Health-insurance reform legislation is in the back-room stage in Washington, with House and Senate leaders meeting out of the public eye to decide what each chamber will vote on in the coming weeks.

We don’t know what those bills will look like, especially concerning protection of the right to life. But it is certain that congressional leaders are not going to be charitable, or even civil, to anyone who attempts to buck what they ultimately decide “reform” should look like.

Our conviction is that health-insurance reform legislation should clearly forbid the government from making abortion a mandatory covered service, and should not use federal funds for abortions or their coverage under any circumstances. If you agree, the time is critical to let your legislators know! Click here to send an e-mail to your Member of Congress and U.S. Senators.

Both President Obama and Congressional leaders have put enormous amounts of their political capital at risk by promising that health-insurance reform will happen before the end of this year – too much for failing to pass a bill to be an option.

Not long ago, a trade group representing health insurers issued a report stating that many of the proposed reforms would greatly increase the cost of health-benefit plans (a more accurate term than “health insurance”). Congressional leaders immediately responded to the report by threatening to remove antitrust exemptions that protected the insurers from some types of federal scrutiny, and on Oct. 21 the House Judiciary Committee took the first step toward doing just that. This apparently is how it is going to be for anyone who threatens to derail health reform!

Anyone following the story with an understanding of basic economics could be forgiven by responding to the insurers’ conclusions by saying, “well, duh.” Understand, we don’t have any special affection for the health-insurance industry. But we know how the business works, and the main talking point – that regulation leads to higher costs – is an obvious truth. All of the exclusions and rating techniques insurers employ when pricing its policies are designed to arrive at premium costs that accurately reflect the cost of insuring a particular group. Take away the insurers’ flexibility, and they have no choice but to raise prices for everyone.

Here’s an example: a home-construction company may be comprised of young single men, who are generally healthier than the rest of the population but face risks from accidents that other employers don’t have. A public school district’s workforce includes a significant number of women of childbearing age. A sane insurer will rate both groups accordingly, and the school district’s rates will account for the likelihood that several employees, in a given year, will incur claims for pregnancies.

Hypothetically, let Congress pass a law barring “gender discrimination” in rating, and what happens? The construction company’s rates will go up because rates for men can’t be lower than rates for women, even though single men are far less likely to incur pregnancy claims. We don’t know that this specific “reform” will show up in a bill that Congress votes on, but the point is made: higher costs are the inevitable trade-off for making the insurance industry, or any other business, operate less efficiently than they would otherwise. The same thing would happen if you require insurers to insure something that they would otherwise exclude – say, weight-loss surgery or some cosmetic procedures. We aren’t arguing for or against these regulations, but it’s silly to say that they won’t impact what you and I pay for coverage if they come to pass.

It’s apparently too late to tell Congress this, though. From their perspective, the health insurers’ inconvenient truths are most important because voters might realize that health-insurance reform will ultimately cost them, contrary to what Congress has told them.

What does that have to do with the key issue concerning health reform, the right to life? Well, for months we’ve been told – promised, in fact, by President Obama in many forums – that health-insurance reform will not involve federal funding of abortions. But in numerous instances, efforts to write that position explicitly into the law have been defeated. At the moment we don’t know what the final bill will look like, but it’s not likely to include language that was rejected in the public eye. Amendments on the House and Senate floors are a possibility only if Congressional leaders permit them to be considered.

Our conviction is that language prohibiting mandatory abortion coverage and federal funding of abortion is necessary because of the strong likelihood that an unelected panel of bureaucrats or a federal judge will ultimately mandate them.

You may have heard that the Hyde Amendment covers this concern, but that simply isn’t true. The Hyde Amendment prohibits federal Medicaid funds from being used for abortion; it’s voted upon in Congress annually for that purpose. But health-insurance reform will generate a new stream of federal revenues for which the Hyde Amendment simply won’t apply. Explicit language banning abortion funding or mandating abortion mandates would seem to be a no-brainer, especially since even many pro-abortion Americans draw the line at federal funding of the procedure.

Yes, as our colleague Charmaine Yoest noted recently in The Wall Street Journal, congressional “leaders claim that all they want is to maintain the ‘status quo’ on abortion. In reality, maintaining what we have now isn’t even on the table.” And it won’t be until and unless values voters make it known to their elected leaders that there will be consequences for them if health-insurance reform becomes a financial windfall for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

We’ve asked before, and we’re asking again because the timing is so critical: let your elected leaders know that health-insurance reform must be abortion-free, because abortion is not health care!

Click here to ask your Member of Congress and U.S. Senators to vote against the health-care bills that come for a vote unless they specifically exclude federal funding for abortion or mandates for abortion coverage.

Other ways you can support the fight to keep abortion out of health-care reform include:

• Pray for the success of the pro-life community in stopping an abortion industry bailout, and that elected representatives’ hearts would be turned to realize the moral correctness of our position.
   
• Click here to forward this article to your e-mail contacts.
   
• Copy the Web address (URL) of this story and forward it to your Twitter followers and Facebook friends, urging them to send e-mails to their elected representatives and local media.

We can win this important battle – let’s keep the pressure up!