Justification for the mandate: Working women can spend up to $600 a year on contraceptives. These mandates will save them a nice chunk of money.
Why that's nonsense: Money is completely fungible and no other insurance was targeted.
Lots of people have $500 or higher deductibles on their auto collision insurance. Some don't cover their cars for collision at all*. A working woman who gets into a fender bender will spend money she had earmarked for diaphragms on replacing her bumper. If she doesn't have the extended warranty on her laptop and the thing dies, there's another drain on her contraceptives budget. How about insurance for her TV? The deductible on her renter's insurance?
$600 is a rounding error in health insurance where procedures you really want covered run into the tens of thousands of dollars. If you quizzed women across the country, I doubt they could tell you which $600 items were and were not covered in their existing insurance.
The selection of contraceptives was not random. It was done, as Tim pointed out, by Kathleen Sibelius, a (Vichy) Catholic. She knew what she was doing. She was trying to crush a rival to the State's supremacy in all things.
* - For example, my rust-eaten, 1984 Datsun pickup has no collision coverage.
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You know, I got curious the other day about how much it would cost to get the Pill out-of-pocket. Walmart has a couple of generic formulations on there $4/month list. And, if you buy a 90 day supply (at $10 a pop), you could have birth control for something like $40/year.
That's a long-standing gripe of mine: people thinking that "insurance" should cover perfectly predictable day-to-day expenses.
That's not insurance. That's a subscription to a service.
Health insurance should be exactly that: insurance against expensive, catastrophic occurrences that one wouldn't be able to budget for or cover out-of-pocket.
A case could be made for a separate "health service", where you would plunk down an annual fee in exchange for regular checkups, immunizations, and other routine care. But running it as "insurance" just adds all the various cost inefficiencies of having an insurance running their hands through the money as it travels from you to the doctor or pharmacy.
For example, my rust-eaten, 1984 Datsun pickup has no collision coverage.
Or my 82 Buick Regal... or 1991 minivan... etc. My family and I feel your pain, man.
Definitely standing with the bishops on this one.
I was asked to let you know that Niall from "It's All Straw" is not dead... but his computer needs to be resurrected. He will return "in the fullness of time." :-)
Keep the faith, sir.
Tim, you make a great point. When these kinds of topics come up, it's easy to get sucked into the emotional component of the issue and ignore the broader question - why is insurance covering what is, in effect, as Ivyan says, aspirin?
That's what convinced me that this is enforced statist, secular, religious orthodoxy.
Paper Smyth, thanks for the comment and the news! I was hoping our Holy Scribe was OK.
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