This is completely ridiculous. Every household out there already has all the birth control they would ever need. In a variety of styles, colors, and flavors...
Posted on 08/12/2011 7:57:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Obama administration forces the public to subsidize people’s sex lives.
To understand how the Obama administration is running America into the ground, consider the Department of Health and Human Services’ August 1 decree ordering, essentially, free birth-control pills for all women. Through this brand-new entitlement — announced the very day that Congress voted to “reduce” the national debt — Washington mandates more giveaways, not just to poor women, but to every woman in America, regardless of employment, income, or trust fund.
By Aug. 1, 2012, Obamacare will require insurers to cover BCPs. Further, HHS guidelines state that health plans may not “charge a patient a copayment, coinsurance, or deductible for these services when they are delivered by a network provider.” Thus, BCPs will be free to all women. This goody is neither focused nor means-tested. If Kim Kardashian and Katie Couric want BCPs, by Jove, they will get them free, too! Indeed, by hyperactively demanding such services for women regardless of means, Team Obamaa+ will squander scarce resources and, perversely, misdirect funds that could help needy women, just so that Paris Hilton can get her freak on, gratis.
Most federally funded, state-run Medicaid programs already finance BCPs for poor women, usually free or with co-payments as low as $1.00. This new regulation extends these gifts to middle-class and prosperous women.
“Women currently pay between $15 and $50 a month in co-pays for birth control pills — which equals $180 to $600 a year!” a writer named Serena complained July 30 on the Feminists for Choice website. Even the higher of those figures won’t bankrupt much of anyone, and 49 cents to $1.64 seems like a reasonable daily price for hot, pregnancy-free sex.
Why on earth is the Obamaa+ administration forbidding insurers to recover some of the expense for BCPs from well-heeled women? As with other benefits that insurers are compelled to offer — but now with neither co-payments nor deductibles to help absorb the burden — the government will lob the cost onto the shoulders of everyone who does not use those services. Free pills for women; higher premiums for all.
The HHS decree is based on the federal Institute of Medicine’s July 19 recommendation of free contraceptives “so that women can better avoid unwanted pregnancies.” Experts harbor doubts about this connection. “We intuitively think that eliminating the co-pay for birth control will help alleviate the rate of unintended pregnancies, but this may not be so,” says Dr. David Friedman, assistant clinical professor of gynecology at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. “If the abortion rate reflects the rate of unintended pregnancy, then populations with free birth control, like those on Medicaid, should have lower abortion rates. But the opposite is true. Although the Medicaid population made up only 18.92 percent of New Yorkers in 2009, they had 39.75 percent of abortions. This lends pause to the notion that eliminating co-pays will have any constructive effect on preventing unwanted pregnancies.”
Obamacare’s perks go far beyond the pill. According to the HHS guidelines, insured women can demand all of the following — free of co-payment and independent of income:
• Well-woman visits to doctors, including preconception and prenatal care
• Human-papillomavirus tests
• Counseling for sexually transmitted infections
• Counseling and screening for HIV
• “All Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”
• “Breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling. Comprehensive lactation support and counseling, by a trained provider during pregnancy and/or in the postpartum period, and costs for renting breastfeeding equipment.”
• “Screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence.”
Kirsten Moore, president and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, dreams of better contraceptives — possibly available over the counter. “Imagine a safe, effective, daily birth control pill regimen available on store shelves alongside condoms and cough medicine,” she wrote on Sunday for AOL Healthy Living. “What if there were a Sunglass Hut for contraception?” Au contraire, Obamaa+’s mandate is likely to decelerate rather than turbocharge the pharmaceutical conveyor belt for new and improved contraceptives.
“When the Health and Human Services Department is monitoring and perhaps indirectly dictating health-insurance premiums, the government will impose significant pressure for drug companies to keep higher-cost pills ‘affordable,’ since the government will pay for them,” explains Dr. Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas. “That trend would discourage contraceptive innovation because pharmaceutical companies could not recapture their R&D costs.”
This new policy is designed to address an alleged American crisis called being female. As Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.) put it, “We are one step closer to saying goodbye to an era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition.”
But what about men? Where are the free condoms? Why must males pay for HIV tests, while women soon won’t? Female tubal ligation will be free of co-payments. Men who get vasectomies had better bring their wallets.
Also troubling: Obamaa+’s new mandate will force pro-life Americans to pay part of the cost of birth-control pills, some of which act as abortifacients that kill embryos by stymieing their attachment to the uterine wall. These rules likewise will compel gay Americans to underwrite BCPs, which benefit only practicing heterosexuals. Social justice, anyone?
Thanks to Obamacare, Americans “with cancer, a heart ailment, or a major injury will face co-pays and deductibles, but anyone who wants to go on the Pill or rent breastfeeding equipment won’t incur any personal cost — and nobody will be free to decide otherwise,” Jeffrey Anderson laments on WeeklyStandard.com. “This is what politicized medicine looks like.”
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Maybe I’ll be paying for it, but its cheaper than paying for the offspring.
The estimated cost of delivery alone is $6,000 – $8,000 for a low risk pregnancy, and the cost increases if it is a high risk pregnancy.
http://www.americanpregnancy.org/planningandpreparing/affordablehealthcare.html
the personal cost of birth control ranges from $10 to $100 or more a month
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/04/14/contraception-cost-birth-control-pills-craigslist/
You do the math.
This is completely ridiculous. Every household out there already has all the birth control they would ever need. In a variety of styles, colors, and flavors...
That opinion may be unpopular around here, but I second that!
Bama’s mama should have practiced some control.
Especially when they decide to riot or form flash mobs.
Well all won’t be using it..Your welfare moms will not use because that would mean welfare checks will stop..When they stop having babies to pay for their drug habits and extras they want, then I would say yes pay for it if it will really be used for the people that keep popping out babies for money.. My question here isn’t the birth control already free in the clinic and some schools ..
We pay out-of-pocket, without insurance co-pay, just under $20 per month. No big deal. If the government is going to get involved, their only interest should be in making sure that all welfare women are on the pill as a condition of receiving benefits.
“... which equals $180 to $600 a year!”
///
the government certainly isn’t going to make this cheaper or more efficient. so it will be the high side of 500.
so i will try some math.
(how many woman use it? i don’t know. 50 million plus?)
$500 x 50,000,000 = 25,000,000,000
each year.
if it is so much cheaper and better than being pregnant,
then let them find a way to pay themselves.
free market works. if that is done, the costs WILL go down.
you could make the same argument, for many things.
AIDS costs a LOT to treat. condoms can prevent it.
so the taxpayers should pay for free condoms for ALL gays.
...well, i believe the more we return to personal responsibility, the better. the government has no right to take MY money, and give to someone else, for THEIR voluntary choices.
that is wrong, immoral, and UNAMERICAN !
Now middle class and rich women can get in on free BCP.
“Women currently pay between $15 and $50 a month in co-pays for birth control pills — which equals $180 to $600 a year!”
So what? I may think I need DirecTV for entertainment just as much as these women and their partners need to be banged. So shouldn't the government pay my DirecTV bill?
Birth control always has been free. Don’t do it!
Go to any local health department and they will be happy to give you all the free condoms you want. Let’s be realistic - women who don’t have health insurance or thousands of dollars still get pregnant and have babies and taxpayers will continue paying for them. I rather pay for birth control.
I am all for it. This is one example of taxpayers money well spent. An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure.
I had my first child late last year. The total statement from the hospital was about $12,000 and I had a very easy, healthy pregnancy. I had to laugh that they charged us $700/night for my son’s ‘room stay.’ I guess that little plastic rolling cart is pricey! :)
Thankfully we have insurance, but still had to pay some bills. But the price is staggering if you are uninsured. A $3 condom or $20 birth control pills per month sure is a lot cheaper.
This would even work better. Free vasectomies or tubes tied with the promise that everyone who gets one will get a check for $100 a month for life.
I completely agree. Why is childbirth so expensive anyway? And to think my grandmother gave birth to eight children at home!
Then maybe you should re-read the article, especially this paragraph:
“We intuitively think that eliminating the co-pay for birth control will help alleviate the rate of unintended pregnancies, but this may not be so,” says Dr. David Friedman, assistant clinical professor of gynecology at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. “If the abortion rate reflects the rate of unintended pregnancy, then populations with free birth control, like those on Medicaid, should have lower abortion rates. But the opposite is true. Although the Medicaid population made up only 18.92 percent of New Yorkers in 2009, they had 39.75 percent of abortions. [My addition: and over 70% of the out-of-wedlock childbearing.] This lends pause to the notion that eliminating co-pays will have any constructive effect on preventing unwanted pregnancies.”
Oh.
Now, why would that be?
(Think, think, think.)
The problem seems to be this:
Your idea that contraception reduces unintended pregnancies is a perfectly reasonable inference from pharmacological evidence, but not a reasonable inference from societal evidence. Your conclusion is obvious, common-sensical, and factually incorrect.
This is because contraception has two principal results, one intended and one unintended.
A contraceptive reduces the odds of any particular act of intercourse resulting in pregrancy.
But the easy availability of contraceptives spawns a mentality which holds that intercourse, once intended for procreation and for pleasure, is now intended for pleasure tout court.
The first (intended) consequence has resulted in fewer births per x number of acts of intercourse, albeit with a 3% - 30% typical-use failure rate (Link, an inbteresting one) ---an offensive term, but its meaning is "pregnancy rate." The second (unintended) consequence has been a massive increase in the frequency of intercourse between people who are not married to each other, hardly even like each other, are not building a life together, and/or, even if married, have no intention of being co-reesponsible for a baby.
Altogether, 53% of unplanned pregnancies occur to women who are using contraceptives (that includes the Pill, condoms, jellies, jams, and sprays), but nearly 100% of these women are surprised, affronted, feel angry, betrayed, etc. by the now-shocking fact that sex led to pregnancy.
This number is greater than the number of men who feel that way, because increasingly, men don't think about it at all. ("Pregnancy? Well, whatever. That's her problem.")
This leads to promiscuity, divorces, abortion, skyrocketing STD's (HPV now infecting one in four sexually active Americans), sub-baboon levels of sexual responsibility, mutual contempt between men and women, mutual contempt between parents and children, etc.
Contraceptives were the paraphernalia of Ye Olde Sexual Revolution. That's old news. That happened 50 years ago. What's happened since --- the 50 million American abortions and the 30% American illegitimacy rate (in the most contraceptive - subsidized communities, 70% illegitimacy) is the result.
(Just waiting for the typical liberal response: It didn't work? Well, that's because we didn't do it enough! Do it earlier! Easier! Faster! Door-to-door! Coast-to-coast! Make it mandatory! Above all, let's throw more money at it...)
Well I see it this way...women of child berating age will find it much harder to find a job as soon as the insurance company informs employers it will cost them more by employing them because of this.We will soon see companions only hire women who are over 40 and not much chance they will need this for too many more years.
Well I see it this way...women of child bearing age will find it much harder to find a job as soon as the insurance company informs employers it will cost them more by employing them because of this.We will soon see companions only hire women who are over 40 and not much chance they will need this for too many more years.
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