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.
Well said. Even the "conservatives" here are prone to belief in the superficial.
1. If not for birth control, there would be FAR more abortions + illegimates.
2. IMHO, the illegitmacy rate is primarily a function of the Welfare state. If people (especially women) had to raise children sans Public Assistance, they would be a lot more careful.
3. I will grant that people who are stupid & irresponsible anyway will get knocked up regardless of the availability of birth control.
4. There is nothing wrong responsible people who use birth control. If you are equating birth control with abortion, go peddle your papers somethere else.
Lovely, eh?
Plus, there's this #18 (Really, give it a click.)(Possibly of special interest to you.)
Not in the real world. Factual documentation is needed here.
"2. IMHO, the illegitmacy rate is primarily a function of the Welfare state. If people (especially women) had to raise children sans Public Assistance, they would be a lot more careful."
It's related, but not unifactorally. The illegitimacy rate among the middle-class and affluent isn't related to Welfare, but to the notional and practical split between sexuality and matrimony.
Just one snap-shot. Some 45 years ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted the "pathology of the Negro family" in which out-of-wedlock childbearing was, among Black people, a shocking one out of five. Now it's, for Whites, 1:5, for Hispanics 2:5, for Blacks over 2:3.
The number of White illegitimate children today, NOT on Welfare, is greater by an order of magnitude than the number of illegitimate children of any race on Welfare in 1965.
"3. I will grant that people who are stupid & irresponsible anyway will get knocked up regardless of the availability of birth control."
True. I could rephrase it: "People who are morally clueless will get pregnant or impregnate others without adequate provision for the child, regardless of the proven correlation between intercourse and pregnancy."
"4. There is nothing wrong responsible people who use birth control. If you are equating birth control with abortion, go peddle your papers somethere else."
If you will re-read what I wrote, you will see I did not equate contraception with abortion. What I did imply --- and I hope, more than imply--- is that contraception attenuates what used to be a robust connection between sex and lifelong mutual procreative responsibility. This has consequences.
Here's one that's readily demonstrable: historically, every expansion of contraceptive availability is followed by an increase in the overall incidence of unintended pregnancy.
There's an even stronger correlation between contraceptive availability and pandemic STD's.
If you want to argue otherwise, I am interested in the numbers.
great post!!!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2762671/posts?page=18#18
also, the pregnancies that others above want to pay to avoid, are going to happen anyway.
welfare moms, etc.
and if they can’t avoid pregnancy with free condoms,
i doubt the rate is much better with pills.
this simply makes conservatives and christians pay for the life-style choices of others.
if my wife and i wanted to avoid pregnancy, i’d be happy to take responsibility and pay $20 a month MYSELF.
forcing me to pay for others is wrong, immoral,
AND as Mrs. Don-o points out, it doesn’t work!
PLUS the unintended consequences. like if people used condoms instead of pills, it would lower the STD rate !!!
(including AIDS, which costs a lot more than the few pregancies the FREE pills would prevent)
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.
///
THAT has potential.
if someone wants birth control for FREE, forceably paid for by hard working taxpayers, then it should be PERMANENT !
great point, about this costing more for female employees.
so this hurts female workers who DON’T use pills, doubly.
and, as someone above pointed out, poor people already get pills for free.
so, exactly WHO benefits here?
only people -ABOVE- the poverty line,
who can afford to pay the $20 a month themselves!
instead, we add another 10 or 20 BILLION
- EACH YEAR -
to a bloated government that is already going bankrupt.
...well, we can always cut the pay of the military,
to make up for this extra 20 billion,
right?
our CHILDREN are in debt 14 trillion - $92,000 each !!!
...the picture worth 10,000 words here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2759341/posts?page=2#2
to balance the budget, we need to STOP mandates like this, not add new ones!
Do you think that annihilating the links between sex, marriage, and fertility could possibly have a wider impact on the integrity of families and society? Positive? Negative? Any thoughts on that, Elendur? Tax-chick? Little jeremiah??
Sterility as a plausible lifestyle for the U.S. "welfare class" (all sex, no bonds, no kids-- and an attractive subsidy to make it all more fun!) strongly resembles the lifestyle of the U.S. "college-University-class", right now. And thus it feeds directly into the trend of emptiness, bondlessless, sterility for all.
This does nothing to regenerate the strength and dignity of any individual person, any man or woman, any soul --- let alone the strength and vitality of any social relation: marriage, family, city or countryside, culture, nation or civilization.
The almost complete de-linking of sex, marriage and fertility has already resulted in the probably-irreversible demographic death sentence which Europe now faces. The same would be true of the USA, if you factored out immigration, and the first-generation descendants of immigrants. No known society has ever survived a de-linking of sex, marriage and fertility as comprehensive as our own.
Potential? No. It’s the exact negation of potential.
It’s trying to build a society on a kind of idiot arithmetic, consisting solely of subtraction.
Pure, unadulterated Marxism, wouldn’t you say, savagesusie? What we imagine are individual human beings, created to achieve community with one another and their Creator, are simply economic units, either a cost or a benefit to the Elite One who would, if he could, wipe out their humanity by swishing with his Ish Wish Dish.
It is, indeed, the perfect solipsism of the modern center-of-my-own-universe: just enough of me, way too much of that terribly tiresome Everyone Else.
It is Marxist to the core, and, because of that, it is pure evil.
Ultimately, birth control is to destroy marriage. It is to make the sex act a commodity and meaningless and remove it from the most incredible godlike act that human beings can do on earth—create another human life...another human being with your own genetic material combined with someone you should love. Children connect unrelated families together which in earlier times led to a better chance of survival and people who care about their neighbors and community and private property. Marriage and family create respect, loyalty, security, self-reliance and no need for government.
That is why the Marxists destroyed the marriage contract in the sixties—to destroy relationships. It is what Marxism—welfare system and Marxist elites did to England ( Theodore Dalrymple). Most children who do not have biological parent families, are destroyed. They are gang members, drug addicts, suicide victims, prisoners, prostitutes, etc.....dredges of society which tear it down. Unmarried sex destroys relationships and devotion, security and financial wealth. It creates jealousy, hate, dysfunction, and carelessness.
It divides....the MO of Marxism.
Marxists hate family—take the glue out of marriage—the sex act—and marriages crumble. Birth control is used to promote promiscuity in young girls and make them (and boys) think there is no consequence to the sex act. This adds to the meaningless of life they already created with killing off the concept of God in public school curricula.
Condition women to think their bodies are just designed for recreation—to be used—and what is worse—abortion....teach women to kill their own offspring.
There is no other concept that will destroy family and cultures quicker than abortion-—that killing of one’s own creation—an innocent baby. It is a crime against her body—against Natural Law—and a society which can teach women to disregard her very nature—is a society that is capable of destroying all human beings.
Attitudes of birth control/abortion/divorce/single parenting/homosexuality/ are denying what works to create healthy cultures. If you don’t have emotionally healthy children which has been proven to be the family unit... you will get chaos. Sure, some children are survivors, but many can’t. You have to have emotional support from someone in society—biology is the surest bet. Kids need both a man and a woman to model behavior and relationships—to get a healthy perspective on all people in the world—not just half.
Communist feminist movement also basically handed over our children to strangers to abuse and raise. Encouraging women to abandon their children at the ages where they should be learning trust, self-esteem, and feel secure. The stress in daycares has been documented...IQ also suffers under stress which all children in daycares experience.
Women, prior to the 70’s, thought it was EVIL to allow others who never had a biological interest in their children, to raise them in those crucial formative years which provide their worldview and attitudes. No female primates will let strangers touch their offspring for years.
Marxist indoctrination and the use of the word “preschool” fooled women along with the “parent” magazines, which put in “quality” time over quantity—daycares were “good”. No Einstein, Wright Bros, Edison, Lincoln, Franklin were separated from their parents in their first 7 years of life unless in case of death. Individualism and initiative takes a secure childhood which means total trust which is formed by no separation from loving parents in first 7 years. Just close relatives—for short periods.
The Marxists understood Piaget/Erikson/Freud and so they promoted that which would scar children for life—create lower self-esteem, lower IQ, create insecurity and attachment disorders—those that lead to addictions, suicides, dysfunction, and the incapacity to form long relationships.
Everything Marxist do is try to destroy all relationships...create hatred and resentment for class, race, parents, children but especially for Christianity—because their Theology promotes that which creates secure, happy, self-sufficient families. (except those new age godless “christian” ones with lesbian “pasters”)
Thank you - I knew you would tie it all together!
I just read Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom” again, and although most of the articles are from the 1990s, they are perfectly up-to-date except for the names of a few sports and pop-music figures. Treating people as economic quanta destroys their humanity, in many cases.
It’s painful that self-described conservatives buy into this. I identify more and more with the Mexicans and Central Americans with whom I attend church. Hermano Vicente and Hermano Roberto may have been gang members once, but now they have wives and small businesses and ten children between them (counting the one Hermana Silvia is about to have, her 5th son, bless her heart), and they’re at church twice a week plus Bible studies and home prayer meetings.
Several of the men in our congregation have the body type typical of extreme malnutrition in childhood and adolescence, just like famine survivors from North Korea. However, their children are healthy and as big as mine, and they’re some of my best students in Sunday School, none of this, “Uh, who are the Apostles? What are the four Gospels?” stuff.
There are still a lot of beautiful families out there....even after 24/7 indoctrination into nihilism. It gives me hope for the future!
Thanks for the ping! I had planned to read this and ping it out but it will have to wait until tomorrow, unless I can manage to read it tonight.
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Please Read This One!! Especially the comments by Mrs. Don-o, Tax Chick and savagesusie. I can't add anything to improve the discussion already going on, I'll just add this:
In Huxley's "Brave New World" contraception was mandatory, constant changing of sex partners was mentally healthy and staying with one person too long was considred evil and sick, and the words "Mother" and "Father" were the dirtiest of dirty words. Think about it...
Great! We all get to pay for free IUDs for Snookie, Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashian sisters.
That is very encouraging and beautiful.
Thanks for this. You are seeing and saying such valuable things. Bless you up one side and down the other, with a big dab right in the middle.
Thank you. We live in a very imperfect world, but if we don’t see others as human beings with the full potential we have ourselves, then we’re no more *acting* as human beings than the underclass so many right-wingers want to “spay and neuter.” Either we’re all fully human, or none of us is.
And what is the contention, so often posted, that nothing can be done about the welfare system but the same “learned helplessness” that keeps Theodore Dalrymple’s patients from taking any control of their lives? It’s just another way of saying that nobody is an active agent, “the forces” are too big for anyone to affect ... or in other words, Marxism.
Thank you very much, and the same to you! I hope it’s a lovely day where you are. 70s and overcast here, but I have to take Francisco out to look for reptiles anyway. We don’t find them, but it’s important to look.
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