one thing, she vetoed the 2009 Late-Term and Partial-Birth Abortion Regulation Act, which solidified the standards for late-term abortion data reporting and demanded medical justification for destroying a fully developed baby in the womb.
Prior to that, Sebelius vetoed abortion facility regulation legislation – the sort that could have stopped convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell, and that’s even now uncovering dens of filth in Virginia – in 2005 and 2003.
Consider also Sebelius’s cozy relationship with late-term abortionists like George Tiller and LeRoy Carhart, and her zealous defense of Obamacare’s infamous HHS mandate, which forces employers to fund contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs, regardless of conscience objections. A host of individuals and organizations have sued HHS on this point, including a Bible publisher, a popular Catholic radio station, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. They have the support of over a third of the United States.
Put simply, Kathleen Sebelius, who styles herself a Catholic, wants to force nuns to pay for abortions.
It’s clear how Sebelius feels about abortion. So what does Obamacare, rife as it is with “the Secretary shall…,” have to say about it?
First off, health insurance plans are required to exact a monthly surcharge specifically for elective abortion. Many news outlets have mentioned the “$1 abortion surcharge,” but the truth is that a dollar is the minimum amount.
It is nearly impossible to discover which insurance plans include this abortion-on-demand surcharge and which ones don’t. Insurance providers refuse to specify which plans include it. The situation is so bad that Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) has put forth legislation to demand disclosure of which insurance plans on the exchanges will use customers’ money to dismember or poison children in the womb.
Meanwhile, all of the health insurance plans on the Rhode Island’s Obamacare exchange cover abortion. And Connecticut prompts customers to include “unborn children” (the state’s words) as family members – while including plans that cover abortion.
It does not get more macabre than this – but it is one rare instance where Obamacare tells the truth.
(All this is just a sample. Don’t forget Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, which already forces taxpayers to fund abortion in many states, or Obamacare’s provision to fund abortions for federal workers, whose premiums [in part] and salaries [in whole] come from the taxpayer.)
So even if the Obamacare website is a dysfunctional disaster, when it comes to facilitating abortions, the law itself works just fine. And at the center of its implementation is Sebelius.
With the notable and laudable exception of Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), congressmen refrained from questioning the HHS secretary on abortion this Wednesday. But viewers and voters should ask, and often: what’s most important to Kathleen Sebelius?
Is it creating an efficient Obamacare portal, through which millions of customers at a time can quickly and reliably shop the insurance exchanges? Sebelius does not know.
How about even a functional website – one that doesn’t self-destruct, make a mockery of visitors’ privacy, or tell insurance companies that potential customers have multiple spouses … or count spouses as children? Sebelius will get back to us on that.
But we don’t need the secretary to get back to us on this question; she’s already made the answer quite clear. Kathleen Sebelius’s favorite thing appears to be making Americans investors in and subsidiaries of the abortion business – be it by deception or by run-of-the-mill government compulsion.
When your Health and Human Services secretary is so eager to make the American people complicit in abortion that she jumps the gun on a law that’s now booting millions off their insurance plans, it might be time to get a new secretary. Neither our pre-born children nor our religious freedom can endure this one.
Drew Belsky is communications director for Live Action, a new media movement dedicated to ending abortion and building a culture of life. Contact him at drew@liveaction.org, on Facebook, or on Twitter.