Determining A Health Plan's Abortion Coverage Remains A Challenge

As the third open enrollment period winds down on the health insurance marketplaces, one thing hasn't changed much since the online exchanges opened: It's still often hard to find out whether a plan covers abortion services.

The health law requires insurers to say one way or the other, and they have gotten better about reporting abortion coverage details this year, advocates on both sides agree.

But the federal government has yet to put out final instructions on how insurers should handle the issue on their Summary of Benefits and Coverage overview. Lacking specific instructions about what to say and where to say it, many insurers have simply left the information out of the summary, advocates say.

That leaves consumers in a bind. "It's not easy to figure out whether a plan covers abortion and if it does, to what extent," said Kinsey Hasstedt, a public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights.

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