The Stupak amendment is atrocious. Abortion should be covered by a universal health care plan.
That said, the alan guttmacher institute says that there were 1.29 million abortions in the US in 2003, and that in 2001, the average cost of an abortion was $487.
Multiply the two and you get $628,2300. Adjust for medical inflation and all the abortions in the US probably cost around $900 million in 2008. Let's assume if abortion were widely available, that utilization would increase by 50%. That's about $1.45 billion. That's not really that much money.
Bill and Melinda Gates do lots of lovely health care work, for which they will spend $3.8 million this year. So for less than half the health care spending of the Gates Foundation, we could provide abortions to anyone who wants them, no questions asked.
Okay, so there are states that don't have any providers. Throw in another $300 million for travel, and we're talking $1.75 billion to provide abortions to women who want them. Still about half of all Gates Foundation spending.
How hard can it be to find a bunch of rich people and foundations to generate that much money? I know lots of kossaks would help generate small netroots donations too. Instead of wasting money on washington pro-choice organizations who failed embarrassingly as lobbyists during this health care reform battle, just fund safe, caring provision of the procedure privately to anyone who wants one, and you take three-quarters of the political fights off the table.
We should still fight those fights -- but provision of abortion through Medicaid or private insurance would no longer be a question of life or death, it would just ease the strain on rich liberals.
Then the fight would boil down to the basics -- does the constitutional right to privacy cover abortions, and should abortion be legal. We win those fights.
For all the useless bureaucratic crap that liberal foundations fund, and all the energy we put into fighting back against the anti choice crazies, we could take a lot of the issue off the table with the bold stroke of a few liberal pens backed up by lots of little checks from us. A little less than $2 billion a year. It's what obama spent on his election. Create a central fund that any doctor can tap for reimbursement, and you're done -- national abortion insurance for every woman in the United States.
Bill and Melinda -- we appreciate all the work you do for women's health around the world. But this is a place where with one bold stroke, you and a handful of friends could make a huge leap forward for women right here in the US, especially poor women. It would also be a demonstration of the power of goodhearted, courageous rich people to change the nature of the politics of health care in a deep way.
Hey Robert Wood Johnson -- you gave $520 million in grants last year. Two of your seven program areas are "coverage" and "public health." how about giving 2/7 of your grants to a bold stroke idea that radically expands women's health coverage, $150 million a year for a national private abortion coverage pool.
Hey, Rockefeller Foundation -- you say you "seek high-impact ideas that have the potential to make a difference in the lives of large numbers of poor or vulnerable people and we require some results from such ideas to be measurable within three to five years."
How's this for a high impact idea?
Just a thought.