9/11, Pearl Harbor, and Contraception Coverage

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According to Congressman Mike Kelly, these are three events that should live in infamy. You see, today is Aug 1st, which is the day that the mandate that insurers provide coverage for contraception goes into effect. His full quote from his press conference on Capitol Hill:

"I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that's Pearl Harbor day. The other is September 11th, and that's the day of the terrorist attack. I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."

Seriously? I still don't get the argument. Even if you are personally opposed to contraception, how are your religious rights being violated by allowing others within your company to have access to them. And comparing this to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Hyperbole, thy name is Mike Kelly.

Link

 

Linking Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to opposing/approving contraception is worlds of far-fetched!

 

"This is a right that every American should be outraged, outraged about what this administration and Secretary Sibelius has set forth here on August the 1st," New York Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R) said at the same press conference as Kelly. "And as Mike said, August the 1st is a day that we as American will look at as the largest assault on our First Amendment rights."

If that is the largest assualt we have to receive to our 1st Amendment rights in our lifetime, I am going to be a happy old man with no worries....

 

BTA,
of course it is hyperbole. Now, a lot of Americans are almost religiously opposed to taxation too. Grover Norquist has dedicated his life to a jihad against taxes. The Texas GOP platform for instance wants to see the Department of Education abolished. The people who subscribe to that view see their taxes being used to fund it anyway. The outrage. Pacifists hate that their taxes are being used to buy arms and fund wars and kill people. They are being forced to pay for that either way. They are all being forced to pay for something they are opposed to. Thinking of it, many people hate traffic lights and speed cameras, yet their taxes are used to fund them anyway! Tyranny, obviously.

Does it matter that there is an indirectly coercive element in this? Does freedom mean that laws, or everybody, do have to respect all whims and wishes of every nut- or oddball, allowing them to opt out? Hardly. Some objections, however fervently held simply don't matter after a constitutional democratic consensus has been reached. The people making a big stink about such 'coercion', and fume that their taxes are used to fund abortion (which, trifles, I know, in some instances is a necessary medical procedure) ought to know better, and probably do, but alas ...

Folks like Kelly have made a simple and conscious choice, and that is to not accept the the constitutional democratic consensus when they don't like the result. To them doing politics means never, ever giving in. We are witnessing the unravelling of the American consensus.

In part, take for instance David Barton, they simply make up a world of fiction in which for instance there is no separation of church and state*. Now that is historically utterly unsupported, but that doesn't bother the rubes to whom Barton is pandering, who hear the same nonsense from the pulpit every Sunday, and pay Barton for telling them what they want to hear. They, too, are opting out (of reality).

Spoiler

* ... and where evolution is "just a theory"

 

This is a government intrusion that should not be allowed. I say that without even caring that it involves contraception as it doesn't really matter what the coverage was for. For those who don't know this how health insurance works in the US.

1. The employer and the insurance company negotiate and come up with a contract that determines what will be covered and what the cost of the coverage will be.

2. The employer decides how much of the permium they are willing to pay and the remaining premium is paid by the employee. While there isn't a signed contract as in #1, there is an implied contract as the employee decides to accept the job using #2 as one of the deciding factors.

So now the government comes in and issues a mandate for coverage of X. A mandate is a wonderful thing as the government is inserting itself into a contract negotiated by two parties and forcing them to do something and not providing any money. In this case now the health insurance company is forced to provide a service that may or may not have been agreed to and therefore the price is increasing.

Now in all probability these costs will then also be passed down to the employees which means less money in their pockets. I guess you could call that a phantom tax on some people. Others that already had the coverage will probably have no change.

 

That's a great point. I have never worked for a company in my lifetime that didn't cover contraception. As soon as companies started paying for Viagra as healthcare, the pill followed shortly thereafter.

 

The problem is that in the US health coverage is linked with employment. If it was decoupled, as it is in most European countries, there would not be any "government intrusion" into what an employer has to cover and what not, because it isn't the employer's job to decide that in the first place. Alas, in the US it is, simply by merit of the legal form chosen, so any attempt to regulate health coverage "intrudes", inevitably, into the affairs of an employer.

That is not government nefariousness. This "government intrusion" is the inevitable consequence of the specific choice the US has made for the form of their national health coverage, coincidentally the most expensive in the world.

Choose a different form (the one of dreaded 'socialised medicine') and the problem will disappear.

 

I have a honest question - in most of the western world, is health care for profit? I mean, yes, doctors obviously make a lot of money, and every one who works at the hospital is paid, but is there a goal of making money thrown in on top of that? In the US, the hospitals want to make money, and so do the insurance companies, which, I would think, is a large reason why health care costs so much more here than in other nations.

And the cost really is outragous in most cases. On my recent vacation/family reunion, I spoke with a family member who is self-employed, and pays for healthcare out of pocket for himself, his wife, and his two kids. Annual cost: $30,000. He and his wife are in their 40s. The two daughers are 15 and 12. None of them have any health issues where they would require more care than what would be considered normal. How is $30,000 a justifiable price for that family?

And that case is not unusual. My employer pays half of my health insurance cost. The total cost of my plan is a whisker short of $15K annually, of which I pay $7.5K. And that's a group rate. And of course it doesn't pay for squat until you reach the family deductible of $2,000. The only year that I received more than I paid into the plan was the year my son was born.

There are only two groups of people who I am aware of that need a lot of healthcare in a typical year. 1.) the chronically ill, and 2.) the elderly. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap with those groups. But if you're over 65, you qualify for medicare.

 

And just how do YOU know your insurance pays for Viagra????

 

I know where you're going with that, but $30,000 would probably look pretty good in the event of catastrophic loss, which is typically enough to bankrupt all but the most wealthy (considering that a frigging MRI scan alone costs like $10,000 or something). Even a relatively minor surgery would probably cost well over $30,000 once all the elements were added up, so if Junior has to get his tonsils removed or what have you, the split probably becomes a winner. I guess that's the insurance game in a nutshell - you hedge your bets and play to lose.

 

Absolutely true - of all insurance, not just health insurance. You don't buy auto insurance with the hopes that you'll use it, and you definitely don't buy life insurance with the hope that you'll use it. I think that the distinction comes into play that everyone expects that they'll need some healthcare every year, just far less than what they are paying.

Which takes me back to the point of how many people are dipping their hands into the cookie jar here. The more people trying to make money invariably must drive up the cost.

 

Yeah, much like other gray area health care like dental. There's nothing really life-threatening about having bad teeth, but dentists still casually recommend and carry out hugely expensive procedures for the same reason, and people accept the treatment for the same reason. If doc said "Hey, little Jimmy needs braces so that his teeth aren't the slightest bit crooked down the line, and I'm gonna charge you $20,000 for them," I suspect fewer little Jimmies would have winning smiles as adults.

Also, I know it's popular to think of the free market as "evil to the COAR," but it does produce well-qualified persons to carry out these services. Would you rather have an extremely well-trained and educated person who can command a large salary treating yourself and little Susie, or some dude who only grudgingly entered the health care field for lack of a better alternative and who the hospital can get away with paying a comparatively small salary to because there's not a lot of competition due to the field not being lucrative? [Braces for joaquin's socialist utopia reply. ]

 

I have no problem with doctors being well compensated. My brother is a doctor, I saw how he worked his ass off, and borrowed out the whazoo to pay for his education. That's not, however, where I suspect the huge amount of cost comes from.

 

I find that interesting. What Euros consider a weakness I consider a strength. If all you have is the government plan and something isn't to your liking doesn't that mean you are "out of luck". Here, I have many options. Even at my current firm there are multiple "plans" that I can enroll in and I pick the one that is best for me and my family. If I thought all of my employer's plans were crappy I would look to change jobs to a company that offered better coverage.

 

That makes you dependent on your company of choice, which offers them opportunity for blackmail if they are inclined to do that, which, given the extent to which most people are economically dependent on heir employer, is a possibility. They may also just force you into mandatory arbitration in case of conflict, depriving you of your day in court if you feel you get the short end of the stick. What if you get laid off, the company goes bankrupt and you just don't find a job? **** happens.

In my country we leave the employer out of it. We leave them out of the details of your illnesses, too. If you have a work related accident the employer is left out of it too and the employers mutual insurance association takes over (mandatory membership for employers, with the idea in mind that suing your employer has consequences for the relationship between the parties; also, they are solvent even if the employer isn't). Iirc in the US the measure of choice for such matters is often litigation, IMO infinitely inferior as an approach.

 

You see though, I don't ever look at it that way. Ever since I became a father, I want top notch care in case anything goes wrong with my son. Therefore, I'm more likely to pay more out of pocket. When I was single on the other hand, and figured the only way I'd need a lot of care is if I got in a car accident, I went the cheap route. I took the plan with the $10K deductible that only cost me $55 a paycheck, figuring even if I got sick a lot, I'd never spent the amount of money I would on paying the deductible. Granted with a family, there is no such thing as a $55 per paycheck plan, but I think you get the concept.

And I think this is because people don't buy health care insurance the same way they make decisions of purchasing other products. If you want a new TV, you probably don't go to the store thinking you'll purchase the most expensive TV you can reasonably afford. You'll look at the different features, and decide which ones you really like, and which ones you're willing to compromise on. However, if you are the primary provider for your family, you do tend to pick the best coverage you can reasonably afford.

 

That is an entirely different issue. If you don't have a pot, it doesn't matter what someone tells you to put into it. This mandate only affects people with health insurance.

EDIT:- I also wanted to add that you used the term "healthcare" and that is the wrong term. The correct term is Health Insurance. Everyone is entitled to Health Care. If you have a heart attack and an ambulance rushes you to a hospital, they will treat you. If you are without health insurance everyone will bill you and many people file for bankruptcy to get out of the medical bills. This is a big bait and switch that confuses many people. Here in the US we do not have sick people dropping dead because they don't have access to healthcare.