by Doctor Science
So you’ve probably been wondering why I haven’t posted about the current battles in the War on Women. Mostly it’s because I’ve been very busy with that “work” thing, and I don’t think it’s right to make such posts if I don’t have time to moderate the comments, because they can get a bit … heated.
The other reason is that I’ve been reeling from one day to the next, as the hits just keep coming. You can refresh your memory by glancing through Balloon Juice’s War on Women tag, or Charles Pierce’s Lady Parts tag, or pretty much the whole thing at Reproductive Health Reality Check. I’ve been basically too choked with outrage and unbelief to figure out where to begin, and what to say that wasn’t just a string of Carlin Words.
Now I’ve got (a little) time, so I’m going to ask:
In what kind of world does this make sense?
Adieu Ammenotep, 1960, by Leonora Carrington, who was being surreal on purpose. I never heard of her before, but she sounds like an amazing person. She died only last year, at the age of 94.
Look at the facts:
– Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about policies that restrict insurance payment for contraception. Her testimony had nothing to say about her personal situation, she was relaying the experiences of a wide variety of women, especially those who need birth control pills for reasons other than contraception, such as polycystic ovary syndrome.
– Rush Limbaugh made up lies about her testimony and started riffing on them.
– He didn’t just call her a slut — though he did it over and over and over again — he said it was because she couldn’t spend that much money on birth control unless she was having sex all the time. This was actually a combination of a lie (Fluke said nothing about her own life) and sheer stupidity, because (as everyone ought to know) birth control pills cost the same amount regardless of how much sex you’re having.
– Limbaugh’s lies and foul, skeezy language were picked up all over Right Bloglandia. Here’s a starter list, but it’s all over the place. For instance, I stumbled upon Robert Stacy McCain calling her a lying liberal bitch — and also, bizarrely, a “Chubster”, because no attack on a woman can be complete unless you say she’s fat and unattractive, too, even when that is visibly not the case.
When the Republican Presidential candidates were asked about the situation, they said:
Romney: “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.”
Gingrich: “I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the President’s apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of this week.”
Paul: “I had said he used very crude language, and I think he gets over the top at times. But it’s in his best interest. That’s why he did it. I don’t think he’s very apologetic. He’s doing it because some people were taking advertisements off his program. It was the bottom line that he was concerned about.”
Santorum: “He’s being absurd. But that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd. And — and he’s taking the absurd, you know, the absurd — absurd, you know, sort of, you know, point of view here as to how — how far do you go? And, look, he’s in a very different business than I am. I’m concerned about the public policy of this president imposing his values on the people on people of faith who morally object to — to the government telling them they have to do something which they believe is a grave moral wrong.”
In a world that makes sense, at least one of the candidates would have said something in favor of contraception in general, or of respect for women even when you disagree with them, at minimum. Anything to avoid worsening the gender gap — Obama had a 13-point advantage over McCain among women in 2008, and women vote more than men.
Instead, the candidates basically went along with the narrative, so they shouldn’t be surprised that even numbers of Republican, Tea Party women are starting to reconsider their allegiance.
Meanwhile, in New Hanover County, NC:
Commissioners unanimously voted down a state grant that would fund contraceptive supplies and services in the county. Just like the national story, providing contraceptive healthcare to women is anything but one-sided, but commissioners all seemed to have the same mindset.
“I have a fundamental philosophical issue with using tax pay dollars to fund someone’s irresponsibility,” said Commissioner Rick Catlin, who also serves on the county’s health board.
“If these young women are being responsible and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with, but unfortunately that’s the problem that we have,” Commission Chairman Ted Davis said.
All five commissioners voted to turn down a nearly $9,000 state grant to help fund contraceptive supplies and medical services related to family planning.
But maybe New Hanover isn’t totally surreal:
After thinking it through, one commissioner says he regrets his vote.
“I’m one of those abstinence guys, so I agree with those comments,” Commissioner Jonathan Barfield said during Monday’s meeting.
Barfield says he realized his mistake after talking with his wife.
“Her first question was, ‘What were you thinking?’ and we started walking through and talking about this discussion,” Barfield said. “She brought up some very valid points that if someone is seeking contraception, it shows that they are being responsible.”
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! I congratulate Mrs. Barfield on her ability to get an idea to sprout on apparently infertile ground.
Really, in what kind of a world does it seem reasonable to say “birth control is irresponsible”? In particular, what kind of man thinks that birth control is irresponsible, or negative, or anything other than a big load off his mind? Is this really how a lot of people are thinking, or is it all what Harry Frankfurt defined as Bullshit — a lie that doesn’t even *care* about the truth, just about what works for the moment?
In a way, I’m grateful to Limbaugh and his yelping chorus of slut-shamers. Feminists like me have been saying for years that the real issue isn’t abortion, or religious freedom, or even contraception, what the sexual McCarthyites are opposed to is women’s sexual agency. Sandra Fluke didn’t have to *do* anything to be called a “slut”, all she had to do was be a woman in public.
I am closing comments on this post. Moderation rules on the following post will be quite severe for a while, until everyone gets used to not making personal attacks all the time.
Look at what Rush did as a tactic. All the media scrambled to point out the outrageous statement he made. Everyone was shocked. Advertisers suspended advertisements.
In the midst of all this my wife, without batting an eye, says to me that nobody should have to pay for this woman to have sex.
And all the while everyone is shocked at Rush calling this girl a slut and demanding a video tape.
I’ve explained the real issue to my wife a couple times, but I doubt she really understands.
Yes, Rush is a horrible person who said horrible things. But this is an age old tactic–hide the lie in a bombastic statement. The bombast makes us all shudder and point and on and on. All the while, the lie gets mainlined.
The question seems to be, at least partially, “What is responsibility?”
In the world of early 20th century, with no contraception available, a “responsible” woman would only have sex in marriage. (This applied to a “responsible” man, too, but he would not be caught if irresponsible.) This is natural: only within marriage, the unavoidable offspring could be brought up in relative economic and social security.
On the other hand, with the pill available, a “responsible” person would take care that no STD’s are spread and no unwanted offspring is begotten. Dr. Science takes correctly the position that this is what “responsibility” means with the modern technology. Of course, this definition of responsibility expands woman’s sexual and social autonomy considerably, which is a bad thing from the conservative POV.
As a man, I would say that for me “responsibility” means using condom with females I do not completely trust, mainly for the sake of STD’s. With a long-term partner, pill is a much better way of family planning. And this is how the conservative attack on women hurts men: if a poor woman cannot afford the pill, the sexual enjoyment and autonomy of her male partner is also diminished. Thus, the conservatives are not only hurting poor women but their poor male partners, too.
Of course, from an authoritarian point of view, this is just a good thing. Regulating people’s intimate behaviour in detail is the hallmark of any competent cult leader.
“And this is how the conservative attack on women hurts men: if a poor woman cannot afford the pill, the sexual enjoyment and autonomy of her male partner is also diminished. Thus, the conservatives are not only hurting poor women but their poor male partners, too.”
This is true, but in a “so what?” kind of way.
If a poor woman can’t afford dining out, the gustatory enjoyment and autonomy of her dates is also diminished. Thus not subsidizing restaurants not only hurts poor women, but also poor men. But not a lot of people are going to view this as a reason food stamps ought to cover Olive Garden.
You really are better off with the, “Sometimes the pill is used for other medical purposes aside from contraception.” argument. It doesn’t require the listener to believe that folks are entitled to have their jollies subsidized. Which is, of course, the view Rush was attacking in his usual crude way.
So, so this isn’t good just from an authoritarian POV, (In fact, authoritarians can and do take the opposite tack, or else this wouldn’t be in the news at the moment!) it’s also good from a, “Do whatever the hell you like, but foot the damn bill yourself!” point of view.
A very common point of view outside the left…
Looked at more neutrally: there’s no publicity like bad publicity.
Even an unwitting instrument of the Right Wing Noise Machine like myself can recognize that birth control pills are not “jollies”. Why can’t you?
folks are entitled to have their jollies subsidized
What subsidy are you talking about? Students pay insurance premiums, so they’d be subsidizing themselves. Are you referring to the cross subsidy by which students who never take birth control pay for those who do? If so, how is that different from students who never ski paying for the mending of bones broken by student skiers?
If a poor woman can’t afford dining out, the gustatory enjoyment and autonomy of her dates is also diminished. Thus not subsidizing restaurants not only hurts poor women, but also poor men. But not a lot of people are going to view this as a reason food stamps ought to cover Olive Garden.
Nobody is talking about government money or taxpayer subsidies, Brett. Sandra Fluke and her fellow students are required, as a condition of enrollment at Georgetown, to purchase health insurance from them, at a substantial cost. They would like that insurance to cover reproductive health. It currently does not.
So just what on Earth are you on about?
Did you even RTFA?
Do you ever RTFA?
Or do you start from a conclusion (THIS IS DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD THOUGHTCRIME) and work backwards?
(Don’t answer, it’s rhetorical.)
NB: What kills me is that this is also true of all the employment-based health insurance to which this bogus “religious freedom” argument has been applied. First off, it isn’t, like, a birthday present or something. A health plan is part of your compensation, and the employer should have no more say over how it gets spent — whether on Viagra, Depro-provera or Prozac — than he/she does over your paycheck.
Second, at just about ever decent-sized employer I know, you don’t have the option not to take the insurance plan, unless you can provide solid evidence that you have health insurance via other means. If you cannot do so, your employer will enroll you and will take the employee contribution out of your check. So, again, they require you to take it, then want to tell you how you can use it? LOL nope.
Can’t disagree with Doctor Science in the slightest.
But let’s not forget that the War Against Women is also being fought on the domestic violence front: From yesterday’s NYT:
“The legislation would continue existing grant programs to local law enforcement and battered women shelters, but would expand efforts to reach Indian tribes and rural areas. It would increase the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, extend the definition of violence against women to include stalking, and provide training for civil and criminal court personnel to deal with families with a history of violence. It would also allow more battered illegal immigrants to claim temporary visas, and would include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.”
Of course, Republican lawmakers claim oppose the bill on the grounds that it’s being expanded to help the loathsome illegal immigrants (who apparently deserve to be battered) and same-sex couples (similarly deserve domestic abuse).
But more telling is Phyllis Shlafly’s reaction (remember? She’s the guardian of “traditional marriage”): “Last month on the conservative Web site Townhall.com, the conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly called the Violence Against Women Act a slush fund ‘used to fill feminist coffers’ and demanded that Republicans stand up against legislation that promotes ‘divorce, breakup of marriage and hatred of men.'”
I can only hope that Republicans true colors are becoming more and more obvious to people who think that they’re harmless so that they’ll be voted out of office.
(It’s okay with me, Brett, if you think that contraception is all about someone’s “jollies” even though it reduces the infant mortality rate in countries where it is widely available. People who are middle aged and, have children, and still don’t get it that sexuality is a part of intimate expression, not just “jollies,” will never be convinced.)
BTW, the GOP is 100% dedicated to losing most of the female vote this year, and possibly forever.
Arizona wants to make it legal for employers to engage in panty-sniffing, then fire all the slutty girls.
Wisconsin wants to use the law to call single parenthood child abuse and also recommends that battered women try to just remember the good times and stick it out.
And the national GOP has decided to, for the first time, get pissy about renewing the Violence Against Women Act, because it includes provisions for Native American women and same-sex couples, and also an expedited visa process for abused undocumented immigrants.
Brett may have a point to the effect that coverage for birth control pills should not be compulsory, but so far he’s not making it.
AFAIC, this is a dispute that’s completely between the employees and the employer. It’s not clear to me that either the federal government or Rush Limbaugh should have any kind of interest in the matter.
It’s not clear to me that either the federal government or Rush Limbaugh should have any kind of interest in the matter.
Right now, the government offers substantial tax breaks to companies who pay their employees with health insurance rather than just cash. Given that the companies are claiming a government benefit, it seems perfectly reasonable that they have to abide by minimum government standards, like, say, the notion that your insurance product has to pay for drugs that treat PCOS.
I mean, it would be absurd if companies could claim the tax break while offering their employees “insurance” that didn’t pay to treat actual medical problems in the real world.
“Do whatever the hell you like, but foot the damn bill yourself!” point of view.
Do you even understand what health insurance is? Do I get to say I don’t have to pay premiums because someone broke his leg while skiing? Can I say that my co-worker should have used better birth control (that obviously you think she — because why would her husband have to pay for it? — should foot the bill all on her own) so she didn’t get pregnant so I don’t have to pay into the pool that pays for her prenatal care, hospital bills, or well baby visits?
Health insurance in Libertopia: you pay for every treatment yourself, and if you can’t afford it, you stay sick or die.
When I tried to point out at another blog that Brett was simply handwaving away that birth control and other preventative coverage was a workaday part of the risk management/cost control tactics of every insurance company, his response was “I’m not writing a master’s thesis here.”
He seems to genuinely not understand how health care plans work, which makes me wonder why he doesn’t simply start a competing company if he’s got such a handle on how to do it better.
Brett’s argument isn’t even a good one from the fiscal conservative point of view, if one is being at all realistic. Contraception is cheaper than an unplanned pregnancy. Are people simply not going to have sex if they can’t afford contraception, or are they going to take their horny chances?
Compartmentalized thinking abounds.
Or what MM said. (I know it didn’t take me 12 minutes to write my last comment.)
A very common point of view outside the left
when you write shit like this (which you always do), it forces the reader to choose between two options:
1) you’re a troll
2) you have never met anyone who would describe themselves as being of “the left”
neither option gives the reader any reason to take you seriously.
i’m sure this isn’t the first time someone has said this to you.
Maybe the Olive Garden-food-stamps analogy would make sense if a meal at Olive Garden would eliminate the need to eat for the next year, at which point I imagine it would be very fiscally responsible for food stamps to cover meals at Olive Garden.
(I only eat there when my in-laws perdictably give us a gift card. The food is soooo friggin’ salty that I think they’re trying to kill me.)
I was thinking as I read this post all this obviously stupid crap from Republican politicians wouldn’t make any difference to male Republican voters becuase they would either rationalize it away or say that they don’t agree but are going to vote R anyway. You all know the line because you’ve heard it right here on obWi: “I Know that Palin/Santorum/every other Republican politician is crazy. but I’m not one of those Republicans (I just vote them into office)”
Female Republican voters might actually be moved by this issue since it is an attack on them or their daughters or female relatives.
SO the men who don’t really care about anythig except keeping their tazes low and their federally funded services high will keep on voting R regardless of the the harm to women just as they kept on voting R regardless of the harm to everyone else.
Female R voters who never cared about the harm Republicans do to their fellow Americans are suddenly having a thought or to about it since the harm is now aimed at them or their female relatives and acquaintences.
Are people simply not going to have sex if they can’t afford contraception, or are they going to take their horny chances?
We both know, from several millenia of written history, that in all societies, the latter is true for the vast majority of population. I’m sure that Brett knows it, too.
The whole point of making contraception unaffordable and unaccessible for low and middle class is to cause the social structures built around the unavailability of contraception to return:
* impossibility of responsible premarital sex
* as a result, severe curtailing of women’s personal autonomy and social freedom
* resulting in increased power of men, especially fathers and other male relatives.
This is a Kulturkampf of sorts. Wide-spread use of contraception is an integral part of our culture and our way of life. Fight against its availability is a fight against modern liberal society.
Do you even understand what health insurance is?
Many libertarians both do not understand insurance and, in many cases, are against the concept of insurance. While insurance and libertarianism are not wholly incompatible, the “collectivist” nature of insurance itself is abhorrent to them in an instinctual sense, so it becomes difficult to have discussions about it with them.
* impossibility of responsible premarital sex
* as a result, severe curtailing of women’s personal autonomy and social freedom
* resulting in increased power of men, especially fathers and other male relatives.
Don’t forget the goal of populating a large, cheap, and exploitable work force. The less control families have over their numbers, the more desperate for any work the laborers will be, and the less they will be able to afford to educate their children, giving rise to more generations of cheap labor. It’s a long game strategy.
Brett, your “jollies” argument is also wrong – or else, why isn’t the catholic church / Rush Limbaugh decrying the fact that employers are compelled to pay for Viagra?
Isn’t that enough to show that what these people are upset about is specific to women?
Lastly, what’s wrong with paying for jollies? I don’t like that you characterize sex as though it’s a joke. Sex is very serious – especially for women, who run the risk of pregnancy. Also, to use an example that another post mentioned, when a skier gets into an accident and the insurance company pays a premium for his treatment, isn’t that company paying for his “jollies?” What’s wrong with a consensual contractual arrangement whereby risk spreading for “jolly” enjoyment is agreed upon?
While insurance and libertarianism are not wholly incompatible, the “collectivist” nature of insurance itself is abhorrent to them in an instinctual sense, so it becomes difficult to have discussions about it with them.
I get so tired of hearing or reading sentences that begin “Why should I have to pay for…” that I want to respond, “You don’t have to pay for anything. Hop on a log and paddle out to the middle of the ocean.”
But that’s not very nice, is it?
Why did I make this about “paying for your jollies”? Because that’s the basis on which Lurker defended it: Not because contraceptives might be used to regularize periods, or treat some other condition, but because, if you didn’t subsidize them, some poor woman might have a lousy sex life.
I suggested he might want to defend it on other terms. I still do.
Nobody is keeping the students from paying for contraceptives with their own money, any more than the fact that the university doesn’t pay for the CDs means it’s prohibiting listening to music.
This is, pretty unambiguously, about forcing religous institutions to violate their own convictions. It’s about the left’s determination that nobody gets to have convictions that matter except them.
We both know, from several millenia of written history, that in all societies, the latter is true for the vast majority of population. I’m sure that Brett knows it, too.
I don’t actually know that he does. Or, even if so, millions of like-minded people out there certainly only understand this in a highly “compartmentalized” way, as hairshirthedonist notes.
Because this form of thinking seems to be to be essentially pandemic in the whole Republican/libertarian/conservative sphere. The idea is apparently to take it as given that if the consequences/risks are unpleasant enough, people will simply cease to engage in “irresponsible”/”undesirable” behavior X. Human nature and the testament of 10,000 years of history simply don’t hold a candle to such an obviously logical assumption.
So, when people predictably continue to behave like human beings rather than profit-maximizing robots, well, f*** ’em. And if the sum total of that situation makes us collectively worse off than we would be if we took a little corrective, collective action (to, say, provide easy access to birth control), well f*** us all. It’s more important to be ideologically pure. Government only makes things worse. Etc. Etc.
It’s obviously not just lady parts, either. Though I expect that is a particularly crucial — and nasty — cornerstone of the whole mode of thinking.
Think of retirement security (“screw pensions/social security, responsible people should just save their money!”), health care (“responsible people would just set aside money for medical expenses! why do we call it insurance when it pays for routine checkups!), and social welfare of all kinds (“responsible people would just buy rice cookers and then become self-made millionaires! Food stamps just make people poorer!”). Even things like public education fall under this kind of attack.
(There are obviously racist and/or sexist overtones to all of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a substantial segment have simply forgotten that it was all supposed to be just a dogwhistle talking point and have bought into it completely.)
Lastly, what’s wrong with paying for jollies? I don’t like that you characterize sex as though it’s a joke. Sex is very serious – especially for women, who run the risk of pregnancy. Also, to use an example that another post mentioned, when a skier gets into an accident and the insurance company pays a premium for his treatment, isn’t that company paying for his “jollies?” What’s wrong with a consensual contractual arrangement whereby risk spreading for “jolly” enjoyment is agreed upon?
This.
I also think it’s deeply strange to talk about sex as “jollies” at all. As if it’s just a risky hobby some people partake in, like skiing. I mean, it’s not as if sex is some kind of (nearly) universally practiced basic biological activity or anything.
No. It’s something really weird which should obviously not be part of standard medical care.
Phil:
You’re doing it again. Talk about the argument, not about the person making the argument. I will delete any further comments of yours that include ad hominem attacks, even if I agree with the rest of the comment.
Is it possible to put comments into moderation on this thing? *poke poke*
Brett, would you mind answering the question I asked you about subsidies? To wit:
Nobody is keeping the students from paying for contraceptives with their own money, any more than the fact that the university doesn’t pay for the CDs means it’s prohibiting listening to music.
On the other hand, it would not seem unreasonable for student health insurance to cover an ear checkup to look for loud music-induced hearing loss, and, if necessary, hearing aids or other treatment.
Likewise, say, a liver checkup for a college-age binge-drinker. And if there were a magic pill which could make either alcohol consumption or loud music relatively harmless, that would seem like a very smart investment for a health plan.
So, Brett, what makes sex (which is probably an even more universal activity than excessive drinking or listening to loud music) so special?
(Also “prohibiting” seems like maybe an interesting Freudian slip. Who’s talking about prohibiting unauthorized sex? Who even thinks that reducing access to birth control is even going to somehow reduce the incidence of sex?)
“Nobody is keeping the students from paying for contraceptives with their own money, any more than the fact that the university doesn’t pay for the CDs means it’s prohibiting listening to music.”
Is it unclear to you that Sandra Fluke pays roughly $47,000 in tuition to Georgetown, which also buys her health insurance?
In what way is she not paying for birth control with her own money? Keep in mind that (typically, I think) people who buy birth control also pay copays for it. I have a feeling that your argument, in order to address the fact that Sandra Fluke is paying for health insurance, will boil down to not liking the concept of insurance. But I am eager to be proved wrong!
“This is, pretty unambiguously, about forcing religous institutions to violate their own convictions. It’s about the left’s determination that nobody gets to have convictions that matter except them.”
You are conflating two things – 1) being forced to do something you don’t approve of, and 2) being forced to pay for someone else doing something you don’t approve of. But those are distinct things. No one is making the Catholic church use birth control. Instead, the Catholic Church as an employer is being forced to abide by the insurance requirements that apply to other employers.
There’s two hurdles the religious argument has to get over to make any sense –
1) Acting as an employer is secular – render unto Caesar, etc etc. Does the Bible actually say somewhere that, not only can you not use contraception, you cannot subsidize the use of someone else’s contraception? Where in Catholic dogma does it say that?
2) Even if the Bible did say “thou shalt not be forced to cover contraception as part of prescription drug benefits in thy health insurance coverage,” why should we respect that religious belief? What if the Bible said it’s against Christian dogma to drive under 90 mph? What if the Koran said it’s a sin to allow your neighbor to play the flute at 3 p.m.?
Oh, and yes, just as Brett avoided Turb’s question, he also avoided the fact that the Catholic church, Rush Limbaugh, and he are AOK with being forced to pay for Viagra, which point I would love to see debated more.
Brett:
Why did I make this about “paying for your jollies”? Because that’s the basis on which Lurker defended it: Not because contraceptives might be used to regularize periods, or treat some other condition, but because, if you didn’t subsidize them, some poor woman might have a lousy sex life.
If you go back and look at Lurker’s comment @04:31, that’s not what ze is saying at all. Lurker says that contraceptives are necessary for responsible, safe planning of a woman’s family — which is to, of her *life*.
The only person who’s enjoyment is brought up is her male partner. Contraception is about a man’s “jollies”, but about a woman’s *life*.
Phil:
You’re doing it again. Talk about the argument, not about the person making the argument. I will delete any further comments of yours that include ad hominem attacks, even if I agree with the rest of the comment.
OK, legit question: Why am I the only person here who gets publicly policed this way? You completely disappeared from comments on this post where a whole bunch of this went on, a great deal of it at my expense. What is your beef w/me, Doc?
I should add, a great deal of it was at your expense as well, Doc.
Certainly I’d be fine with rendering unto Caesar all birth controls that have his face on them.
😉
Contraception is about a man’s “jollies”, but about a woman’s *life*.
I would like to disagree. The contraception using medical devices or medicines affecting the female reproductive system is, for the man about his enjoyment, as it allows much more enjoyable intercourse than the use of condom. Actually, it is even unfair to the woman, because she needs to carry the risk of (very unlikely) medical complications of contraception.
However, contraception as a whole is about family planning in general. And that is quite as much about the man’s life than about woman’s life. Even for the man, contraception of some type is necessary for the planning of one’s life. And this right to enjoy family life in privacy of one’s home is quite as much the right of man as the right of woman.
And have no doubt: when the “pill” has become unaccessible for women, the conservatives start fighting the condoms. The reproductive freedom is not a gender issue. It’s a human rights issue.
It is an affront to religious freedom that Catholic (or other religious) institutions (other than churches) should have to pay less for health insurance coverage for their employees when that coverage includes contraception under the category of preventive medicine.
They are being “forced” to underpay for health insurance which will cover contraception for their employees, who may or may not use contraception according to their own judgement, which may or may not be informed by their own religious convictions, about which their employer should have no knowledge or input.
That’s what’s at issue here, as a matter of religious (or, more generally, moral) freedom.
When’s that scheduled to happen?
If they can find enough pharmacists willing to claim a conscience exemption to dispensing it. Not nationwide, obviously, but I bet it could happen in some of your smaller states.
When’s that scheduled to happen?
When are you going to die? If you don’t know, does that mean that you’re immortal?
Historically, there’s been a reasonably successful effort to eliminate abortion access by imposing lots of restrictions. Recent events suggest that some of the same groups behind such efforts also dislike contraception, so I’m not sure why it is unreasonable to think about a world where they replicate their success limiting abortion access to contraception.
I mean, Congressional Republicans have been pretty clear that they believe that *any* employer should be able to stop paying for birth control, so this is hardly a fringe position voiced only by powerless losers….
This might happen when all pharmacists are Catholic. In other words: in your dreams.
Protestants, in general, have absolutely no problem with birth control.
Please tell me just how close we are to getting legislation passed, in any state, that makes the sale of birth control illegal.
Please tell me just how close we are to getting legislation passed, in any state, that makes the sale of birth control illegal.
Why?
Is that question relevant to the general question of access? Has anyone here suggested that birth control would be legally banned, as opposed to sufficiently hindered so as to reduce its accessibility?
I mean, abortion is inaccessible to many women in the US…but it is completely legal.
This is, pretty unambiguously, about forcing religous institutions to violate their own convictions.
As pointed out ad nauseum here and elsewhere, no, it is not. The Church is not forced to be an employer. The Church is not forced to provide health insurance to its employees. If the Church wishes to engage in the secular sphere, it has to play by the secular rules.
I know this is a terrible blow to those who insist on the maintenance of socially outdated heirarchies that usually begin and end with male domination, and further insist that politics conform to their antequated and morally reprehensible beliefs.
Fortunately you are losing this battle. To bad for you.
This isn’t a serious question, I hope.
Uh, oh. Committed the “too” quawk quo fallacy.
This might happen when all pharmacists are Catholic. In other words: in your dreams.
It appears we have a growing trend of Catholics going into the pharmacy business, eh?
This might happen when all pharmacists are Catholic. In other words: in your dreams.
If you live in a rural area and don’t have lots of time and money, then it takes only one pharmacist to deny you access to birth control. Now, if you have lots of time and money or if you live near many pharmacies, then things are different.
Protestants, in general, have absolutely no problem with birth control.
No, that is wrong. For example:
Fair question. No.
How do you see this working? There’s an order of magnitude more women who need to be prevented from getting their birth control pills, at any old pharmacy they choose. Which, incidentally, there are two orders of magnitude more of those than abortion providers.
But I suppose anything that can happen, will happen. So we might as well get braced for it. Mobs of scythe-waving pinkos are coming for our guns!
If you live in a rural area and don’t have lots of time and money, then it takes only one pharmacist to deny you access to birth control.
Yep. That’s why I specified it could happen in a small state. Not everyone lives where there’s a dozen Walgreen’s and CVS stores within a 15 minute drive.
I mean, abortion is inaccessible to many women in the US…but it is completely legal.
Indeed.
Yes! By which I mean: no.
Trend consisting of one sourced datum, which currently is out of business.
I think if you read your example, it’s contraception and abortifacients. I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
Oops, don’t need to. From your link:
Also:
So, there’s that.
Why 15 minutes? We once lived where we had to drive a half hour to the nearest pharmacy.
Or…why not US Postal Service? You know that you can get prescriptions by mail, yes?
Teh crazies are going to have a hard time picketing USPS, UPS and FedEx simultaneously, along with all the pharmacies.
“As pointed out ad nauseum here and elsewhere, no, it is not. The Church is not forced to be an employer. The Church is not forced to provide health insurance to its employees. If the Church wishes to engage in the secular sphere, it has to play by the secular rules”
Yeah, I understand: Want to minister to the sick? Do it on my terms, or not at all. Want to minister to the poor? Do it on my terms, or not at all. Want to educate people? Do it on my terms, or not at all.
Want to do anything at all? Do it on my terms, or not at all.
You believe in religious liberty… in the privacy of people’s heads, and nowhere else.
That’s what I mean by saying that the left won’t permit anybody but themselves to have convictions that matter. Because if you don’t dig a hole and bury yourself in it, the left demands you live on their terms.
I think if you read your example, it’s contraception and abortifacients. I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
If people are upset only about abortofacients, then they should complain about abortofacients. But if they complain about contraception in general (or contraception and abortofacients), then it is clear that they object to non-abortofacient contraception as well.
See, if the Blunt amendment specified that any employer could refuse to pay (through insurance) for abortofacient drugs, you might have a claim. But it didn’t. Because that’s not really the issue.
Brett: Yeah, I understand: Want to minister to the sick? Do it on my terms, or not at all. Want to minister to the poor? Do it on my terms, or not at all. Want to educate people? Do it on my terms, or not at all.
How far does this go? If it was a belief of Church X that runs Hospital Y that Ethnic Group Z was sub-human and therefore refused to treat or hire any members of Z at Y based on that belief, is that ok? Or is that forcing people to “do it on my terms”?
I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
Yeah. Right.
From past experience, I’m guessing these religious groups definition of what constitutes an “abortifacient” (or what constitutes an abortion for the purposes of defining an abortiffacient) might be somewhat larger than the definition a medical professional might use.
For example, those who think pregancy begins at conception consider use of morning after pills “abortion”. And of course morning after pills contain roughly the same hormones as regular birth control pills do, just at a higher dose.
So there you go. Birth control pills are “abortifacients”. And it’s “just the abortifacients” that are causing the problem.
I think if you read your example, it’s contraception and abortifacients. I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
Well, except that there’s an increasing belief in the pro-life community that birth control causes abortions. Which erases that distinction.
This a really tiresome discussion. There is no war on women, just like there is no war on the church. Sandra Fluke has every right to be an activist in pursuit of a change in policy in the Catholic employer ranks. They have a right to defend their religious stance.
The rest is a huge red herring based on Rush Limbaugh being a d*&K and an idiot.
Until the PPACA was passed there was no requirement for any employer to provide birth control as a part of an insurance plan, and they mostly all did. It still wasn’t required until Sebellius said it was and the employers still provided it. The idea that there is a war on women in any widespread sense is simply not supportable.
And this:
isn’t historically true, at all. In fact, historically, if you didn’t sign up in time you couldn’t until the next enrollment period. You could avoid paying for it by simply doing nothing. Then they became more adamant that you specifically turn it down so they wouldn’t be forced to provide it as an exception if the employee came back after the enrollment period and demanded it.
I would need a cite to believe it is true today if it has become true since PPACA passed.
As an aside, many plans didn’t and stil don’t cover Viagra.
Assertive argument is assertive.
It may very well be that there’s a quite different version of things than can be had from Turbulence’s assertion of what a few casual paragraphs in Worldmag certainly must mean. Or not. But if you’re going to pick one of those, you have to substantiate it without coming up with Calvinball rules to help you.
You believe in religious liberty… in the privacy of people’s heads, and nowhere else.
Yes, because all us lefties are trying to force people to use contraceptives and trying to prevent religious leaders from teaching their belief systems. WTF?
CCDG: The rest is a huge red herring based on Rush Limbaugh being a d*&K and an idiot.
Hmmm, one might wonder why Rush thought it was okay to go on with the whole slut/sex tape/lying/etc. stuff about Fluke for three days. One might also ask why prominent national GOP politicians felt they had to walk back any criticism of him almost immediately.
It’s a mystery, I guess.
Thank you, jack and evilrooster, for pointing out that a nontrivial portion of the religious right considers not only the morning-after pill, but even the ol’ Pill, to be an abortifacent.
That’s what I mean by saying that the left won’t permit anybody but themselves to have convictions that matter.
Right, that’s why the antiwar left has been so successful. Where’s my conscience exemption?
“Describe a world for me in which this makes sense”, AND “what makes sex ….. so special?”
Questions for the ages. May I answer in French?
So, a Catholic Priest, a male libertarian with multiple personalities, Sandra Fluke, and a male evangelical snake charmer/preacher board a three man canoe and take turns paddling vigorously for the rapids downstream.
On the way, a bottle with an old copy of Cosmopolitan Magazine (large bottle, the three-litre Wild Turkey vessel; the magazine was placed there by a Mormon snipe hunter on a bender) tucked inside bobs up against the canoe and one of them retrieves the magazine and opens it to Helen Gurley Brown’s column, which poses a question.
The question: How do you achieve sexual gratification without benefit of contraception?
The Priest answers: “By the grace of God, I condemn the vice of contraception and suffer the little children to come unto me, especially those pouty altar boys.”
The libertarian answers: I masturbate while wearing a condom because I’m afraid of giving myself something and then I’d have to see my doctor for treatment, who would have to consult my insurance company regarding coverage of the condition, which is against my rules regarding one hand washing the other.
Sandra Fluke answers: Frankly gentleman, I don’t give a damn about sex any longer after being raped by Georgetown University for $47,000 annually, excluding textbook expenses and contraceptive coverage, and then passed along for sloppy seconds to a horde of gibbering, drooling, right-wing blowhards who gobble boner pills and wear condoms underneath their pants just in case they get lucky. Now, if the question is about my friend with the female condition, I’d be happy to discuss it with you.
The male evangelical snake charmer/preacher, grimly looking ahead, pompadour mussed, answers: First, I don’t want to talk about it because it’s not a fit subject for company; secondly, we’ve got some paddling to do if we’re going to reach the Abyss up ahead by nightfall, which, by God, I’m praying we do; and thirdly, if I get out of this via rapture and you don’t, I get the motel room with the vibrating double bed, the disco/porn channel/free lube/complimentary fleshlight luxury package, and the open Watts line to call my SuperPAC and make sure the my flock’s money is going to whichever Republican candidate most thoroughly eradicates Planned Parenthood.
_______________
As to the Olive Garden, food stamps or not, I’m not sure I want some fat, horny, Church Lady/Man franchise general manager, male or female, deciding to put salt petre in the water while wearing a double holster with a dildo on one side and a speculum in the other coming up to me and my wife and/or girlfriend at our table and asking us if there’s anything more they can do for us while they check the small print in our server’s health insurance policy, which Olive Garden probably doesn’t supply anyway, viewing the expenses of cancer affliction much the same way as they do the expense of contraception …. as overhead.
By the way, the vegetable primavera was fit only for livestock. And that dildo your holstering doesn’t look sufficiently al dente, so why don’t they take it back to the kitchen, consult their spiritual and constitutional advisors, and then the three of them take a flying leap off Gof8ckyourself
Overlook.
Any time I meet a person with religious convictions, I know, like Groucho, they’ve got others too, whether we like the first ones or not. Either way, they feel violated.
As to Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, et al, advertising boycotts and Comedy Central are all very good in a civilized society, but since that is not the world we live in that can in any way be described as making sense, I recommend punching them as hard we can, breaking their jaws and many other of the large bones in their smug faces because, in the end, the only measure they will understand, is violence.
Like one of the good Catholic priests, among the many, most of them Irish, despite my little joke above, like Spencer Tracy at the end of “Boys Town” finally did to put a stop to the bullies.
As to the funny questions regarding scriptural prohibition against health insurance covering contraception, driving too slow or playing the flute at 3:00 pm. (that’s O.K., but keep it down at 3:00 am), I’m with whomever the fisherman Thomas McGuane meets in a fishing camp who chortles about the Italians: “They love their little popes, but then they put their condoms on they f*ck like rabbits!”
I think even the rabbits should have health care coverage, even if they do have a hare up their as*es.
Speaking of rabbits, Phyllis Schafly (and Helen Gurley Brown, come to think of it) once recommended that wives dress up in bunny costumes and meet their husbands at the front door as the latter return home from work.
I favor her health insurance company being forced to cover her choice of contraceptive, just in case Newt Gingrich rings the doorbell dressed as the milkman and she decides to vote for him as a prophylactic against the demon seed in the White House.
Rick Santorum would like to make birth control illegal while Mitt Romney has said he intends to defund the largest health clinic in the country that supplies birth control to low-income women. When these two men are the front-runners of the Republican primary, meaning one of them will be selected by their party as the most qualified person to be the President, you cannot claim with a straight face there isn’t a war on women’s access to contraceptives.
Ugh, one might also wonder why every single right-wing dead-ender blogger felt they had to try to top Rush to come up with the most vile epithets to describe Fluke, and why they all lied consistently and repeatedly about the content of her testimony. (And are still doing so.)
This is, pretty unambiguously, about forcing religous institutions to violate their own convictions.
From here:
Students attending Georgetown are required to have health insurance, and their coverage is required to meet a certain standard.
If they don’t have that coverage, they are required to buy into Georgetown’s plan.
That plan is underwritten by United Health Care. As far as I can tell, UHC is not a religious institution.
The school is not paying for the insurance, they are not directly providing the insurance, and they are not providing the care. The student’s money, presumably, goes to United Health Care and/or to the folks directly providing medical goods and services.
It’s completely unclear to me how Georgetown has anything to say about what is, or is not, in a medical plan that is underwritten by someone else, and paid for by someone else. That would seem to be a matter for the other two parties to sort out.
I’m not seeing what Georgetown is being asked to do that has anything, whatsoever, to do with their religious convictions. At most, they appear to be using their institutional leverage to steer students to UHC.
Is that covered in the Bible somewhere?
Other than possibly getting some kind of vig off of UHC’s fees, I don’t see that they’re a party to the transaction, at all.
russell, I don’t think you understand. Let me break it down for you: THE LEFT!!!!111!!!
“….meaning one of them will be selected by their party as the most qualified person to be the President, you cannot claim with a straight face there isn’t a war on women’s access to contraceptives”
I can, Santorum on the subject
Romney believes that Planned Parenthood shouldn’t continue to receive federal funds, having nothing to do with banning contraception, or even Planned Parenthood.
However, Obama is moving to defund the Texas Womens health plan, which does provide contraception, because they won’t pay Planned Parenthood. Now that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
CCDG wrote:
“This a really tiresome discussion. There is no war on women, just like there is no war on the church. Sandra Fluke has every right to be an activist in pursuit of a change in policy in the Catholic employer ranks. They have a right to defend their religious stance.
The rest is a huge red herring based on Rush Limbaugh being a d*&K and an idiot.”
Yes, I think his father ignored his mother’s vigilance regarding the rhythm method.
Thus, here we are.
Slart wrote:
“I think if you read your example, it’s contraception and abortifacients. I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.”
I see someone else has already pointed out Santorum’s (last I looked, second in a Presidential primary in the greatest Nation on Earth) repeated threats against ALL contraception.
True, his audiences, are made up of women of all denominations dosed to the gills with prophylactic hormones prescribed by doctors for whatever reason and probably paid for by their healthcare providers, including the gummint ones, and men who, if they could suddenly be built to also get pregnant, instead of getting just others pregnant, would be caught jumping the counters at CVS’ and Walgreen’s around the country wearing ski masks and litle else and grabbing as many birth control pills as they could and then rush home and barricade themselves in an upstairs bedroom, skip work and spend three days checking out their new lady parts.
But, again, the conversation is top down from the usual suspects, and thus, here we vent.
Brett, once again, would you mind answering the questions I asked you in my first comment on this thread?
If those questions are too difficult for you, just let me know.
However, Obama is moving to defund the Texas Womens health plan, which does provide contraception, because they won’t pay Planned Parenthood. Now that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
This is precisely backwards. Rick Perry wanted the federal money for the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, but not to let Planned Parenthood have any of it. Medicaid rules forbid states from interfering with womens’ choice of provider for mammograms, cancer screening and other services, so long as those providers are qualified Medicaid providers.
Perry insisted that Planned Parenthood be excluded, so Medicaid said, “Well, then, you can’t have the money.”
Painting this as something Obama is doing is partisan hackery of the most transparent and tortured sort.
I mean, who do you think should get to pick your doctor, you, or Rick Perry?
Yes, Romney has spun like a dervish on the Planned Parenthood issue, but if Erick Erickson and Moe Lane criticized him for NOT sticking a thermonuclear bomb up his keester and launching himself and his warhead at womanhood’s collective vagina to solve the problem once and for all, he’d offer that up on FOXnews too.
Not that I think he would actually do it if elected President.
Not that I think he would actually not do it if elected President.
I think whenever he stops spinning, at whatever number the pointer is aimed is what will become policy.
I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
Well, except the morning after pill is not an
abortifacient
Let’s make it a Franklin.
Slarti, Phil’s point about the Texas efforts to defund Planned Parenthood helps explain why mail-order pharmacies aren’t really the answer here. You can’t get BC without a prescription. If you can’t find a primary care doctor that you can afford — remember, there’s a shortage of primary care doctors, especially in poorer and rural areas — then you can’t get BC, period. If Perry is successful in his let’s-defund-Planned-Parenthood scheme, then a bunch of people will lose easy access to BC.
They will lose this access even though the US Postal service is still running. This is how multi-pronged attacks work: you try lots of things to impede access to BC. Some of them work, some of them don’t, but overall, you increase the cost of getting BC and thus reduce the number of people who can use it.
They have a right to defend their religious stance
It’s not a religious stance for a secular institution to claim that they can defy a health insurance regulation, particularly when they are not a health care provider.
Until the PPACA was passed there was no requirement for any employer to provide birth control as a part of an insurance plan, and they mostly all did.
This is totally wrong. Plenty of states had such requirements in place, and they proceeded with a minimum of controversy. It was only when a certain woman was barred from arguing in favor of it at a congressional hearing and then when the right waged a full-bore attack on her for days for doing so later that it became an issue.
Santorum and Perry not providing Federal funds to Planned Parenthood because they offer contraceptive services is like a Christian Scientist President or Governor defunding Medicare and Medicaid because they pay for prostate cancer treatment.
Obama taking my money from Texas is the way it should be done.
Take the missiles and all military installations out of there too.
Redeploy pointed at Governor Perry’s crotch.
However, Obama is moving to defund the Texas Womens health plan, which does provide contraception, because they won’t pay Planned Parenthood.
The above assertion is pure craptackular spinola verging on mendacity.
when I was asked the question on contraception I said I didn’t support it.
Thank you, my point is made. Given his voting record on access to birth control, reproductive services, and so on during his time in the Senate, his actions underline this belief.
Romney said he would defund PP. Since no Federal dollars are allowed to be spent on the 3% of PP services that are abortion-related, what precisely do you think he is promising during his campaign that he will defund, and what effect do you think it would have? I’ve used Planned Parenthood services in the past for access to low-cost health screenings and birth control. They provide an important service that is not available for many women from other sources. Attacking them means attacking all the women who use PP for their health care and access to affordable birth control for cheap political points. If Romney wants to be a viable moderate candidate, all he has to do is to make a statement acknowledging that private disagreements with birth control options are best made between the patient and the doctor, the end. He could sew up the Republican women’s vote with one speech. Instead he’s stumping that he’ll pull money from the one place many women can even get pills. Read the NYT article Dr. Science linked to. Women are listening.
“Women are listening”
Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.
“I wouldn’t vote for it” is a pretty straightforward statement. Federally defunding Planned Parenthood barely dents PP’s budget, it doesn’t get rid of it.
AAARRGGHH the world is ending in a war on women! Nothing better for the DEms to keep shouting.
And I love the patient choosing a doctor argument in Texas, everyone who has any kind of insurance faces that issue. Pulling fed funds is pulling fed funds, it’s a fact. No matter how you want to spin it.
“I wouldn’t vote for it” is a pretty straightforward statement.
Yes, it’s what we call a “lie”. Go read his voting record. It’s public.
Federally defunding Planned Parenthood barely dents PP’s budget,
You mean, one-third of PP’s operating budget?
http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/planned-parenthood/
The Right has been engaging a war on women for years. Personhood amendments, criminalizing miscarriages, conscience clauses for pharmacists to not dispense medicine (but curiously, they dispense Viagra), fighting against domestic violence legislation, and when we object, calling us sluts and prostitutes and the best that the leading political figures on the Right can come up with is, well, I wouldn’t have said those exact words.
Privilege means you don’t have to notice your neighbor’s house is on fire, but standing outside your own and complaining that she’s yelling too loudly about the heat does not make you look as suave as you might think.
If there were no right-wing jihad against Planned Parenthood, the Medicaid funding wouldn’t have been an issue. Plain and simple. But Rick Perry has decided he knows what’s better for Texas women than they do.
Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.
Maybe you can mansplain it to them.
Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.
Women know what it’s like to have access to medical services taken away – it’s happened to plenty of them in the case of abortion services. Women know exactly what’s going on here. They’ve paid higher rates for medical insurance for a long time. They’ve had to fight for full medical coverage of hospital stays related to childbirth. They really don’t need the “sensationalism” of blogs to tell them what many of them have experienced in one form or another. And older women remember when contraceptives were denied. This is nothing new.
Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.
I find it difficult to believe that you are in a better position to make the correct judgment about the issue than the women who are directly affected by it. You are sticking to your formulaic, “both sides are just as bad, and this Republican thing isn’t a big deal,” so it strikes me that it is less than likely that you are being led to the correct conclusion, since all you’re doing is filling in the blanks of a pre-written narrative an ideology you hold, while the women outraged by this are just basing their judgments on what they see.
Want to do anything at all? Do it on my terms, or not at all.
You believe in religious liberty… in the privacy of people’s heads, and nowhere else.
That’s what I mean by saying that the left won’t permit anybody but themselves to have convictions that matter. Because if you don’t dig a hole and bury yourself in it, the left demands you live on their terms.
In which Brett totally ignores the questions posed to him about insurance, how it works, and why this is TOTALLY DIFFERENT, while getting in a big ‘ole whine about the oppression of The Left.
Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.
Marty, I’m sorry, but are you living under a rock? Have you missed the laws that are being proposed all across the country (VA, WI, AZ, TX) and the GOP Presidential candidates getting in on the act (not just Santorum. Romney’s vow to shut down PP)? Rush is only part of this. The whole Rightwingosphere is up in arms about paying for jollies, as Brett so artfully put it.
The Right just can’t resist scolding the slutty slut sluts. Meanwhile, make sure that Viagra’s covered! Get hurt bunge jumping? No problemo. Want contraceptives for responsible family planning? YOU DIRTY SLUT! I won’t have any of my insurance premiums subsidizing your jollies! You must, of course, continue subsidizing* MY legitimate health needs.
* – used in the Right Wing sense, which means when we all pay premiums, and one of us accesses healthcare, the payout for the care means the rest are subsidizing that person.
“Women are listening.”
Yet, as Phil has pointed out on occasion regarding these issues, it’s we men, with the exception of Dr. Science and a few other of the women left here at OBWI, who do all the talking.
My grandmother used to sit quietly at the dinner table as the men raged stentorian over the issues of the day and if asked, Naomi, what do you think?, she’d bat the question away with both hands and make a “blooey” sound with her mouth and start clearing the table, followed by the other women, with the exception of my second cousin Mary, known as a spinster in the parlance of the time, but who had opinions.
Then we’d hear my grandmother muttering in the scullery once the door swung shut from the dining room … something about that blamed Roosevelt.
My grandfather, lower jaw dropped in the I’ve-been-snubbed-again open position, would close his mouth, his dentures clacking together like the N-E-S-T-L-E-S Nestles Makes The Very Best dog’s shut-mouth coda, look around the table and say: “Gentleman … and Mary … brandy and cigars? You kids can go outside and chase the dog chasing the car.”
Only parts of that story are true, but I forget which.
Sex never came up, though I was so young I can’t be sure, given that today, when I watch movies from my grandparents time, the sexual innuendo is as thick as a topical cream.
In a thread where Brett is getting repeatedly woodshedded for harping on “the left”, this seems particularly out of place.
I’m just going to start linking every instance of “the right” to Redstate. Don’t make me pull this car over.
It was a deliberate tit-for-tat for his “The Left” actually.
Fair enough, I’ll desist.
“I find it difficult to believe that you are in a better position to make the correct judgment about the issue than the women who are directly affected by it.”
I certainly should not be discussing this. As a man I can’t look at facts and hyperbole and determine the difference.
I also am curious to know the facts around how many women are directly effected by this, directly being your word, since the vast majority of women in the middle class and up have coverage for this, and a large number of poor women have access through other programs.
And I certainly expect that women will decide what they believe based on facts, but we are all just commenting on a blog so I get to have an opinion whether you believe it is valid or not.
In fact the last person that told me I did’nt have a right to have an opinion on a subject because of who I am hasn’t spoken to me since. So stand in line.
I think as long as there is parity between tits and tats, all is good, Rob.
What?
I just noticed this, in the New York Times, for anyone who’s forgotten how recently access to contraception became legal and think that being worried about its future is “hair on fire.” It was in 1965, the same year that the Supreme Court held that a married couple had a right to receive counseling and prescriptions for birth control. Before that decision, using and prescribing contraception was a crime in many states.
No jollies, for sure. Also, no jobs. No freedom. Some people remember and don’t want to go back.
CCDG, it isn’t because you’re a man that you don’t have a right to your opinion. It is because your opinions are uninformed and consistently fit into a pre-determined narrative and then you go on to claim that the people opposite your formulaic belief are the deluded ones.
Who am I going to believe? The guy who is constitutionally incapable of ever taking a moral stand on right-wing idiocy in policy because he doesn’t think they do much that’s wrong, or someone directly affected by the policy who doesn’t have a personal stake in a “both sides to it, this isn’t a big deal” narrative that you are obsessed with?
How many is “many”? They should be easy to name.
All I can find on da innerwubs is that Connecticut was the last state to have such laws on its books. But my Google skills are not yet maxed, it appears.
…or more alarmingly: maybe my Google skills ARE maxed, but at some low level. Maybe a pair of +6goo glasses are in order.
I don’t know whether this is tit or tat, but Pat Robertson clears something else up:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/03/16/world-gone-mad-3/
The lady who asked Robertson the question via the mailbag must have been put up to it by her husband, who could be heard yelling “Halleluyah!” from the bedroom when Robertson divined the answer.
I’m curious about Robertson’s habit of having a woman read the mailbag questions to him on the air, like Ed McMahon reading the answers to Johnny Carson’s swami-coiffed The Great Whomever.
I get the feeling Robertson pulls his female cohost aside afterwards, his crotch tightening, and encourages her to keep those questions coming and my, I love the way you blush.
I suppose if he had a guy co-host things would be worse, with both of them bursting into laughter and faking stuff shooting out of their noses with those gag spray noodle cans.
“It is because your opinions are uninformed and consistently fit into a pre-determined narrative and then you go on to claim that the people opposite your formulaic belief are the deluded ones.”
Funny, I post a direct quote from a presidential candidate, seperating his personal beliefs from what he believes government should do, and it gets “He’s lying”.
Yet, I am the one applying a formulaic belief? Well, to some extent I am, just as the people who disagree with me are.
The difference, IMO, ……..
[deleted much longer comment]
never mind
As a man I can’t look at facts and hyperbole and determine the difference.
Funny, I post a direct quote from a presidential candidate, seperating his personal beliefs from what he believes government should do, and it gets “He’s lying”.
Based on his voting record as a senator, demonstrating what he really thinks government should do, mind you, as opposed to an empty and baseless “He’s Lying.”
There is a difference between assertion and argument, if one bothers to look.
I do look forward to Santorum, or any other sour-mouthed church lady running for that matter, winning the nomination so that just after the individual receives the Limbaugh Show endorsement for President, Rush can go to a commercial break featuring an adultery hookup web site plying its wares.
I’d bet a double-sawbuck that it’s the abortifacients that are causing the problem.
And it would be, except that they’re lying or mistaken. They think Plan B and quite possibly ordinary birth-control pills are abortifacients.
RU-486/mifepristone actually is an abortion pill. As far as I know, it has to be obtained at a clinic with followup visits and medical direction. It’s not sold at pharmacies as a contraceptive. Much of the anti-Plan B rhetoric is geared toward making people think Plan B is the same kind of thing as RU-486, and it is not; it’s the same kind of thing as regular birth-control pills.
I’m thinking there should be a grassroots organization called “Sluts for Obama” if there isn’t one already. Someone needs to have some fun with this bullsh1t before we all start contemplating the choices Count discussed in his last comment on the Having a bad day Friday open thread.
“…given that today, when I watch movies from my grandparents time, the sexual innuendo is as thick as a topical cream.”
Thanks, Count. Visions of “It Happened One Night” danced through my head when I read that. I wonder if Gable pulled a rubber out of his wallet or Colbert (not Stephen) just used an asprin between her knees.
Before I bid adieu to all of you for the weekend (and well into next week if I had any sense ;)), one wag, I forget who, said Rick Santorum is one of the greatest minds of the 13th Century.
Like I imagine Walker Percy got through it (I’m nowhere near his league) humor seems to keep the downside of Camus’ question at bay.
Here’s the question I still have not heard an answer for:
in what kind of a world does it seem reasonable to say “birth control is irresponsible”?
Thanks
Little Ricky wouldn’t measure up anywhere near these guys.
hsh (and seccondarily Phil),
I didn’t say Santorum doesn’t believe in limiting abortion. And, as per Phils graph, there is still lots of sentiment in this country to place limits on it far beyond what I would support.
However, despite numerous votes to limit abortions,I can’t find a reference to any vote where he voted against availability of birth control.
It seems that he has been consistent about his personal beliefs and where he believes government should intervene on both topics.
And yes, I believe the two topics are interrelated yet distinct.
“The guy who is constitutionally incapable of ever taking a moral stand on right-wing idiocy in policy because he doesn’t think they do much that’s wrong,”
I have a little time today so I wanted to address this. I am not incapable of taking a moral stand against the right. I have, more than once, taken a stand against what the right is espousing, I’m consistently antiwar, I believe in strengthening and expanding SS, I disapprove of the tone of almost all the right wing candidates.
But you are correct that I don’t believe that idiocy is limited to the right wing, and no one is better at spinning things than our current President.
So I comment here much less often only because the blog doesn’t needs more voices pounding on the right wing or its candidates, ya’ll do that very well.
I comment when I think that the subject being discussed has a legitimate other side that isn’t being represented. That means I always am on the “right” when I comment because that’s the side that sometimes doesn’t get represented.
Finally, to be honest, there are times when I don’t think the “right” is being well represented but I avoid stepping in the middle because it’s just too much effort to argue with both sides.
CCDG, you know that has the effect of making it seem that you are only interested in representing the other side. Perhaps unfair, but what you don’t write communicates as much as what you do write.
And I know there is always a tendency in blog debates to try to lump people you don’t agree with into a nice homogenous mass, a la pink slime, so as to be treated with the ammonia of witty blog replies, but I, for one, would much prefer knowing a range of options about what ‘the Right’ might consist of rather than argue with one or two individuals whose tics are then taken as indicative of the whole conservative enterprise.
Justme:
It is because your opinions are uninformed and consistently fit into a pre-determined narrative and then you go on to claim that the people opposite your formulaic belief are the deluded ones.
That’s heading over the line, dude. Rein it in, focus your argument on the *argument*, not the person.
I just . . . I almost can’t get over a female front pager posting what she has, and including a bunch of links to a lot of women, including GOP women, being seriously taken aback by what’s going on, and there beingncomments from at least two female posters, and then in strolls someone to say, “Oh, silly women, just calm down. It’s not so bad as you think.” That’s like very nearly the textbook definition of mansplaining.
BTW. Arizona is now going to defund Planned Parenthood as well, but I’m sure that’s somehow Obama’s fault too.
What would the American Taliban do without their jihads?
I think it’s a reflexive reaction. The Republican party has depended upon hate and fear mongering for decades: red baiting, Willie Horton, nig–excuse me–BUMS on welfare, family values which was code for hating on gays, union thugs, Medicaid cheaters, illegal aliens,….
Now the boogeyman du jour is women who use birth control. Some Republican women are upset becuase hating on other people was OK but not hating on people like them. Males who vote R just go along and rationalize their support for the lastest hatemongering.
“That’s like very nearly the textbook definition of mansplaining.”
Thanks for your input Phil. However, I don’t have to turn off my brain due to my sex. “It is not as bad as you think” is a perfectly rational argument based on some view of the facts. I don’t need you to pull out denigrating descriptions of that point of view to understand yours.
“Mansplaining” is just another way to take some number of people that might disagree with you and marginalize their opinion without having to actually argue the point.
In the end “war on women” is a new way to frame a debate on abortion that has been going on for decades in this country. It is another way to not have a conversation about a serious topic in a serious and honest way.
I believe that abortion should be legal until some time (viability, maybe twenty weeks, maybe a little longer). And no I am not a woman, but I have held twin boys in one hand born at 27 weeks, struggling for life, and winning, as surely as any other infant. You will never convince me that they don’t matter in the discussion or that I have to be a woman to have an opinion.
And you don’t get to silence me by calling me names or belittling my opinion with code words for “unable to understand”. Human beings are remarkable in their ability to empathize without having an identical experience.
However, I don’t have to turn off my brain due to my sex.
Neither do women, and yet you’ve traipsed in here and accused them of “having their hair on fire” due to “hyperbole” and “distortions” and “spin.” As if they aren’t capable of sussing out their own interests and priorities, looking at the facts on the ground, discerning trends and making decisions on theses bases. Nope, it’s just silly wimmenz being all hysterical. (In the most traditional sense of that word.) Luckily, you’re here to tell them how it is!
“It is not as bad as you think” is a perfectly rational argument based on some view of the facts.
See above. YOUR opinion is “perfectly rational,” while theirs is “hair on fire.” weird.
It is another way to not have a conversation about a serious topic in a serious and honest way.
If you really think that what’s going on with the anti-Planned Parenthood jihad and the crazy new restrictions (like the one I linked to regarding Idaho) and the attempts to get personhood amendments everywhere when they couldn’t pass one in for heaven’s sake MISSISSIPPI are serious and honest, I question your ability to define what those words mean.
And you don’t get to silence me by calling me names or belittling my opinion with code words for “unable to understand”.
I’m not trying to silence you. I’m trying to get you to maybe consider whether running into Dr. Science’s thread, based on a post with lots of links and expressing serious concerns, and saying, “Silly, hysterical, hair-on-fire women, let Rational Marty explain to you what’s REALLY going on” is the tactic you really want to deploy here.
BTW, “mansplain” is not a “code word for ‘unable to understand.'”
“Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.”
You can score bonus points by complaining that your feelings are hurt and your opinions are being dismissed and you’re being silenced and you’re the real victim here. (See also: http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2010/01/you_may_be_a_mansplainer_if.php)
Yeah, I know what mansplaining “means”, it really was a nice way for me to not say “code word for stupid and boorish”, which would mean accusing you of a personal attack that I didn’t want to accuse you of making.
And I think it’s a stupid word, creating a sexist context for something that happens between people of both sexes every day.
I have certainly had the experience from people of both sexes. I supect you might have also.
And this:
Yes, often people have differing opinions like that. “Hair on fire”, an over reaction and possibly unrealistic overestimation of the actual risk.
CCDG:
“Yes, women are listening to the hair on fire factually incorrect charges that are sensationalized in these blogs.”
“‘It is not as bad as you think’ is a perfectly rational argument based on some view of the facts.”
CCDG, what charges made on this blog are factually incorrect?
Also, “it is not as bad as you think” is not an argument, it is an assertion.
Why is “it” “not as bad” as “they” think? What do you think the posters here are wrong about, and how much do you think that should mitigate their concern?
Please use specific examples. Thanks!
“It’s not as bad as you think.”
I could see that with respect to the “War On Christmas”. This war….not so much.
Did the War on Women begin the day before or the day after HHS decreed that all employers must provide BC and that there would be no conscience exception?
Does the Blunt amendment do anything other than return to the status quo ante?
Are all of those here advocating in favor of the HHS decree really comfortable with vesting an executive agency with the authority to make such sweeping impositions?
The last time I looked, anyone applying to Georgetown did so voluntarily and with at least constructive knowledge of the rules.
Limbaugh is an ass and is rightly getting the grief he deserves. However, his stupidity doesn’t prove Fluke’s case. Diktats from the feds are, or should be, viewed across the spectrum with great concern.
Further, the argument “if the RCC’s want to employ people they have to play by our rules” cuts two ways and I assure all of those making this argument, they won’t like the backstroke when the other side gets in power. Finally, people have a choice whether to seek employment, medical services or what have you from a religiously affiliated entity. If they don’t like that religion’s program, go elsewhere.
Julian,
I did. I used one of multiple quotes you can find from Santorum where he unequivocally stated he didn’t believe birth control should be banned, which was initially the primary topic. the answer I got was he lied based on his voting record, which has no votes to ban birth control.
Not as bad and factually incorrect.
Then I got the answer that lots of states had passed laws requiring BC be covered, I didn’t challenge that assertion because I don’t have thee facts on that, but I was never presented that requirement as a purchaser of health insurance plans.
See I like talking about things that are actual. What I said is there is no widespread attack on BC, most companies have provided it with no government coercion. The coercion that started this was objected to by a specific group that had in the past been exempted. Not by any broad range of companies that were trying to not provide it. It was the scope of the real problem that I was addressing.
By the time we got several comments down the responses had broadened the topic to abortion and Voter ID’s. Valid topics, not what was being addressed at the start.
How many is “many”?
An interesting challenge, sir. It didn’t take me long to stumble on the apparent answer. It’s 24, and I am just about the most inept google searcher one could ever find. Just luck in this case, I guess.
The Real Americans, you know, the Founders, did not look askance at abortion or contraception. How contraceptive bans came to be common during the mid 19th century is an interesting story. I’m sure the Federalist Society is all over this.
Finally, people have a choice whether to seek employment, medical services or what have you from a religiously affiliated entity. If they don’t like that religion’s program, go elsewhere.
The bishops aren’t satisfied with an exception for religiously affiliated entities. They want any employer or similar organization, whether it’s a religious organization or not, to be able to deny coverage for contraception when insurance is bought through the health plan. The rationale is that the employer’s personal religious objections (not the employee’s) are what counts, even though for employee health plans this is all provided as part of the employee’s compensation.
Nor are they satisfied with Obama’s compromise that puts it all on the insurance company, since after all that cost has to come from somewhere and money is fungible. Which makes me think they shouldn’t really be satisfied with employees paying out-of-pocket either, since the employee’s wages came from the employer. What’s the big difference, from an employer’s perspective, between paying insurance premiums that get ultimately get spent on birth control and paying wages that ultimately get spent on birth control?
Does the Blunt amendment do anything other than return to the status quo ante?
The answer seems unambiguous: Absolutely YES. The amendment would carve out a vast exemption for employers to, on asserted moral grounds, be exempted from any health service coverage required by the HCRA.
Such a measure is hardly a return to the status quo ante. Wouldn’t you agree?
and that there would be no conscience exception?
We’ve been over this. Either everybody gets to play at the “conscience exception” game or nobody does. As an atheist I can think of a whole lot of things I want to claim conscience exemptions for.
Nobody’s individual rights to practice their religion are being trod upon here.
Finally, people have a choice whether to seek employment, medical services or what have you from a religiously affiliated entity. If they don’t like that religion’s program, go elsewhere.
First of all, in many cases they don’t have a choice as to hospitals. Especially in your state, where your governor has decided that he gets to choose where poor women can and can’t get health care.
Second of all, how about when you show up at Target or CVS and St. Pharmacist the Divine decides they won’t fill your prescription because they know better than your doctor and also because Jesus?
the answer I got was he lied based on his voting record, which has no votes to ban birth control.
Which bills to ban birth control was he given the opportunity to vote on? Thanks in advance!
“Such a measure is hardly a return to the status quo ante. Wouldn’t you agree”
No, the PPACA and the dictates from Sebelius are the change. The Blunt amendment is barely expansive over the way it has always been. A little research and even the state laws that required birth control predominantly had religious exceptions.
The question is why we now need a government dictate to provide something the vast majority of employers always covered.
It has been years since I hired someone that didn’t ask about what our health plan covered before accepting an offer.
Stretching to respect religious objections in a workplace where that has created only marginal exceptions seems consistent with other places where we provide conscientious objector exceptions.
The bishops aren’t satisfied with an exception for religiously affiliated entities.
Really? I am pretty sure the record shows that is exactly what was requested by the RCC which HHS refused.
What’s the big difference, from an employer’s perspective, between paying insurance premiums that get ultimately get spent on birth control and paying wages that ultimately get spent on birth control?
I’ve answered this not-compelling argument before. Compelling an employer to perform an act with the employer’s money has no relationship to spending decisions by employees away from work. I can limit what my employees do in the workplace. I can’t limit what they do on their own time or how they spend their money.
As a practical matter, the vast majority of employers, outside the RCC, are indifferent to or in favor of insuring for BC. I have no idea if my firm’s plan covers this. My law partner (female, of child bearing age, not interested in further children AFAIK) hasn’t called anything to my attention to suggest it isn’t covered. Nor have any of the other female attorneys or staff. I assume it’s either covered or not a big deal, since there has never been any shyness about bringing other deficiencies in past health care plans to my attention. I am also one of those employers whose experience is that pregnant employees cost a lot more than non-pregnant. That’s a cost of doing business. Because I consent to this or that ‘cost of doing business’ doesn’t mean I consent to or waive my right to complain about additional costs being imposed on me and others like me by someone in DC.
Such a measure is hardly a return to the status quo ante. Wouldn’t you agree?
In fact, I would agree. On that discrete point, I wrote too quickly. What we are now seeing is a heavy handed reaction to heavy handed, extra-democratic fiats handed down by an executive agency.
This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when ideologues clash. HHS is so sure and certain that it is right and the Obama Administration and its supporters are absolutely tone deaf to how others will react.
Currently “the left” is calling the shots. “The right” is pushing back. Someday, “the right” will sit where the “the left” currently sits. You won’t like it.
Phil, I didn’t claim he had a voting record on the subject. That question would be for those who claim he is lying based on his voting record. I spent an hour looking for any reference in any website to him voting to ban birth control or not. Many of those sites had lots to say about his record, but not on BC.
Thanks for the question!
Compelling an employer to perform an act with the employer’s money has no relationship to spending decisions by employees away from work.
Once that money passes to the insurance company it’s no more “your money” than their salary is. What you are buying is “a health care plan.” How the employee uses that plan is, by and large, none of your business.
First of all, in many cases they don’t have a choice as to hospitals.
I’d like to see a cite on this. We are awash in hospitals and outpatient treatment centers in Texas. But, if you are right, and the only treatment center available is run by the RCC, your solution is: either do as we say or shut down. Now, if the only hospital available shuts down rather than bowing to your dictates, you have, in the name of philosophical purity, deprived many people of basic health care. Congratulations. A well made point.
Especially in your state, where your governor has decided that he gets to choose where poor women can and can’t get health care.
I’ve followed this only minimally. The hyperbole, as far as I can tell, far exceeds the reality. The main gripe is the abortion preconditions, which are hugely unpopular with people outside of Texas and a limited number of columnists in Texas. For the rest of the people here, it’s pretty much a non-issue.
Second of all, how about when you show up at Target or CVS and St. Pharmacist the Divine decides they won’t fill your prescription because they know better than your doctor and also because Jesus?
Again, this is part of the parade of horrors the majority here like to roll out. Here’s my counter: when sexually active young women find themselves materially inconvenienced when seeking the pill, it won’t be you and me fussing at each other at ObWi, it will be real people complaining full on in real time. That isn’t happening because access to BC is, in fact, wide open. At least in Texas.
The problem in Texas isn’t lack of access to BC. You can get it anywhere and that isn’t going to change. The problem is the lack of young women availing themselves of BC and their equally irresponsible male partners contributing their share toward far too many children being born into uneducated, unemployable, single family homes. The young men pay virtually no price for their role, which is a different set of problems.
No, the PPACA and the dictates from Sebelius are the change.
Really? What exactly does the ACA do that the EEOC didn’t do in 2000?
The last time I looked, anyone applying to Georgetown did so voluntarily and with at least constructive knowledge of the rules.
Can you show me where specifically on Georgetown Law’s web site I can find a statement that the mandatory health insurance will not pay for birth control under any circumstances at all? That’s what Fluke was complaining about: her fellow classmate couldn’t get BC to treat a dangerous medical condition.
Also, can someone explain to me what specific Catholic doctrine forbids the use of birth control to treat PCOS in a woman who is not having sex with men?
No, the PPACA and the dictates from Sebelius are the change.
Not correct. The status quo ante we are discussing is that time after passage of the PPACA and prior to the ruling in question. You have arbitrarily moved that point further into the past, before the Act’s passage.
Further, the Blunt amendment would, insofar as federal law overrides state law, opened up the “moral exemption” universe to gut those very laws you cite at the state level which mandate the extent of health insurance coverage. And here I thought conservatives were all about “states’ rights”?
Can you show me where specifically on Georgetown Law’s web site I can find a statement that the mandatory health insurance will not pay for birth control under any circumstances at all? That’s what Fluke was complaining about: her fellow classmate couldn’t get BC to treat a dangerous medical condition.
No, I can’t. Which is why I use the precise phrase, “constructive knowledge”. I am not going to get into the substance Fluke’s testimony. I did not find her persuasive and but for Limbaugh’s making her into a national celebrity, she’d be a cipher. She’s an activist and an advocate, using anonymous victims as her evidence. She could see concern etc on the faces of her classmates because their insurance didn’t cover BC. Seriously? At an RCC law school, women are facially demonstrating concern over the lack of BC? How does one observe another’s face and determine (a) concern and (b) the cause of that concern. As I said, not persuasive.
can someone explain to me what specific Catholic doctrine forbids the use of birth control to treat PCOS in a woman who is not having sex with men?
You may be assuming a doctrine that does not exist, although I have no idea what their rules are.
“Really? What exactly does the ACA do that the EEOC didn’t do in 2000?”
I included both the aca and sebelius because one authorizes the act of the other. I am not familiar enough with the lawsuit cited to address the breadth of the decision, but Sebelius did away with the religious exemptions by executive decree authorized by the ACA.
Further, the Blunt amendment would, insofar as federal law overrides state law, opened up the “moral exemption” universe to gut those very laws you cite at the state level which mandate the extent of health insurance coverage. And here I thought conservatives were all about “states’ rights”?
Bobby, I’ve thrown out, several times, the problematic nature of putting this kind of power in the fed’s hands. You’re not responding. Nor is anyone else.
Further, the state’s rights argument fails here. Obama federalized the whole thing.
You won’t like it.
Tex,
I can still vividly recall those days when I was routinely told to “love it or leave it”.
It was not but just a few years ago when a well know radio talk show host was admonishing people like me to “win an election” and “suck it up”.
So informing me about “tone deafness” really doesn’t get you too far.
Thanks.
“Julian,
I did. I used one of multiple quotes you can find from Santorum where he unequivocally stated he didn’t believe birth control should be banned, which was initially the primary topic. the answer I got was he lied based on his voting record, which has no votes to ban birth control.
Not as bad and factually incorrect.”
So this means there is no “War on Women” and women in general should calm down and stop being so hysterical (a word I chose deliberately)?
That’s your smoking gun?
I can still vividly recall those days when I was routinely told to “love it or leave it”.
It was not but just a few years ago when a well know radio talk show host was admonishing people like me to “win an election” and “suck it up”.
This really isn’t much of a response. What you were told back then and what HHS is now authorized to tell the entire country to do is a huge paradigm shift.
You are fine with HHS telling everyone to do things you think people ought to be required to do. When the shoe is on the other foot, you won’t like it so much. But, if HCR is legal, that is the regime you’ve signed us up for.
So, informing me of what some radio guy said doesn’t get you too far. It’s the here and now that needs to be addressed. Obama’s HHS may be to your liking. A Santorum HHS, not so much.
She could see concern etc on the faces of her classmates because their insurance didn’t cover BC.
The focus of her testimony was her classmate who, because she couldn’t get the BC that she was technically entitled to, had to get an ovary removed. As a result, said classmate is now likely to enter early menopause and will probably never be able to have children.
Emergency surgery. Infertility. Menopause in your 20s. A close friend. This doesn’t jive with “concern on the faces” that you describe. Did you even read her testimony? Surely you don’t think that your “concern on the faces” gloss is an honest way of describing her testimony?
You may be assuming a doctrine that does not exist, although I have no idea what their rules are.
I attended Catholic school for 12 years. I know a thing or two about Catholic doctrine. And that’s why I think you’re wrong about “constructive knowledge”.
Based on my knowledge of Catholic doctrine, I’d have expected Georgetown to pay for birth control for non-contraceptive medical problems, especially when the consequences of NOT doing so was permanent damage to reproductive system causing infertility. The school fucked up horribly, even in terms of Catholic doctrine.
So this means there is no “War on Women” and women in general should calm down and stop being so hysterical (a word I chose deliberately)?
So, when did the War on Women begin, who declared it and what does that war entail?
Prior to Sebelius’ diktat, who was fighting this war?
The hyperbole and hysteria is hardly a one way street.
Now, if the only hospital available shuts down rather than bowing to your dictates, you have, in the name of philosophical purity, deprived many people of basic health care. Congratulations. A well made point.
Which is, in fact, PRECISELY what your governor just did, by attempting to restrict Medicaid funds only to health care providers that he deemed morally acceptable. Congratulations.
(And if the Catholic Church would honestly shut down a hospital rather than adhere to the law, they are just as morally bankrupt and evil as I have always said they were.)
For the rest of the people here, it’s pretty much a non-issue.
“Women who rely on Planned Parenthood for women’s health services” are, of course, not people.
Since Marty can throw out an anecdote about premature twins and pretend it proves something, can someone read this and explain to me just exactly how all these waiting periods, ultrasounds, “abortion causes breast cancer” lies, and all the rest are designed to do anything other than cause additional inconvenience, trauma and pain to women who are, in most cases, already dealing with the most difficult decisions of their lives?
Prior to Sebelius’ diktat, who was fighting this war?
Republicans and anti-abortion activists.
This has been another edition of SATSQ.
I am not familiar enough with the lawsuit cited to address the breadth of the decision,
Yes, I can see that.
The EEOC decision in 2000 sets the legal status quo that you claim the ACA overturned. You don’t know what that status quo was. Which means you really aren’t in a position to talk about how the ACA changed it.
Did you even know about the EEOC decision before I linked to it?
Marty, you moved the goalpost to Santorum’s support of an outright ban all by yourself. That was never suggested.
Access to something can be restricted short of a ban on it. And, if he thinks states can ban birth control, that means he thinks such a ban is not a violation of a fundamental right, even if he thinks states shouldn’t (whoopie!) institute such a ban.
With that, can anyone name a Catholic who is required to use contraception or who is prevented from teaching his or her beliefs as a result of HHS’s interpretation of the ACA?
The focus of her testimony was her classmate who, because she couldn’t get the BC that she was technically entitled to, had to get an ovary removed.
The focus of her testimony was mountains of anonymous hearsay. Please. And it did specifically address the concerns she observed in many women who were burdened with the cost of BC, according to her. I hear analogous claims all the time in cases I defend. They inevitably turn out to be BS. Ms. Fluke will never be called upon to document her claims. They resonate with people who believe these things as articles of faith. Personal spending habits and practices of the women she claims to speak for, if verified, would almost certainly show her testimony to be fiction.
Based on my knowledge of Catholic doctrine, I’d have expected Georgetown to pay for birth control for non-contraceptive medical problems, especially when the consequences of NOT doing so was permanent damage to reproductive system causing infertility. The school fucked up horribly, even in terms of Catholic doctrine.
All in the name of philosophical purity. Congratulations. A well made point.
BTW, my last comment was directed at Georgetown, not you, Turb, if that wasn’t already clear.
Maybe if the Chastity Brigade hadn’t restricted their hearing to an all-male panel of churchmen we could have had some for-real non-anonymous testimony from some women besides Ms. Fluke. One wonders, doesn’t one?
But kudos, McK – that’s a display of gainsaying and mindreading that puts every other instance ever seen at ObWi to shame. I’m just going to preemptively dismiss all your future statements as fiction because I cannot verify them, starting with the idea that you speak for “the rest of the people in Texas.”
“The focus of her testimony was mountains of anonymous hearsay.”
Why am I positive that had she named names, those same women would now also be slimed and harassed by Limbaugh and his pals? Intentionally anonymous examples protect privacy, and given that Fluke herself was called a slut and a prostitute, I don’t blame her for sparing her friends the scarlet letter.
You are fine with HHS telling everyone to do things you think people ought to be required to do.
So, as a matter of principle, you do not support laws “telling everyone to do things you think people ought to be required to do.”
Excuse me. I had the mistaken impression that’s kinda’ what laws do.
can anyone name a Catholic who is required to use contraception or who is prevented from teaching his or her beliefs as a result of HHS’s interpretation of the ACA?
I think this, and the others like it, are straw men. If you think the line between permissible and impermissible gov’t intrusion is the point at which an individual is compelled to do some act, or ordered to refrain from some act, in his or her private home, or what a person can or cannot believe and verbalize, then we have much more of a fundamental disagreement about limits on gov’t than was apparent before.
‘d have expected Georgetown to pay for birth control for non-contraceptive medical problems, especially when the consequences of NOT doing so was permanent damage to reproductive system causing infertility. The school fucked up horribly, even in terms of Catholic doctrine.
All of this assumes Fluke’s testimony about her anonymous friend is true. My experience is that anyone who has a sufficiently acute health problem that poses the level of risk Fluke claims existed, will find the $20 a month to pay for BC pills if that isn’t covered by insurance. But, if in the name of philosophical purity, it is necessary to believe the unproven and the incredible to justify gov’t by diktat, well, I have no answer for that. But, keep in mind, diktat is a two way street. Santorum’s HHS and his friendly, unsubstantiated witnesses can paint just as unlikely a picture fitting their preconceptions and use that to justify their own brand of intrusion.
Why am I positive that had she named names, those same women would now also be slimed and harassed by Limbaugh and his pals?
Well, there you have it. No need to actually prove your case if some creep on the other side will call names.
So, as a matter of principle, you do not support laws “telling everyone to do things you think people ought to be required to do.”
Yes, as a matter of principle I very much support the barest minimum of telling people what to do, because I happen to think I am pretty good at running my own life and am happy for you to run yours. The social contract makes law necessary, but conceding that fact doesn’t make every law necessary or good or justify any more intrusion than is necessary to maximize individual liberty and minimize imposition on others.
My experience is that anyone who has a sufficiently acute health problem that poses the level of risk Fluke claims existed, will find the $20 a month to pay for BC pills if that isn’t covered by insurance.
I’m going to need names and documentation here, otherwise this is simply anonymous hearsay and is almost certainly fiction.
I happen to think I am pretty good at running my own life and am happy for you to run yours
“Unless you want an abortion, then I support all manner of bullshit.”
First, in the interest of injecting some comic relief, I note that bobbyp’s cite on the Comstock Laws includes a reference to:
United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries
I know the Count is taking the weekend off, but I hope he finds ten minutes to give us a riff on that one.
Can you show me where specifically on Georgetown Law’s web site I can find a statement that the mandatory health insurance will not pay for birth control under any circumstances at all?
The closest thing would be here. Click through to the Description of Benefits (it’s a pdf), the list of exclusions starts on page 28. Prescription meds for birth control are excluded “except as specifically provided in the policy”. I’m not sure what that exception amounts to.
Once that money passes to the insurance company it’s no more “your money” than their salary is. What you are buying is “a health care plan.” How the employee uses that plan is, by and large, none of your business.
IMO this is an extremely relevant point, and one that is seldom raised in this discussion.
The “it’s my money” part of “it’s my money and I don’t want it spent on XXXX” is not all that self-evident, to me anyway.
I am very sympathetic to people who have religious, moral, ethical, or simply cultural problems with things they are required to participate in or just deal with, either be law or simply because That’s The Way Things Are Done.
That said, the folks with the scruple are not the only folks involved in whatever the issue is, and the other folks involved have a stake and a say in what happens.
Sometimes honoring your conscience requires *you* to adjust *yourself* to everyone else’s preferences, rather than the other way around. Sometimes that’s inconvenient, or expensive, or may even require you to not involve yourself in certain things.
I think you have to squint awfully freaking hard to not see that the particular things that folks are actually objecting to amount to women having sex with people they aren’t married to, or even people they *are* married to but not with the intent of getting pregnant.
Which wanders pretty far into MYOB territory, IMVHO.
In the Georgetown scenario, the folks who are claiming a religious exemption aren’t even a party to the transaction in question. They aren’t providing health care, they aren’t paying for or directly providing insurance. They’re just saying you have to have it, and if you don’t, we’re gonna make you buy it from UHC. It’s unclear to me what standing they have to dictate what is in the plan on religious grounds.
Last but not least, to the degree that we are going to have *any legal requirements at all* placed on transactions between different parties, the idea that anyone can exempt themselves from any of those requirements, based on any personal religious more or ethical scruple, is really, really, really problematic.
And if you’re going to allow it for the specific case of birth control, for the RCC, you’re going to have to allow it for anything, for anyone, otherwise you’re establishing religion. I.e., you’re granting a legal preference to one person’s conscience, but not everyone’s.
The question of whether the feds have any standing to mandate what needs to be in a health insurance plan is an interesting one, but to answer it we would have to walk back about a million other things, and a couple of hundred years of legal and social history, to find anything like common ground.
Maybe it wouldn’t exist even then.
So yeah, it’s the “liberal’s” time to call the shots. And that’s what they’re doing. And conservatives are pushing back, which is their prerogative, however they’re making themselves look like grade-A asshats in the process.
Did you know that Flake is dating a JEWBOY!!!! A lefty commie JEWBOY!!!!
Go ahead and ride that pony, I’m gonna go make some popcorn.
I also have to agree with Phil, I find it hilarious to be warned that I might not like it when conservatives get the upper hand.
Dude, if you only knew.
All of this assumes Fluke’s testimony about her anonymous friend is true.
MxTex, do you think all people lie all the time? If not, what specifically about Fluke’s testimony about her friend indicates that she’s lying? Is it because she’s a woman? Because she disagrees with you?
My experience is that anyone who has a sufficiently acute health problem that poses the level of risk Fluke claims existed, will find the $20 a month to pay for BC pills if that isn’t covered by insurance.
Do you know anything about how PCOS works?
The condition can cause silent cumulative damage for a long time before it leads to an acute episode. And I’m sure it was possible, with extra time and extra cash for Fluke’s friend to get BC pills somehow. But since she was a law student on scholarship, she didn’t have lots of extra time or money and since her condition was not acute, she did what people do and ignored it, until it became an emergency. With perfect foreknowledge, she might have done better, but no one has that, and there’s no reason she should have had to jump through hoops to get drugs to treat her medical condition: she was paying for insurance and she had a serious medical problem.
I understand that law school is a busy time; do you know anyone who, during the stress and sleep deprivation of that time, made a poor decision?
The closest thing would be here. Click through to the Description of Benefits (it’s a pdf), the list of exclusions starts on page 28. Prescription meds for birth control are excluded “except as specifically provided in the policy”. I’m not sure what that exception amounts to.
Not much.
Fluke mentions that technically speaking, her classmate was entitled to BC under the policy because she had her doctor provide all the documentation needed to prove that it was for a serious medical condition.
But it was still rejected. Because better that a thousand law students go through menopause in their 20s than let one slut get access to birth control.
The Jesuits are masters of moral logic I’ve been told.
Bobby, I’ve thrown out, several times, the problematic nature of putting this kind of power in the fed’s hands.
Both you and Tex are trying to make this a special, and inexplicably inappropriate, case of federal regulation that actually comports smoothly with the New Deal paradigm (Tex rather incorrectly brought that term into the discussion).
Given the same chance for one of “your guys” to do a similar thing (cf No Child Left Behind Act), I have not one iota of doubt that you would have no deep underlying philosophical objection. After all, the right of the federal government to insist that they can make the rules to which the distribution of public monies is tied to is fairly, and rightfully, widely accepted. And let us not forget that health care insurance is, as currently construed, the beneficiary of a rather large public subsidy.
As for the poor Catholic church, I am reminded of many otherwise fine principles that they publicly pronounce as part of their inviolable doctrine that they routinely accommodate the state on when the state tramples that doctrine.
So what makes this rather recent one (1869, 1964) so special?
“Did you even know about the EEOC decision before I linked to it?”
Actually no I wasn’t. So I read it and some other articles about it. Thanks for the info. It seems that subsequent court cases or threats of litigation have been successful against even Catholic schools(DePaul). The fact that it existed does inform my opinion. It also makes me wonder why Georgetown hadn’t been cited by the EEOC.
It means that some amount of the reaction to the Blunt amendment is warranted, as it would overrule preliminarily the EEOC ruling. Certainly creating additional litigation.
It is also possible that, although I wasn’t specifically aware of it, that it is why no one ever brought up BC as an optional covered item. (Although it didn’t in the discussions from 1995 to 2000 either).
In thinking about it, I would say that perhaps the biggest change in the administrations new requirement is expanding the breadth of the EEOC ruling which didn’t cover employers with fifteen or less employees.
That seems to add the requirement for about 20 percent of the workforce.
In thinking about it, I would say that perhaps the biggest change in the administrations new requirement is expanding the breadth of the EEOC ruling which didn’t cover employers with fifteen or less employees.
That’s a good point. I’d like to see more discussion on that point. I mean, it seems that there’s more of a need in smaller companies. IBM is not going to deny 50,000 employees birth control on the whim of a new chairman, but a ten employee mom-and-pop shop is likely to have far more capricious management.
“United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries”
My view regarding pessaries is much the same as MckT’s view regarding the Federal Government. I find their insertion invasive, uncomfortably expansive, and an infringement on the very seat of justice.
Only in the most extreme situations should they be used, and then only if accompanied by the bright light of Sunshine laws. As well, immediately before pessary insertion the insertee should be read his or her rights and asked what they want for Christmas.
While I understand that certain medical conditions necessitate the use of the aforesaid devices, I will admit that, by nature, Rush Limbaugh and pessaries were made for each other.
Proposition: I think this, and the others like it, are straw men.
Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
Assertion: The ruling is an infringement on religious freedom.
Contra: The ruling does not infringe on anybody’s religious beliefs, the public espousal thereof, nor their right to freely congregate and practice them.
Contra-contra: but, but, but…federal overreach! Liberal despotism! Catholic charities! It’s no big deal!
Teh proposition fails dismally. The contra position is not based on a misrepresentation of the initial assertion. It refutes it directly, head on, and unambiguously.
It’s time to give the straw men a rest. Isn’t there a Fair Labor Standards Act or something? Or is that just another classic example of federal overreach?
Brett skrev :
You believe in religious liberty… in the privacy of people’s heads, and nowhere else.
That’s almost correct.
Every person’s right to freedom of religious practice ends exactly where the right of others not to have the strictures of someone else’s religion imposed on them begins.
Brett, in the majority, apparently cannot imagine that a government that does not prevent its agents, in the form of contracted-service corporations, to impose Christianist policies on its employees, will also allow its agents to impose the policies of other religions on persons who do not share those beliefs.
Can a company contracted for services by government and headed by Orthodox Jews demand that gentile employees grow sidelocks, use two sets of dishes, and risk dismissal for driving on Saturday? Can a government-service company headed by a Scientologist demand that employees risk their health doing the Purification Rundown and spend hours each week paying to be audited with an E-meter? Can a city government headed by Muslims prohibit alcohol and pork consumption by its non-Muslim employees, or reduce employees salaries by amounts that employees spend on alcohol or pork ? Can a Hindu public school principal open each assembly with a small sacrifice to Ganesh, and demand student participation?
I the US, the answer to all those questions is “no”. Even in a majority-Muslim school district in Michigan, a public school cannot mandate the burqa for female students. Even in a majority-Baptist school district in Alabama, a public school or state university cannot prohibit the hijab (although this probably wouldn’t stop them from trying).
In the society Brett seems to advocate, the answer would be “yes, government agents may impose religious practices on persons of other religions, so long as the imposed religious practices are those acceptible to Brett Bellmore”.
People who share Brett’s opinion cannot seem to envision a society in which their religion is not dominant, in which the practices of some other religion are forced upon them; but then, no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.
When I’m playing chess with someone good at chess who has been kicking my butt regularly, and they leave their queen exposed, I’m going to think. And if I can’t see any downside to taking the queen, I’m going to think some more. I know they are too good of a player to make a mistake like that. I know it is a trap. But I can’t see what the trap is.
The right in the US has been really clever at manipulating cultural issues over the years. To me it looks like they’ve left their queen exposed on this one.
Now there isn’t a “War on Women”, technically. You aren’t going to hear Republicans claiming that their drone attack on the Elk’s lodge that killed 30 old white dudes was based on faulty intelligence that a woman was inside. You aren’t going to see columns of tanks heading out to destroy the female hordes. But when ninety something percent of even Catholics use contraceptives and the best answer a Republican can come up with to the question of whether contraceptives should be outlawed is “States rights!”, women are going to feel like they are under attack. When someone who argues that contraceptives should be part of health plans for reasons that have nothing to do with sex gets called a slut, women are going to feel like they are under attack. When the best that Republican candidates can come up with as a response to the slut comment is that they would have used different words, women are going to feel like they are under attack.
I mean what words would they have used instead? Strumpet? Harlot? Fallen woman?
So yes, there’s a war on women. It looks like a horrible political move for the right to me. When the debate was about abortion, that made sense. I’m to the left of Dennis Kucinich on most issues, but even I think abortion is always wrong. But contraception? Really? We have to even have this argument? In 2012? I don’t see how the right benefits from this conversation even going on.
But I get my butt kicked all the time at chess.
If the next two Supreme Court justices are nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican Senate, then I expect that Griswold will eventually fall. Much that the right decries as moral decay is protected mainly by the right to privacy found in the penumbra.
I hope that the new Arizona law will be nullified by the courts in no time. And the intent could not be clearer or the GOPsters would not systematically remove language that would prevent it from being (ab)used the way its detractors say it will and is intended to be, i.e. making use of contraceptives for contraceptive purposes by female employees a legal firing offence, if the employer (any one, no church connection required) desires so and giving the employer the right to check the medical records of said employees, resp. requiring the employee to prove that BC is used not for BC but for unrelated medical purposes. Well, it IS a libertarian and conservative principle that hiring and firing needs no stated cause and the state should not be involved in private contracts (except to enforce them if the weaker party is suspected of violation).
An observation and a question.
Some people here, like Phil, have no idea whatsoever how healthcare insurance works. Statements like your employer will just sign you up for the plan whether you want it or not are risible for being so totally wrong. Often times both husband and wife are employed, husband by company A and wife by company B. Company B may offer a benefit structure that makes better sense to the family so husband will decline coverage from his employer and be picked up as a dependent on the wife’s (company B’s) plan. happens every day.
Most plans don’t cover viagra.
There is just a lot of silly misinformation re; health insurance that makes me wonder what else the usual suspects just make up as they go marching along the feminist warpath.
Any how, why is all of the discussion center on BC pills? IUDs (copper rings) are very effective and can be had for as little as $200. They last ten years +/-. So a woman could finance one of these for $20 a year. Who doesn’t have that kind of money? You might be gullible enough to believe that a law student can’t come up with $20/month, but $20/year. Even a crack head could forego one rock a year and pay for an IUD.
Possible side effects of IUD’s:
Mood changes
Acne
Headaches
Breast tenderness
Pelvic pain
Cramping (copper IUD)
Increased bleeding during menstruation (copper IUD)
Nausea
There is an increased risk of pelvic infections, particularly for women who have more than one sexual partner.
Nothing to it! Only $19.99/mo. But wait! There’s more!
Silly misinformation is as silly misinformation does….as we approach the event horizon of infinite density.
IUDs (copper rings) are very effective and can be had for as little as $200.
A few years ago, my wife got an IUD. Finding a doctor who was willing to give her one was very difficult. She dealt with several who simply were not interested in providing an IUD to a young woman. This is not an isolated experience; the internet is full of stories of women who can’t easily find a physician to provide an IUD.
Moreover, apparently many physicians aren’t willing to talk about the IUD or have misconceptions about it; we can hardly fault patients for their ignorance of the IUD when physicians are so ignorant themselves.
To be abundantly clear, what I said was *if you cannot demonstrate that you have coverage elsewhere.* Like, you know, *via your spouse’s coverage.*
If you’re going to try to troll me, learn to read. I don’t even care what language.
Also, pretty sure an IUD won’t treat PCOS, endometriosis or dysmenorrhea, but I’m not a doctor like some people apparently imagine themselves to be.
Any how, why is all of the discussion center on BC pills?
Because coverage for prescription BC pills was the issue Fluke argued for. And because Fluke subsequently has been the focus of comments like “she’s having so much sex, I don’t know how she can walk”, and “she’s dating a wealthy commie jew, why doesn’t he pay for her contraception”.
The arguments Fluke made for coverage of BC pills were, as it happens, not only not restricted to contraception, they were primarily *not* about contraception. They were about people she knew who needed the scrip for other issues altogether, like ovarian cysts.
Which, as it turns out, are not well addressed by IUDs.
Last but not least, I’m not sure what medical products or services anyone other than you or I choose to employ are remotely the business of you or I. In the Georgetown case, not only are you or I not being asked to pay for them, the righteous Jesuit fathers of Georgetown U. are not being asked to pay for them.
On the contrary, they are requiring other folks to pay for them. And then, insisting that their (the holy Jesuit fathers’) religious conscience be observed in a contract to which they have no part.
BC pills are a medical product, available only by prescription from your doctor. There are about a million reasons why they might be exactly the right medication for the situation at hand. That decision is between a patient and her doctor. You and I have bugger all to say about it.
Especially if the patient herself, and not your or I, is actually paying the premium.
“marching along the feminist warpath”
When the subject of vaginas comes up, can a douche be far behind?
I keed, I keed.
But seriously, when I hear Limbaugh use the term “feminazis”, it conjures images of fat, loud-mouthed, diapered men wielding training cigars and being whipped senseless by phantoms wearing sensible shoes.
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/338384
Fetch me yon pessary, laddie.
“On the contrary, they are requiring other folks to pay for them. And then, insisting that their (the holy Jesuit fathers’) religious conscience be observed in a contract to which they have no part.”
I just want to clarify this. The student is paying about 20% of the premium, as is true in most employer plans. They pay 1,850 a year or 5,500 a year for a spouse and child plan. So the Jesuit fathers are covering the other 50-80% out of the budget. Yes, that all comes from tuiton etc. but it is not paid specifically by the student.
Not really disagreeing much with you russell.
“Especially if the patient herself, and not your or I, is actually paying the premium.”
Actually, we are all paying the premium, and for BC pills, if we are in the same risk pool. As CCDG notes, the employer or school in this case, is also paying the premium. That is just a fact.
“That decision is between a patient and her doctor. You and I have bugger all to say about it.” Wrong as usual on the HCI topic.
HC insurance is true communism. It’s a true community venture. The idea is to achieve the greatest good for the most – or in economic terms, achieve the maximum utility. There will always be someone who has a medical need that won’t be covered. That is a sacrifice for the greater good. If money grew on trees such would not be the case, but, difficult as is for some liberals to accept, money does not grow on trees and economic value judgements must be made.
I still cannot believe that a young woman cannot come up with $20 a month to take care of a serious medical issue. Seriously, you guys stretch the limits credibility in your search for examplary for your cause victims.
$20 a month? Come on.
If things are that financially distressed for this supposed real woman, the she should have chosen a different situation that would have covered her needs. As the song says, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some times, you just might find, you get what you need”.
I am with McKT on this. Most HCI plans I know and/or have worked for cover BC pills; especially if the pills are of medical necessity for reasons other than contraception. I have serious doubts as to the validity of this anon. woman who was denied and who suffered medical complications as a result. heresay.
I call BS on the whole story.
She – the anon victim in the scenario – no doubt hangs out with the gazillions of anon women who claim to have been raped but refused to report the crime because they don’t want to get involved in fighting for their rights. Way to go women. Hear you roar…..err squeak away and hide……..
Other than inflamatory heresay and a hyperbolic reaction (War on Women!!!!) we have another piece of evidence to toss on top of the already humungous mountain of same, that Rush is a crazy a-hole also with a prediliction towards hyperbole and inflamatory remarks. Yawn.
If you think the line between permissible and impermissible gov’t intrusion is the point at which an individual is compelled to do some act, or ordered to refrain from some act, in his or her private home, or what a person can or cannot believe and verbalize, then we have much more of a fundamental disagreement about limits on gov’t than was apparent before.
Perhaps that isn’t the line, certainly not in the general case as you’ve presented it here. But there’s lots and lots of daylight betweeen how HHS has interpreted the ACA and the sort of intrusion described above, which is largely the point.
In the specific case we’re discussing, concerning freedom of religion, I think there is a line somewhere between *requiring primarily secular institutions run by churches, if they provide health insurance at all, to provide heath insurance for their employees that covers birth control, when the decision to use that particular coverage does not involve the primarily secular institution or the church that runs it*, and forcing people to use birth control or preventing them from decrying its use, which would be the deliniation between permissible and impermissible government intrusion.
I just don’t see that we’re all that close to that line as things currently stand.
I just want to clarify this.
Thanks for the clarification, it’s appreciated.
HC insurance is true communism. It’s a true community venture.
This may come as a shock to you, but “community venture” and “communism” are not synonymous. Despite the similarity in spelling.
The idea is to achieve the greatest good for the most – or in economic terms, achieve the maximum utility.
My understanding is that the purpose of insurance is to manage risk by spreading it across a relatively large population.
Perhaps we’re talking about two different things.
There will always be someone who has a medical need that won’t be covered. That is a sacrifice for the greater good.
Again, as I understand it, it’s less a matter of utilitarian triage, and more an actuarial decision about whether it makes sense for something to be covered or not.
I still cannot believe that a young woman cannot come up with $20 a month to take care of a serious medical issue
I don’t see that it’s any of your freaking business.
I call BS on the whole story.
Well, obviously, that settles it then.
$20 a month? Come on.
Well then, why stop there? Why not make people buy their own hypertension medication? rather than apply the co-pay?
I’d wager one of Slarti’s double sawbucks there are many more examples of “cheap” medical procedures or prescriptions that are typically covered by health insurance.
Again. The question. Why pick on this particular one? It’s obviously not the cost, so that is a red herring.
So where’s the beef?
“I don’t see that it’s any of your freaking business.”
The story was put into the public realm and the woman is being made into a poster child for female victimization. So yeah, i want to know the facts. As a voting citizen, it is now my business to understand why she can’t afford a measely $20 a month to save herself.
“My understanding is that the purpose of insurance is to manage risk by spreading it across a relatively large population.” yes of course. i didn’t think that needed to be mentioned. however, the bundle of services included under coverage does depend on some form of utility maximizing analysis because, after all HCI is a business, and if utility for the consumers is not maximized, they will take their business elsewhere.
“Well, obviously, that settles it then.”
it should, but there is another ideologue sucker born every minute.
…but, difficult as is for some liberals to accept, money does not grow on trees and economic value judgements must be made.
Well, it’s not the “money”. Currency can be printed as deemed necessary. So you start right off with a bogus assumption. But yes, it is about deciding where our economic resources will go, and simply asserting that the allocation of economic resources just somehow won’t accommodate somebody else’s priorities is simply a bullying tactic to claim ‘my way or the highway’.
So…basically you are saying we cannot debate how our resources are to be allocated. How convenient for you.
That is a proposition that is at odds with any reasonable conception of democracy, and it is simply unacceptable.
“Well then, why stop there? Why not make people buy their own hypertension medication? rather than apply the co-pay?”
Look, I am all for full coverage of contraceptives, even for pure for contraceptive purposes (though I do think IUDs are an ovelooked, yet very cost effective approach that should be incentivized over pills).
I just think this whole story is BS. $20? Find more better victims for your posters.
Also, Is it any surprise that a bunch of religious kooks and pencil dicked pot bellied Guido loosers want to control women’s sexuality through these types of means? But it isn’t a “war on women”. At most it is an attack on an aspect of womens’ finances by some organized loosers; mostly wops and micks.
So a little perspective is in order here.
At worst some women will have to shuck out their $20 a month and if that is too much of a burden on them the free market will offer them a solution before long.
Looser than whom?
Anyway, what’s up with the wops and micks thing? Is that sort of thing intended as bait, or is it a personal tick (or both)?
HC insurance is true communism.
Trotskyite deviationism aside, this is one of the most absurd statements I have ever read from anybody claiming to be an economist.
If this statement is true, then any insurance construct is “communism”.
I bet the folks at AFLAC are a bit stunned at this news. There go the bonuses. Quack.
“mostly wops and micks.”
Fer christ’s sake, it’s St. Patrick’s day. For the love of god, put down that drink and go to bed.
“mostly wops and micks.”
Did I write that that….oooops. Yep, time for bed.
“If this statement is true, then any insurance construct is “communism”.”
First of all, I like communism. I think capitalism is overrated.
HC insurance is different from other forms of insurance.
All other forms of insurance are based on the value of the thing being insured, i.e. a $25k car is insured for up to $25k. You can’t insure it for $50k. The insurance is purely protection against the loss of something you could afford to buy/own and, indeed, do own.
Life insurance is an agreement to receive a certain maximum payout based on what you pay in. It is a little more like HCI, but still resembles auto or home owners insurance in its actuarial approach and in that it has a cap on payout based on what is paid in per contract.
With HC insurance a group of individuals is pooling their resources (via premiums) to purchase goods and services they would not otherwise be able to afford or, if able to afford, would prefer to not spend money out of pocket on. BTW, both of these reasons for purchasing HCI are problematic.
Me, I tink itz da stinkin Polocks ova heah who are causin all de problems.
Lookitisguy, gettin his end in just unda da wiah befoah the whatchamacallit, da Violence Against de Broads Act goes troo:
http://www.politicususa.com/tea-party-kidnapping-and-rape/
Wut kinda behaviah izat, I ask ya?
Now, I got to go downtown wit da boyz and see my insorance broka — Ho Chi Minh Mutual ovah heah ….. commie bastid, but he knoz his bisiness, but I’m tinkin, jus between you and me, dat I’ll buy a life insurance policy on my cousin, who I’ve gotta feelin is not feelin so good and may drop dead soon. With a little encoragement, if ya know what I mean …. badda bing, badda boom, even dose commies know da ovah-unda.
…. What? …. whaddaya laughin at? You tink I’m funny? How am I funny? Izzit da way I look, or what? Youda one who sez I’m funny, soes tell me zactly how I’m funny.
In udda news, whozit, Rand Paul, anda Lindsay Graham, Jim Demint – wut kinda name is Demint any way, sounds like a afta dinna mint for dumb guys, and some udda Republican clown have put forward a bill to sunset and completely privatize Medicaeh in 2014, includin for dose already on na program.
I don’t know wut my mudda gonna’s do. She’s eighty-tree and has da dementia (maybe dey should callit de demintia, hunh?) and the canca already and now dey wanna post a made man as a guard inner vagina too, jus to make shuah theres no monkey business up ere.
I don know wut dis contry iz comin to, but I know wut I’m gonna do to the muddaf*ckahs who are destroyin it ovah heah. I promise you dat.
Theya showin deir troo colors, and the coloras I’m goin ta give em is black and blue.
And you tink the sons of Italy are da problem?
Now, itza weekend and I asted you people to leave me alone jus for once, cause I gotta blonde comin ovah and I want tings to be nice, you know?
All other forms of insurance are based on the value of the thing being insured, i.e. a $25k car is insured for up to $25k.
And liability insurance, to include but certainly not limited to professional? That only exists in my head?
From the religious conservative POV the IUD is NOT AN ALTERNATIVE. It works post-conception and therefore is considered not as a contraceptive (which even many conservatives now accept in principle) but as an abortifacient (and therefore not acceptable to many that would accept contraception in the right circumstances).
In the catholic dispute on birth control it has been a longstanding proposal of compromise to allow pre-conception methods (including the pill and condoms) while still condemning all post-conception methods (IUD, RU-486, abortion).
—
—Not directly related to the above—
To be sarcastic, it looks to me like many have not yet even fully accepted that there is an egg in the first place but mentally still consider the woman as simply the breeding box for the male seed
Is it any surprise that a bunch of religious kooks and pencil dicked pot bellied Guido loosers want to control women’s sexuality through these types of means? But it isn’t a “war on women”. At most it is an attack on an aspect of womens’ finances by some organized loosers; mostly wops and micks.
comedy gold.
avedis, I don’t mean to be harsh, but you’re behaving like an @ss.
With HC insurance a group of individuals is pooling their resources (via premiums) to purchase goods and services they would not otherwise be able to afford or, if able to afford, would prefer to not spend money out of pocket on.
See, that might make sense if they all got to buy stuff at will. Kinda like a medical services Sam’s Club.
But, as we all know, in HC insurance lots of people pay a (relatively) small premium against the risk that some small number of them will need expensive services.
Nowadays, virtually insurance providers also include preventative care in the coverage bundle, because doing so lowers overall cost for everyone.
But “pooling resources to buy expensive stuff” is not really an accurate description.
Long story short, there are lots of reasons why a woman and her doctor might decide, between themselves, that birth control pills are a better choice than an IUD. Or, vice versa. Or, some other alternative.
None of that is any of your business or mine. Just like it’s none of anyone else’s business if you and your doctor decide that your (hypothetical) high cholesterol should be treated with diet and exercise, or Lipitor. Or whether somebody else’s heart disease should be treated with medication or surgery.
Not anyone else’s business. To some degree the insurance company gets a vote, because they are writing the check, and they’re responsible to make sure that the money is spent intelligently.
But you or me? No.
“But, as we all know, in HC insurance lots of people pay a (relatively) small premium against the risk that some small number of them will need expensive services.”
Negative.
And that is the crux of the matter. People purchase HCI and then they all expect it to pay for every little medical service they want; including $20/month BC pills. people think once they have paid their premium, they should never have to reach into their pockets again for any health related good or service.
What you are talking about is the kind of HCI I would prefer. Low cost, very high deductible insurance against catastrophic events. But this hasn’t been the norm in a long time, though it is making a come back. But then you’d have to save your own money and open your own wallet for $20 items. Apparently this is too tough for some people and they go hysterical and allow themselves to get sick for lack of ability to forego one meal a month at Olive Garden.
People purchase HCI and then they all expect it to pay for every little medical service they want; including $20/month BC pills.
That probably has something to do with the bulk discounts that insurance companies can negotiate with providers. I’d much rather pay higher premiums and get my insurance to cover everything since they’ll arrange to pay a lower price than I would for the same services.
Apparently this is too tough for some people and they go hysterical and allow themselves to get sick for lack of ability to forego one meal a month at Olive Garden.
What a lovely set of generalizations, particularly with the class-based snark inherent at the restaurant choice. A great way to dismiss genuine economic hardship and the difficult choices it brings.
I am closing comments on this post. I don’t have the time & energy to moderate two posts at once when every other comment at least contains an ad hominem attack or remark. Sheesh, people.