Posted on 03/08/2012 6:10:31 AM PST by SeekAndFind
As a practicing internist who prescribes contraception for women on a regular basis, I don’t see the current flame-throwing debate as being about religious principles or promiscuity, and certainly it isn’t about the need to save health-care dollars, as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has so disingenuously asserted.
Instead, in the age of Obamacare, the new insurance mandate is simply about increasing government regulation. But if you regulate insurers, they will fight back. If something is mandated, something else will be cut. Premiums will rise, not fall. Health-care costs will rise, not fall. While I think it is absurd and inflammatory to suggest that a law student like Sandra Fluke who wants her contraception paid for is necessarily promiscuous, at the same time it is equally absurd to suggest that mandating this kind of coverage will somehow save money while supposedly not implying a moral choice of one health-care service over another.
What do you think insurers are going to do to cover the contraception mandate and still preserve a profit? Let me tell you: Even as they are raising premiums, at the same time they will deny other services such as MRIs and CT scans, or they will cut doctors’ fees. Wouldn’t it be ironic if your contraception was covered but you couldn’t ask your doctor to write the prescription for it because he could no longer afford to accept your insurance?
That’s the main problem with Obamacare in the first place. Its proponents talk about extending health care to more and more people when what they are actually doing is extending health insurance. Insurance that will ultimately buy you less while promising to get you more. Insurance that is easy to use, with no payments up front, provided that you can find a doctor to accept it. Insurance that will break the American bank as it extends entitlements in every direction except where we need them the most. Would you want flood insurance that covered every rainstorm but didn’t pay out when there is actually a flood? I wouldn’t. I want my health insurance to be there when I am actually sick. I want it to have the resources to cover the best and most effective technology.
Sandra Fluke is not necessarily sex-seeking just because she wants her birth control paid for by insurance. But is she considering that the money to pay for her contraception has to come from somewhere? Plus, from a medical perspective, she is not representative of the real contraceptive needs of America’s youth. She isn’t using the kind of birth control that I and other doctors would recommend. I would like to see more condom use among my single patients, because condoms do not only prevent pregnancy, they also cut down dramatically on the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. At a time when we have an epidemic of human papillomavirus, with the majority of young people turning HPV positive within five years of becoming sexually active, our national dialogue should be about condoms and the HPV vaccine, not about how women are going to pay for their birth-control pills.
Condoms are cheap. If the Obama administration feels strongly about contraception, I recommend that it have people handing condoms out on every street corner.
Instead of suggesting that we control health-care costs by making fewer babies, the way China does, or compelling us to pay premiums to cover services we may or may not believe in, Secretary Sebelius would be wise to consider that fewer insurance mandates would save us the kind of money we need to treat patients who are really sick. Isn’t that a more moral approach to health care than trying to stop our future patients from being born?
— Marc Siegel, MD, is a professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center and medical director of the center’s Doctor Radio.
This is what I've been saying all along: everyone who is paying (and is going to pay more) for actual medical treatments ought to be infuriated that they'll be charged for anti-health drugs and surgery.
In nearly every article I read about this subject, they insist on called Fluke a “Law school student”. Makes me doubt anything else the author says...............
Oh? What if "medically necessary" BC was already covered with doctor prescription... what does that leave you?
Isn’t she a law school student? If folks want to infer ‘student’ as a young person as the Ds have promoted, that doesn’t mean she still isn’t a law student. Many grad, law students are 30ish.
This is the really creepy part of what this doctor says: “At a time when we have an epidemic of human papillomavirus, with the majority of young people turning HPV positive within five years of becoming sexually active,”
I thought I read that she was teaching law students—maybe I read that wrong, but I don’t think so.
If you want to keep me out of your bedroom, then keep YOUR bedrooom activities out of MY wallet.
‘HPV is spread through sexual contact, meaning no penetration is needed to contract the virus. Even if condoms are worn during intercourse and worn correctly, there is no guarantee of 100 percent protection against HPV. This is due to a condom covering only the penis, leaving the rest of the genitals uncovered. During intercourse, these unprotected areas can come in contact with the vagina.’
The doctor should ALWAYS tell his patients that the best form of birth control is to abstain from sex, particularly casual sex with multiple partners. Women are always more susceptible to the consequences of sex than are men.
If you really want to participate in abstinence, get married and have children!
LOL!
-—— If you really want to participate in abstinence, get married and have children!-——
From now on, when people ridicule abstinence, I’m simply going to reply, “so promiscuity leads to happy, loving, lifetime relationships?”
They dont fight back against you, or the governmnt.
They fight back against their suppliers - paying less for procedures, covering fewer procedures that are less politically correct, etc.
He is saying they don’t fight in the open.
She enrolled as a student at Georgetown precisely to start agitating against the policy of the university NOT to pay for contraception for its students. She is a birth control activist, first, and foremost, but she must be taking some law classes as well.
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