Health care and abortion

I am sure the writer of the following letter is opposed to restricting abortion in any sense. However, this is one line of argument that lacks logical cohesion. It supports the fallacy that insurance is about "pooling" risk, it isn't. What one ought to pay for insurance is the real expected cost for that person. Indirect subsidies are not insurance in any meaningful sense, except a political one.

To the Editor:

I would like to ask those people who, as a matter of conscience, do not want to see tax money being used to finance legal abortions where they think the money to finance that coverage comes from now. It comes out of their pockets, in the premiums they pay to their insurance companies.

Those who fought against the financing of abortions in the present health care reform bill may have good reasons for having done so, but pretending that keeping taxpayer dollars out of the equation somehow relieves them of financial complicity is a denial of reality.

Elizabeth Fuller
Peterborough, N.H., Nov. 10, 2009

Ms. Fuller is right in that the current insurance system acts upon a subsidization scheme, not on sound insurance principles. Basically, health insurance is insurance in name only. The conclusion drawn has the premise that this subsidization scheme is proper, it is not. We should end this indirect subsidization within the health insurance market and therefore allow people to pay for their own abortions. When will people admit that abortions arise out of controllable behavior. You don't come down with pregnancy. As someone who is not morally opposed to abortion, I find the inability to acknowledge this disturbing.