Birth control: it’s free!
Isn’t this wonderful?
More than half of privately insured women are getting free birth control under President Barack Obama’s health law, a major coverage shift that’s likely to advance.
…The share of privately insured women who got their birth control pills without a copayment jumped to 56 percent [in 2013], from 14 percent in 2012. The law’s requirement that most health plans cover birth control as prevention, at no additional cost to women, took full effect in 2013.
The average annual saving for women was $269.
What a wonderful guy that Obama is, and what wonderful people those Democrats are, giving me free birth control. Birth control that the Republicans and the religious fanatics at Hobby Lobby would deny me.
What’s that you say? Can’t hear you. Well, you don’t have to shout in my ear!! You say that somebody’s paying for it? What do I care, as long as I don’t have to? You say maybe I am paying for it, through increased premiums or taxes?
I knew it was too good to be true. Those greedy insurance companies, always trying to screw me.
Now, to get back to my own voice rather than whomever I was channeling just then (don’t know what came over me), let me add that I continue to be astounded at people’s financial ignorance. I’m no economic whiz, but I know that neither insurance companies nor the government—as kind-hearted and benevolent as both undoubtedly are; always thinking of us, never of themselves—give us things for free. Everything government does is paid for through taxes. I suppose if you pay no taxes it’s free to you, but even then, an insurance company is still (when last I checked) in the business to make money and not give things away.
The birth control mandate, by the way, was not voted on by Congress, not even by the convoluted machinations through which Obamacare itself was passed. The mandate, as well as its reduction in the extent of co-pays, was an administrative HHS decision, based in part on the recommendation of a medical panel known as the IOM [emphasis mine]:
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandates contraceptive coverage for all employers and educational institutions, even though the mandate itself is not included in the wording of the law(s) passed by Congress. The mandate applies to all new health insurance plans effective August 2012…
On January 20, 2012, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a (then) final rule of an August 1, 2011 interim final rule on health insurance coverage with no cost sharing for FDA-approved contraceptives and contraceptive services (including female sterilization) for women of reproductive age if prescribed by health care providers, as part of women’s preventive health services guidelines adopted by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for the Affordable Care Act. Male contraception is not eligible.
Regulations made under the act rely on the recommendations of the independent Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its July 19, 2011 report Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps…
All of the birth control mandate lawsuits (and Hobby Lobby should more accurately be described as an abortifacient lawsuit) follow from that mandate by HHS, which followed from that report by the IOM. The lawsuits focused on the mandates’ anti-religious aspects, because that was the issue for those particular plaintiffs. But there are other possible objections, such as whether the government should be mandating that something like contraception coverage be “free” (that is, no direct and obvious consumer contribution) for anyone, and especially for those who can afford it, since so far as I can see there is no means test.
You can find the IOM report here. Basically, it seems that HHS asked the IOM to review “what preventive services are important to women’s health and well-being and then [recommend] which of these should be considered in the development of comprehensive guidelines,” and that’s exactly what the group did. Under their recommendations, HHS announced that:
…a full range of preventive services for women, including annual well-woman visits, screening for gestational diabetes, breastfeeding support, HPV testing, STI counseling and HIV screening, contraception methods and counseling, and screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence, will be covered by new health plans without cost sharing.
This is both mandated and for the most part completely covered, so we are all paying for it, and it was never even subjected to a vote by Congress.
And dare I ask: what of men? I understand that only women can get pregnant, and this is a very important aspect of their health care that does not apply to men. But don’t things like HIV, contraception, domestic violence, and STIs apply to men? Do they not deserve some freebies too?
And what of the myriad other health problems we all face? If the socialist camel has gotten his nose in the tent regarding women’s reproductive care, why shouldn’t his whole body and then a whole herd of camels follow? The answer is, of course, that universal “free” coverage has always been the intention of the left. And getting the birth control mandate in there slyly and secretly was the way to go, because Obamacare probably would never have been passed if its designers and proponents had been upfront and put it in the statute itself.
[NOTE: In a somewhat-related post, blogger Bookworm—who’s a lawyer—very helpfully and clearly explains the Hobby Lobby decision, not as it’s been distorted and lied about, but as it’s actually written. She’s trying to get “progressives” to understand that what they’re shrieking about just isn’t so. I wish her the best of luck, but I don’t think lack of explanation is really the answer for most of them. However, if there are any rational people on your list, you might take a look and send it to them.]
[ADDENDUM: Please read this (hat tip: commenter “Ann”).]
About those HHS “administrative decisions” — at Powerline:
This is a tip to the porn industry. It boosts the profit, given the negligible taxes, and provides more Democrat funding.
“[Bookworm]’s trying to get “progressives” to understand that what they’re shrieking about just isn’t so.”
Good luck with that, Bookworm. I try to do the same thing when explaining the 1991-2003 Iraq enforcement that culminated in OIF.
Instead, I’ve been dumbfounded when citing primary sources only to be rebutted by questionable sources (ie, propaganda) that should be dispelled on their face by the primary sources.
Partisans, including lawyers who ought to be receptive to inquiry, will consciously choose the revisionist, false narrative over the truth. Why? Because some false premises are weight-bearing. They’re necessary to hold up the basic worldview, and they’re just not going to change Neo-style.
Eric, I admire your tenacity (along with neo’s here on this blog) even though the effort must often seem quite futile. People may not change their minds about the entirety of the Iraq issue anytime soon, but there does seem to be an understanding out there that letting Iraq fall at this time would be just a senseless throwing away of the sacrifice of so many American lives. At least, I hope so.
reticent…
While I favored — and still do — the original campaign to de-throne the madman, there is no question but Bush permitted mission creep to destroy the Grand Tactical Strategy of SecDef Rumsfeld.
Astonishingly, he permitted the same loon that aborted his father’s campaign (Colin Powell) to abort his own crusade. Powell had Paul Bremer installed — with Bush’s blessing.
Later Bush prevented liberal democratic forces from fully de-throning Chavez. So now we have that burden, too.
MOST of the money and blood spent on Iraq was for a futile cause, namely to permit Maliki to interfere with the budding republic — making it a land of strong men instead of laws.
The other tragedy was to spend large, Marshall Plan style, on Iraqi infrastructure. Again, all from the diktat of Colin Powell’s — “you brake it; you own it” school of emotion.
In a sign of the troubles to come: Rumsfeld did not prioritize the destruction of the ammo dumps at H2 and H3. These stashes were ten-miles across on all sides!
All that was necessary was to napalm them from the air — throw in some HE — and make the entire ammo dump a forbidden zone.
Instead, the Sunnis mined these vast dumps for all the years that we were there.
Our guys were tasked with the anal retentive notions of Colin Powell — and others — who expected the DoD to decontaminate worthless desert tracts that Saddam had befouled.
At least HALF of all our casualties can be traced back to these two immense ammo dumps. They were THE source for all of the munitions used in IEDs and VBIEDs.
We should’ve NEVER prioritized going after proofs of Saddams WMD. Shutting down all of the major war plants would’ve done the trick.
Warfare should never have been conflated into lawfare.
Leaving the place a shambles would’ve truly encouraged the rest of the neighborhood to play nice.
We did the exact opposite.
So the opfor Alinsky’d us.
Then Barry out did Bush — pumping up a dead-end campaign to nowhere: Afghanistan.
Again, the same insane ideas about running some WPA projects…
&&&
The ONLY thing that can work in the Third World is strong man authoritarianism — until the time comes when it can morph into a democratic republic. ( See: Korea, Singapore, Chile)
Socially devastated polities CAN’T transition to republican democracies. Our opponents (Russia, China, the Ummah, the Left ) won’t let such a transition happen.
Further, we have to keep most NGOs out of the picture. They are swamped with anti-Capitalists and Leftists. They are cultural poisons against republican democracies. They corrupt alien politicians.
(Look at the food distribution warfare in Somalia. NGOs have shut down the Somali farming sector. No farmer cares to work his tush off to compete with free food.)
Our NGOs are screwing up civil rights in Russia. They spend so much time peddling dogma that the Russian government falls back into NKVD/ KGB antics… the only kind of self-defense that polity knows.
And, look what our State Department did to over through Mubarak. 60 Minutes had a full expose on the matter. Now that gambit is lost into the memory hole.
Is it ANY wonder that no nation trusts Barry, the Orphan Grinder?
blert: “While I favored – and still do – the original campaign to de-throne the madman”
My explanation is heavily weighted on the 1991-2003 Iraq enforcement with only some opinion about the 2003-2011 peace operations. I don’t believe the usual question of ‘Was it worth it?’ can be answered if one doesn’t understand the why of it in the 1st place. Most people don’t, including supporters, despite that the background context for OIF is open source, easily accessed, and straightforward. Such is the obscuring power of the prevailing false narrative.
Our intervention in WW2 generated a gigantic ripple effect and included failures and errors that dwarf everything we got wrong in Iraq. Yet we tolerated our WW2 shortcomings because we understood – or at least universally accepted a validating narrative for – why we went to war in the 1st place. A different popular-political lens is applied to the Iraq mission because the popular perception – the general will – has been corrupted. The key variable isn’t whether we screw up, because we almost always screw up. The key variable is whether we stick it out enough to work through our screw-ups to win the war and secure the peace, and that depends largely on the general will.
In any case, my point wasn’t to take on the OIF controversy, though I’m always ready and willing to roll out my explanation, because the prevailing false narrative of the Iraq mission is patient zero for the disastrous wrong turn of our foreign policy and a pivot point in our domestic politics as well.
My point was to commiserate with Bookworm’s attempt to use reason, knowledge, and principle to save our people’s soul when they choose the mob.
reticent,
There’s more to lose – and more to gain – in Iraq than a sunk cost, but yes, it does often seem futile.
When they deliberately prefer dubious, histrionic opinions to the primary sources – such as US laws, UNSC resolutions, Clinton precedent, UNMOVIC and Iraq Study Group findings – that should dispositively dispel the propaganda, there just doesn’t seem any constructive space to work the discourse.
That’s the effective limit of discourse and the good work of Neo, Bookworm, and others like them. Their piece matters, but it’s not the difference-maker. The activist game isn’t HS debate club. It’s maneuver in the military sense, where words and ideas aren’t the end; they’re means to the end and are manipulated as such.
I am in the process of asking the big shooters of another blog the following question:
You post so much, run articles by contributors, specifically saying things that aren’t so. I am not speaking of personal experience pieces, or opinion pieces.
For example, after the Zimmerman trial, you ran several items grossly misrepresenting the facts of the case. Ditto with gun control and the Hobby Lobby case.
All your privilege.
My question is what do you think of, do you think you need, what is your opinion of the effect on…those readers who know better? Consider that the facts of these cases and others are widely known. As you must know them.
I don’t expect to get an answer. I’m left with speculation and one possibility is something W. F. Buckley offered years ago. Holocaust denial books are not written for today. They’re written to be resources several generations hence when all the witnesses are dead.
I guess my question in general is whether attempting to misinform the unwary at the cost of ruining your credibility with those who know better, which is practically everybody, has a positive effect for the progressive cause.
I am presuming that a good proportion of those like the propietors of the blog in question also know better, those who loudly agree and promote such things must know better.
When we see somebody going on about denied access to birth control, we have to wonder if they actually believe that or are saying what they’re supposed to say though knowing they lie.
Colin Powell’s an Obama supporter. So he’s definitely a general like Benedict Arnold or the ones Lincoln fired for using military tactics that supported Northern Dems.
It’s like having a mini Obama in the White House, before Hussein.
Richard Aubrey:
I think the key phrase is “those who know better, which is practically everybody.”
It’s not practically everybody. It’s a very small percentage, IMHO. Most people do not know better. I know many well-educated liberals (not leftists) and even centrists who most definitely don’t know better. The propaganda works very well. I think it’s just as simple as that. Ends justifies means; I don’t think the writers care about their integrity. It’s for The Cause.
I still think you should write the letters, though.
Richard Aubrey: “I’m left with speculation and one possibility is something W. F. Buckley offered years ago. Holocaust denial books are not written for today. They’re written to be resources several generations hence when all the witnesses are dead.”
That, and taking the proactive step of marginalizing, neutralizing, even stigmatizing the witnesses while they’re still alive.
Clarification on my comment at July 6th, 2014 at 2:53 am:
The good work of Neo, Bookworm, and others like them matters, but it’s not the difference-maker in the social cultural/political setting in terms of the social competition for control of the dominant culture, zeitgeist, general will, and collective consciousness. Insofar as making a difference greater than comforting and educating already like-minded readers like me, their work is calibrated to individuals with a prerequisite unsettled, searching mindset to be a changer like Neo, or the Neo character wanting the red pill alternative truth from Morpheus in the movie, The Matrix.
Desire for the red pill is uncommon. It’s an individual phenomenon, not a social phenomenon. We are intrinsically social creatures with real social needs, physical and psychological. Our pragmatic need for social acceptance can and does routinely overpower our individual sense of principle and honor.
Are Americans intrinsically immune to the social cultural/political activist forces that shaped post-WW1 Germany? Of course not. No more than we were immune to the social cultural/political activist forces that severed us from the British Empire.
With Bookworm’s treatment of the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby case, there’s at least the excuse that her ConLaw-style unpacking is somewhat esoteric.
In contrast, rebutting the claim that the Iraq enforcement was unconstitutional and fraudulent ought to be as straightforward as citing directly to the “specific statutory authorization” of PL 102-1 and PL 107-243, the baseline policy plainly stated by the Executive and Legislature across 3 presidencies, and the non-stop triggering behavior by Saddam. No ConLaw style unpacking ought to be needed for a problem that evolved as frontpage, headline news for over a decade.
Yet even the Saddam problem that was festering in the open for years was successfully radically spun. If something as big, open, and straightforward as the Iraq enforcement can be spun like that, then anything can be spun.
The social movement that acquires control of the social nodal and cuing machinery can direct the central mass of We the People while marginalizing, neutralizing, even stigmatizing the outlier remainder as modern-day outcast Tory/British loyalists.
The method to seize control of the social machinery is activism, because activism is sociology weaponized. And in the activist game, narrative is elective truth and the truth is just another competing narrative.
The Hobby Lobby big lie is breathtaking in its size. Every LIV and apolitical person I know, now genuinely believes that employers have been put in charge of women’s birth control. I found myself truly enraged at friends and relations mindlessly parroting fact-free talking points last week.
This was the saddest Independence Day of my life. That America of liberty is gone, exchanged for a never ending list of “free” stuff. I don’t know how we get it back. I don’t know if we can.
http://jbsanctuary.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/immigration-illegal-type-facebook-hobby-lobby/
JB had an interesting link to a FB experiment to get out the vote and an emotional spread experiment.
Read it and watch a bit of the video link there. Then realize this.
The Left is weaponizing various levels of research in the Hobby Lobby case. It’s not “spontaneous” for nothing.
Socialism is belief in the fantasy that we can all live high on the hog at everybody else’s expense. The socialists have convinced people there really is a free lunch. Somebody else will pay your doctor and pharmacy bill.
Poor HRC and CHelsea certainly think they are poor for living on the looted wealth.
Hi Everyone,
I saw Dinesh D’Souza’s “America” today. It’s well worth seeing. The audience clapped at the end, which is always inspiring when a tribute to America is shown on screen.
This film is an ambitious attempt to redirect the Zinn/Chomsky/Alinsky narrative that Americans should feel shame rather than pride that our history promotes freedom and free enterprise.
A spotlight is pinpointed at Obama as the malevolent agent of Lucifer that he is. Dinesh D’Souza is a brave man, and we should thank him.
Promethea, I also saw it last Wednesday, on the first day of showing. I took three LIV neighbors to it along with my wife. I wanted to see the LIV’s reaction to it.
They had never heard the names Zinn/Chomsky/Alinsky. They were vaguely aware of the anti-American leanings of many dems, but tend to want to be non-judgmental. After all, they don’t hear the MSM criticizing the anti-American leanings of the progs. Thus, they didn’t think there was any there, there. They were intrigued by the film, but tended to think D’Souza is a partisan and he was doing a hit job on Obama. Interesting to me they don’t seem to notice the hit jobs by the MSM on Repubs like Romney/Palin/Cheney. That said, all three are concerned about what’s happening in the ME. They don’t know the details, but are aware that Obama’s foreign policy is not working as they thought it might. They’re also aware of the IRS, but not quite sure what to make of it. They don’t want to believe that the IRS can be used against citizens who oppose the government’s policies.
I don’t think my money was wasted in taking them to the film. My neighbors were definitely introduced to concepts they had not considered before. I just hope many LIVs will see it. It has the potential to make them think a bit. Unfortunately, I don’t think that many will. And that’s a shame.
Would a Christian become a Muslim if he saw a movie about Christian atrocities in the Crusades and Muslim “scientific Golden Ages”?
Neither will members of the LEftist alliance convert merely because they suffered some doubt or damage to their faith. Faith regenerates. The Left regenerates damage. In a day, in a year, after some recovery, they will recover fully. It’s reverse AA.
Returning to the contraceptive issue and who pays for it, here’s a thought. Target and Walmart and other retailers have been selling the Pill for 9-12 dollars a month. Why should they continue to do so if well over half of their customers are subsidized? Watch the price go up to fifty dollars a month and Super Bowl ads for various brands. After all, they’re free, right? Perverse incentives. And anybody who still tries to buy contraceptives themselves find themselves squeezed. Just like higher education.
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