Opinion: Faith and fungibility
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I was in high school when I learned that ‘fungible’ was a concept in economics, not something that could give rise to a fungus infection. The idea worked its way into non-economic political discourse in the 1980s, when the Supreme Court ruled that the fact that students at a private college received federal aid didn’t mean that all of the college’s operations were subject to civil rights laws.
Critics of the decision -- who persuaded Congress to change the law -- argued that federal funds for individual students freed up money that the discriminatory college otherwise might have provided for scholarships. The fungibility of funds meant that the taxpayers were indirectly but actually subsidizing a refusal to comply with civil rights laws.
Flash forward to the current debate over healthcare reform. Catholic bishops and other pro-life advocates don’t want federal funds to pay for abortions, primarily because it would spare anti-abortion taxpayers from subsidizing a procedure they consider immoral. It isn’t just bishops, or conservative bishops, who endorse what President Obama has called the ‘tradition’ of not using government funds to pay for abortion. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, an influential liberal group zealously supportive of health reform, has said that ‘maintaining current policy of not using federal taxpayer funds for abortions and retaining responsible conscience protections for health care workers is critical to achieving the broad consensus necessary for reform.’
As Obama has argued, the major proposals being considered by Congress don’t overturn the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bars federal financing of abortions. But pro-lifers, including the Catholic bishops, have been suspicious. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved an amendment that would allow health care plans to cover abortion so long as they were funded by premiums paid by the insured, not by federal funds.
This where fungibility rears its head, as Sarah Palin would say. By reducing the cost of other medical services, the bill would enhance a woman’s ability to buy abortion coverage. Likewise, federal support for private plans will support abortion services by reducing a plan’s overall cost, making it easier for a woman to pay for abortion coverage with her own money. The archbishop of Philadelphia ridiculed this as ‘a legal fiction, a paper separation between federal funding and abortion.”
He has a point. The problem is that the ‘fungibility’ argument proves too much. Even without healthcare legislation, federal assistance to an individual or family -- such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps or a federal education grant -- frees up private funds that can be spent on an insurance plan that covers abortion -- or an abortion itself. In a welfare state, the only way completely to eliminate government involvement in abortion is to recriminalize it, and that’s not going to happen.