US Politics: 1950's edition

[Guest Raidne]

To state this again - there is NO ISSUE of people NOT providing their own contraception. This is about whether the school's only health care plan - which students pay for - should cover contraception, or if students should have to both pay for the health care plan and STILL not have contraception coverage.

[Shryke]

I just read Fluke's testimony and I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.

Sounds to me like Fluke is asking that the college's health care plan, which offers prescription coverage, cover prescription contraception. This is NOT a free plan. Students pay for it. They also pay a co-pay for prescriptions. Nobody's asking anyone to give them anything, and Fluke never ONCE mentioned her own sex life.

I can't square this with your statement above. I want my health care plan that I pay for to cover birth control too.

ETA: Zabz, Viagra, et al are explicitly not covered under Georgetown's prescription policy as well.

The whole argument seems predicated on this idea that your health plan is a gift from your employer or something, rather then a part of your compensation package along with your salary/wage and all that other stuff.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

And the fact that certain brands of the pill are available to her for $9/month there is irrelevant. Let's say she was a law student at Fordham (another Catholic institution that has an arguably even MORE overprice law program than Georgetown's). Her best bet is to take 2 busses up to the Target on 114th St. That's cross town (Fordham Law is at Lincoln Center), then approximately 50 blocks uptown. And I'm guessing the Manhattan Target has an exemption from the program (if it doesn't, kudos to them, but Manhattan is usually in the fine print for this sort of thing). (Heck, when I was at NYU, admittedly 10 years ago, I could get birth control for $15/month from Student Health. There was no Target at all at the time, but $6 would not have made the trip WAAAAAYYYYY up town worth it (it would have cost at then current prices $4 to get there an back, so really, not worth it when you factor in the time drain)). Better spokesman for the class? Maybe. Doesn't change the issue.

BTW, I have some sympathy for a private religious university wanting some say over this sort of thing. I think they are WRONG, misguided and dumb, and should probably have to give up at least some federal funding, but that's their choice. I analogize to law schools that in the 1990s and early aughts gave up federal funding rather than letting JAG recruiters on campus in protest of don't ask don't tell. They finally caved when the feds said they'd pull funding to other parts of the universities.

NONE of that answers whether the 3 day viscious attack on her personal morals was warranted and whether Rush is a sexist pig (it wasn't, and he is).

Same position on Viagra (Cialis and similar) I assume?

Absolutely. Nobody should have the legal power to force someone else to pay for someone else's costs of recreational sex. Of course, you have side issue of it possibly being an ADA violation, since you could argue that impotence is a "mental or physical impairment" that substantially limits someone in the major life activity of reproduction.

[MinDonner]

...and diabetic treatments (it's just eating sugary junk food for fun!) and sports injuries (your recreation is at your own expense!) and all the other things that we've been over and over and over?

"Fucking for fun", whatever Catholic institutions may think, is not some special rare activity, and contraception is not some special exceptional type of medication for sluts only. It's a normal part of human activity and there should be no reason to treat it as some speshul goddamn case. Even the comparison with condoms is misguided (but men have to buy them!), cos, well, it's not like the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy is something that only benefits women.

eta: holy crap, this was @Zabz, and about 8 posts landed in the half a minute it took me to write it...

[Shryke]

I'll just leave this here:

During his first US Senate campaign, Rick Santorum warned voters of a growing menace that was "breeding more criminals" and threatened to destroy America from within: single mothers.

Santorum, who as a second-term congressman described his views as "moderate," made single mothers a focal point of his welfare policy. He introduced legislation that would have required single mothers who had been on welfare for more than two years to work at least 35 hours a week in order to receive benefits. They would also be denied benefits if they could not identify their child's father. "If they don't give the name, they don't get any welfare," Santorum told the Inquirer. Under his plan, which did not pass Congress, unwed teen mothers would not be eligible for welfare at all.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/santorum-single-mothers-are-breeding-more-criminals

[awesome possum]

To state this again - there is NO ISSUE of people NOT providing their own contraception. This is about whether the school's only health care plan - which students pay for - should cover contraception, or if students should have to both pay for the health care plan and STILL not have contraception coverage.

I pointed this out almost immediately, but FLoW and Republicans seem to have forgotten how insurance works. That you pay for insurance and even then, unless you have freaking awesome insurance, you have a co-pay for most services and most prescriptions.

Unless you're poor and on some form of government insurance. In which case, this is about poor sluts wanting FLoW to pay for them to be poor sluts! Which is strange, because you'd think a benefit that actively prevents poor people from procreating would be exactly down the GOP's alley.

And it would be, if that damn dirty Obama hadn't gotten to it first!

[Guest Raidne]

Absolutely. Nobody should have the legal power to force someone else to pay for someone else's costs of recreational sex.

Actually, nobody's getting the morning after pill covered after a rape under Georgetown's plan either.

Assuming you aren't going to defend some idea of recreational rape, maybe we can let this whole "recreational sex" thing go now.

Furthermore, although Georgetown's policy arguably covers birth control if used for other purposes, they are in practice loathe to approve requests - as happened to Fluke's friend - such that in practice there is no such coverage.

Oral contraception is not a condom. It involves a woman's entire reproductive system in complex ways, and is used for a number of different purposes, one of which is insurance against pregnancy from sex that is planned or otherwise, and possibly not even wanted.

ETA: Yeah AP, every time I almost decide that FLOW is a reasonably thoughtful person, he turns around and utterly upends the facts on an issue dealing with women - and it's always some issue having to do with women and how they dress or conduct their sex lives, etc. - and tries to pass it off as some entitlement issue, when, of course, the people in question aren't asking for anything more than he already gets and are paying for the services at issue. I can only conclude that FLOW has serious, serious issues with women - particularly of the liberal, legal activist variety, and I'll bet you whatever you want that it all goes back to some particular woman or group of women that he had a problem with in law school.

[Shryke]

It involves a woman's entire reproductive system in complex ways, and is used for a number of different purposes, one of which is insurance against pregnancy from sex that is planned or otherwise, and possibly not even wanted.

And how: https://p.twimg.com/AnGeHrHCAAAg7P1.png:large

ETA: Yeah AP, every time I almost decide that FLOW is a reasonably thoughtful person, he turns around and utterly upends the facts on an issue dealing with women - and it's always some issue having to do with women and how they dress or conduct their sex lives, etc. - and tries to pass it off as some entitlement issue, when, of course, the people in question aren't asking for anything more than he already gets and are paying for the services at issue. I can only conclude that FLOW has serious, serious issues with women - particularly of the liberal, legal activist variety, and I'll bet you whatever you want that it all goes back to some particular woman or group of women that he had a problem with in law school.

So he's like Grover Norquist, except replace the ice cream with like .. sex?

[Mlle. Zabzie]

Min - I agree, the policy is stupid and misguided and dumb (and I have more or less not-so-nice things to say about the Catholic Church's attitudes towards sex in general and women and sex in particular).

All that said, I have to square the following in my mind:

1. We do not have a single payer system. For employees, you participate in your employer's plan. For students, you participate in your school's plan. The person who is obtaining the group coverage (in this case Georgetown) negotiates the terms and gets you a better plan than you would get yourself. You pay all (or part) of the premium, as so negotiated (I happen to pay 100% of my health insurance by the by. It's deliciously expensive).

2. A private school/employer, while subject to some limitations as to what the plan must and must not cover, has a lot of latitude to decide what is covered (and in most cases, it's better than what you'd get from the government - as I've mentioned in other threads, the plan for federal employees, e.g., does not cover abortion, my plan from a private employer does).

3. Georgetown is a Catholic University. They don't hide it, they are pretty up front about it. You walk through a Jesuit cemetary pretty much every day on campus (not the law school campus, but the regular campus). Mostly for worse, the Catholic Church is pretty open about not supporting contraception. I don't see why it is then required to negotiate a plan that includes coverage for contraception.

4. I am 100% ok with that meaning that if federal policy is that all plans must cover contraception, the feds can then with draw 100% of their funding (including for research etc.) from an institution not offering birth control as a price. I think my analogy to the JAG controversy still stands to the point.

Make sense?

[DayLung]

Well, I thought that I did answer it, but I'll try it again. First, as a political matter, it is perfectly appropriate to use that one woman as an example if she chooses to testify. Second, she's not some shrinking violet or innocent yanked from the woodwork. She's on record as having said she investigated the policy before deciding to attend, and has been lobbying for it for awhile. She was president of the school's reproductive rights advocacy group, and wanted this controversy from the moment (and even before) she enrolled. But on to the contraceptives.

I'll reiterate the quote from the article I linked above if my position is not clear, and yes, it is about the money.

Ms. Fluke's crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It's nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown's refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself.

Spin it however you want, but that is the reality. I personally do not give two shits who has sex with whom, and I'm not some uptight prick who only had sex with one woman in my life and married her, etc. I've bought condoms myself, I've dated women who've bought their own birth control, and for a couple of long-time girfriends, I chipped in for the cost. But that was our business and responsibility, not anyone else's. Maybe we just thought that way because we weren't spoiled little entitlement brats.

The mindset that I have the right to demand that others pay for what my girlfriend and I chose to do is honestly something alien to me. That opinion has nothing to do with morality, but strikes me as akin to asking society to pick up my bar tab or movie ticket. We are talking recreational sex. There is nothing grand or noble involved, no matter how much you may try to make it so. It's fucking for fun, so why shouldn't you pay whatever costs are ancillary to your chosen recreational activity? Cripe, don't you people have any fucking personal pride at all?

Now, if an insurance company wants to cover that, and an employer wants to buy that insurance, I could care less. They should be free to do that, or not to do that, for whatever reasons matter to them. And if that employer's reason happens to be that they don't think fucking for free is good, then who are you to complain? You have no right to them subsidizing your fucking in the first place, so their reasons for denying it shouldn't matter.

Does that make my position clear?

I swear, the fucking problem with a good segment of humanity right now is that they have a terminal case of "I want it, and someone has to give it to me. Just because I want it."

So, I was reading this post and thought I could add some fun facts. One thing Ms. Fluke brought up in testimony was that a friend of hers had ovarian cysts (a medical condition) that were being treated with birth control pills. This friend did not want the pill to have "recreational sex" but to treat her condition, these pills were more expensive than usual and she couldn't end up affording them so she stopped. The cyst got bad enough that they had to remove her ovary. So.... maybe this really isn't all about people paying people to have consequence free sex, but at least partly about people not getting treatment for medical conditions they have.

[The Anti-Targ]

Hmmmm, how does the prospect of infants starving to death gel with the anti-abortion thing?

[Guest Raidne]

So, I was reading this post and thought I could add some fun facts. One thing Ms. Fluke brought up in testimony was that a friend of hers had ovarian cysts (a medical condition) that were being treated with birth control pills. This friend did not want the pill to have "recreational sex" but to treat her condition, these pills were more expensive than usual and she couldn't end up affording them so she stopped. The cyst got bad enough that they had to remove her ovary. So.... maybe this really isn't all about people paying people to have consequence free sex, but at least partly about people not getting treatment for medical conditions they have.

Yeah, we've been through that. Oral contraception taken for other purposes is ostensibly covered under Georgetown's policy, but you have to get a formal exception and that process appears to be pretty difficult if not impossible based on the limited anecdotal evidence that we have. Having said that, it's unfortunate that anyone has to undertake any special approval process to get the coverage that they pay for.

[Maithanet]

Furthermore, although Georgetown's policy arguably covers birth control if used for other purposes, they are in practice loathe to approve requests - as happened to Fluke's friend - such that in practice there is no such coverage.

I would like to provide a relevant anecdote here. My girlfriend went to Georgetown for undergrad because it was by far the best school she got accepted to, in spite of the fact that she is not catholic. She received some federal aid and took out some loans and worked as much as she could while she was in school to keep those loans from getting out of hand. And she was paying for the student insurance, but she knew that she couldn't get the pill from the Georgetown doctors, because they wouldn't believe you even if you said you needed it for other medical reasons. While it may not seem like that big a burden to have to go to some other doctor to get a prescription for birth control pills, it is an added expense and hassle that you really don't need when you're trying all you can to avoid further debt. And why should it be ok for Georgetown doctors to deny prescriptions to women (who aren't even Catholic!) just because they presume the women want it for birth control? Is that drug-seeking behavior, like junkies coming in for Dilaudid?

[Jon Sprunk]

No he's not. And second, what difference does that make anyway? As long as you don't have as big an audience as Limbaugh, you shouldn't be held accountable for offensive remarks? Again, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee had zero problem appearing on Maher's show, and I don't think she makes a lot of apolitical appearances.

It's a complete double standard.

Also regular guests on the Bill Maher show: Ann Coulter, Michael Steele, and a bunch of republican congresspersons. But I guess they're all a bunch of leftist sexists, too.

There is no liberal media conspiracy. The public reacts to things that surprise/ae/appall them. If republicans/conservatives have a problem with how they are treated by the public, then maybe instead of cooking up wild defenses, they should look in the mirror and try to understand what about their views is so offensive.

Or Limbaugh and his dittoheads could keep on vomitting up lame excuses and half-apologies.

[The Anti-Targ]

Isn't using fiscally conservative / libertarian argumentation to defend / uphold a morally conservative health policy somewhat disingenuous?

Also there's an easy answer to contraception, and to obtaining the pill for medical reasons: turn gay.

Liberal university intellectuals are all gay anyway aren't they?

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

I think that the notion that its just recreational sex removes too much of the complexity here, flow.

For instance, it is monetarily good policy to encourage planned parenthood and thus to prevent unwanted pregnancies. It is better to prevent abortions taking place. It is cheaper to not have to rely on the morning after pill.

This makes supporting contraception akin to supporting preventative medicine.

Ultimately I agree that outside of everything else, an individual should provide their own contraception if they are reasonably able to do so. But that ignores too much else.

I can accept the premise of that reasoning as being less objectionable than the "you have to cover my birth control" claim of it being an individual right. But while I see that reasoning being advanced, I think it isn't the true motivation of a great many supporters of that policy.

If you're going to make that argument, then the first key piece of data you'd need is "how many people have unwanted pregnancies that occurred because they could not afford the pill.". I don't think I've ever seen anyone here even ask that question. Data about unplanned pregnancies doesn't answer the question, because there are plenty of reasons other than "I couldn't afford the pill" that could cause an unplanned pregnancy.

You'd also need two other pieces of data depending upon the exact argument you were making. Regarding the "no copay version", you'd have to know the total amount collected from people who had to pay a copay. You'd then have to compare that total amount of money to the cost of the pregnancies caused by an inability to pay the copay to figure out if you actually saved anything. And again, I haven't seen anyone here even attempt such an analysis, or even ask about it. That's odd if that really is the rationale for that policy.

And regarding the "coverage" issue, you'd again have to look at the total spent out of pocket by people who bought their birth control, versus the number of pregnancies due to an inability to afford birth control that wasn't covered. Again, no such inquiry or analysis here at all.

I think what gets over looked in the "birth control is cheaper than pregnancy" argument is that the vast majority of women who want to use birth control will find a way to pay for it anyway.

[Atreides]

And for some lighter conversation: Mitt Romney's wife doesn't consider herself wealthy. Despite having horses in every port. If she doesn't consider herself wealthy, who is? John Kerry looks really in touch with the average American in comparison to the Romneys.

[TrueMetis]

And for some lighter conversation: Mitt Romney's wife doesn't consider herself wealthy. Despite having horses in every port. If she doesn't consider herself wealthy, who is? John Kerry looks really in touch with the average American in comparison to the Romneys.

6 things rich people need to stop saying.

[Atreides]

I'd seen that cracked article a few days ago, and it was spot on.

[Guest Raidne]

...the vast majority of women who want to use birth control will find a way to pay for it anyway.

Again, what on earth on you talking about? The vast majority of people who need chemotherapy will find a way to pay for it anyway. Does that somehow mean that it's okay for their health insurance policy to refuse to cover it? There are 10 categories of essential health benefits under the ACA - all of them must be covered to participate in the exchanges. Prescriptions are one of those categories. Furthermore, certain preventative health services identified by the United States Preventive Services Task Force have no cost-sharing - contraception is a preventative health service for the reasons Kalbear discussed above.

Basically FLOW, it sounds like your problem here is with the idea that birth control is an "essential health benefit." If you want to argue that contraception shouldn't be an expected benefit of a health care plan, than say so. I've never had one that didn't cover it, but if you think that's unusual, let's hear it.

By the way, regarding the "cost of contraception" argument - it's really not hard to find data on this:

Covering contraception is cost neutral since it saves money by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception saved employees $97 per year, per employee.

http://www.whitehous...us-institutions