As the full scope of the contraceptive services mandate has rolled out over the last few days, learning that it must be offered for free sent me into a great deal of thought about exactly what that means. My first thought was that nothing is ever free, it just means that the costs will be transferred to other people. I think the best idea is that the retail costs for contraceptive services be very inexpensive and it should be readily available to the point that it doesn’t need to be covered by health insurance. Of course, that’s not likely to happen (although it should happen). I wondered who would be affected by the transfer of costs. Can they afford it? Can I afford it? Then it occurred to me that the costs will be transferred to a group of people who are long overdue to share in the responsibility for paying for these services: Men!
Hurray! It been a long time coming.
I sympathize both with the desire of religious institutions to not subsidize contrary to their teachings and with the idea that if the government provides funds it can attach strings to those funds. I just don’t know why of all the things that can and should be free, the administration decided to pick a fight over something that is frankly optional. If we want to insist on free things when it comes to health care we should apply that idea to vaccines, diagnostic tests, and life-saving procedures.
and vaccines is a good one. They are mandated and expensive. I well know that after paying hundreds of dollars in out of pocket expenses for vaccines for my son a few years back. Offering those for free would be a welcomed and non-controversial move that would be applauded. It took me a while to accept the idea of free contraceptive services without addressing the actual costs. One of my first thoughts was how disturbing it was that now I will be helping to pay for these services so that someone who makes twice as much as me gets it free. Terrific! I think mandating the church to offer it free is a bit over the top too. It would have been a brilliant idea to mandate that there be a free insurance rider available to all women and attachable to all insurance plans. That would have been a better idea.
This wasn’t about picking a fight. The ACA allows for preventative care to be covered without co-pay or having to meet one’s deductible, including vaccines. It all comes from science showing that preventative care saves lives and dollars.
http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2010/07/preventive-services-list.html
Speaking of vaccines, what if a church was against vaccines (I suspect some are) and started a school that employed a janitor with a young family? The school offers the janitor insurance coverage for his family but does not want to have a place that covers vaccines. Should the plan have to? I wonder how this current controversy would change if it was a less prominent religion with a less “controversial” type of care (even though contraception is decidedly uncontroversial in the real world).
I haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing free immunizations yet. They are ridiculously expensive though, just the same. Do the hospitals just dispense them free or do the insurance companies pay for the full cost now. Do the vaccine producers give it away? I should research that. I think the reason why there is so much debate about this issue is that some feel that birth control is less of a basic need than immunizations or well visits etc. With health care costing $1,062. per month for a lousy plan from MA Health Connector, the biggest argument in this debate is the cost of health care itself, and whether offering free services without actually reducing the costs for services is the answer. I don’t think it is. It eases the burden somewhat, but the cost is absorbed into out of pocket expenses for other services. Can you believe how much health insurance costs: $1,062. a month with a $2,000-$4,000 deductible, plus 20% of a hospital stay with a maximum out of pocket expense of $5,000-$10,000. Geez, do they have any idea how much money that is? I thinks it’s great that preventative care is now free, but is it all that great to make sick people who are out of work and in a crisis pay such high out of pocket expenses. This whole health care reform package is not even close to what we need in this country.
It should be optional to provide birth control? You realize how large and overwhelming a change having a baby is, and how that can drastically effect everything from being able to work to being able to provide for the household to, yes, a woman’s health.
That should be optional? You really want us to live in a country where legally we force women to either remain virgins or have children?
I’ve got news for you. I don’t want to live in that country, and I don’t think very many other people do, too. 98% of Catholic women who have ever had sex use contraceptives. This is a 100% manufactured issue, from an institution that’s already admitted this has nothing to do with hospitals and everything to do with banning coverage contraceptives for everyone.
You are taking the words, spin and propaganda from bishops of an institution who are not accountable to their own membership — a membership that almost unanymously disagrees with them on this issue and is leaving the church in droves — and you are taking the words, spin and propaganda from the likes of people who have no moral authority over anyone else in this country, and who’s leadership is completely unapologetic over the serial rape of 10 year old boys.
Just this very day, Cardinal Egan of NY and parts of Connecticut has gone out and retracted his ten year old apology about the molestation scandals in his church and archdiocese. What did he have to say?
And these are the people who you think we should bow down to? I’d sooner jump off the Tobin bridge. A lot of these bishops, like Mr. Egan, belong in jail, not ordering the President of the United States — a man who signs away tens of billions of dollars to these affiliated institutions, keeping them alive — what to do.
You’ve lost sight of what this conversation is about. Take a few deep breaths and re grasp what we are debating.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/02/10/us/politics/10reuters-usa-contraceptives-factsheet.html?ref=reuters
This is a nobrainer –
– It makes the base happy
-Greatly increases the number of people who may find the ACA personally benfited them
– It leads to a healthier population
– It reduces health care costs.
Can you afford it? I’d be shocked if it added 1 cent to your monthly bill. That’s the nature of having large pools, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Stop making up asinine excuses with faux outrage.
And what if I’m a Christian Scientist and don’t believe in anything other than spiritual medicine. Should I be forced to pay for any of your medical treatment that conflicts with my faith as part of my premiums?
Of course I should. Because we don’t allow religions to control our politics.
When you want religions to have a veto over what medical treatments are covered in our health insurance plans, get ready for disaster.
Until then, there’s a simple solution. Tell your bishops that if they don’t want to medical coverage at their affiliated institutions that take government money to fund themselves, they should stop taking government money to fund themselves. Then they can do whatever they want.
If the same misguided deference had been shown to religious institutions during the civil rights era, interracial marriage would still be illegal.
It’s perfectly reasonable that men pay to provide contraceptive services for women. I hope Mr. Gingrich can afford it.
Free contraceptive services for all women is a totally new concept! Mandated coverage itself is a totally new concept. I’ve had insurance plans where no contraceptive services were covered at all, and they even tried to deny charges for a pap smear because it was billed in the same visit that birth control pills were prescribed. I had to fight with them about it have the doctor rebill it but still, it’s not as if Free Birth Control has been a basic right and now the church is trying to deny it to women. It’s true that this cost will be redistributed among everyone else. It’s also true that there is nothing in place to control the cost of this service, which is the biggest problem of all with a health insurance mandate, which is why I am not a big fan of the health care reform we’ve been dealt anyway. Seriously? 1 cent? I find that hardly unlikely. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the insurance industry approaches the government for a rather large rate increase with regard to this, and gets it. I think perhaps that there is so much outrage that the churches take so much government money maybe they should just stop doing it. I think that’s a great idea.
Mandating insurance coverage of contraceptive services and supplies would cost next to nothing and actually saves money in the long run.
Study after study shows that every dollar invested in contraception saves at least two or three times that in other health care expenditures related to births from unintended pregnancies.
(See e.g.: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/14/1/gpr140107.html )
On top of that there are additional savings to insurers when women are generally happier and therefore healthier since they are not dealing with an unintended pregnancy.
A 2010 Brookings Institution projected that expanding access to family planning services under Medicaid saves $4.26 for every $1 spent.
The federal government, the nation’s largest employer, reported that it experienced no increase in costs at all after Congress mandated coverage of contraceptives for federal employees.
Moreover, a 2000 study by the National Business Group on Health, a membership group for large employers to address their health policy concerns, estimated that it costs employers 15–17% more to not provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of pregnancy and indirect costs such as employee absence and reduced productivity.
And on and on… This should be obvious. Contraceptives are inexpensive when compared to the total real costs of unintended pregnancies.
As a believer in the social contract, liveandletlive, I’m happy to know that those savings will likely be “redistributed among everyone else” in the form of lower premiums.
Responding to points you’ve made in a few different comments:
First, yes, I understand very well how challenging having a baby is, which is a large part of why I haven’t had one and I won’t anytime soon.
If you’re a Christian Scientist, what are you doing running a hospital at all? As for institutions other than hospitals I would sympathize with the idea that they shouldn’t be required to provide any insurance. Then again, I still prefer a system wherein we don’t assume that ANY employer is on the hook for this anyway.
The Church of course has zero prorogative over institutions not its own; to suggest otherwise is pure paranoia and obviously contrary to a non-theocratic system.
Finally, why bring up the abuse scandals? I don’t know anyone outside the Church hierarchy who believes they handled that well.
Oh, and SomervilleTom, your comment about interracial marriage is a non sequester. The worst that would happen there is that some churches would not marry interracial couples, but would have no bearing on the state’s role of issuing marriage licenses. It’s just like as marriage same sex marriage takes hold in more places from a state standpoint that in no way forces a church to solmnize those unions.
The church is coming at the contraception issue out of some moral high ground, but as Cardinal Egan made clear today, the leaders of the church have no moral ground to stand on, period. When they’re throwing a moral hissy fit, their track record on morality is absolutely relevant, especially when it’s coming from a Cardinal of their church at the very same time that they’re raising these contraception issues.
First of all, if we’re going to live in a non-theocratic system, that means any religiously-affiliated organization that takes government money can’t discriminate against employees or those they service, up to and including their employee health care coverage.
Secondly, it’s not paranoia at all to think the church would try to sway politicians on a non-church related question. They do it all the time. They’re the boots on the ground in many states banning same-sex marriage or trying to end abortion for everyone, not just church members.
Suggesting that they’d try to use a wedge issue to get the President to flip flop so contraceptives weren’t forced to be included in any health care coverage policy is absolutely consistent with every way the church has tried to get involved in politics for the past couple decades.
I’m not a Christian Scientist, but I imagine their church is affiliated with a number of charity and nonprofit organizations, as most churches are wont to do. I’m sure they have programs meant to help addicts or the homeless or who knows what, and I’d be willing to bet that at least some of them receive federal grants or dollars.
If they receive money from the government, they can’t discriminate against who uses those services or who they hire to work for them. If they provide health care coverage — and I’m sure they would, because who will work for a company that won’t? — then, under these guidelines, they can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against what that insurance covers.
That is the fair way to run the system, and the way to protect individual freedom — including religious freedom. No one is forcing these institutions to create affiliated charities. They’re the ones who do that — and then ask for the government’s help to fund it. So they therefore can’t discriminate.
This means then that you’re officially in favor of a system where any employer can force his or her employees to either remain celibate or have babies, regardless of the health of the mother. You’re in favor of a system that could even force women who can’t bring a baby to term to continually get pregnant and have miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage and risk the health of the mother.
You’re in favor of an employer having the right to a religious or moral veto, even when accepting government dollars to cover operating experiences, which is opening a crazy-dangerous bag of worms that could put everyone from the obese to gay people to women under the bus.
I’m sorry, Christopher, but you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. You have to be accountable for the end result of the policies you would propose. The end result in this case is American Taliban territory, whether you like it or not.
If organizations want to discriminate, then they should just go ahead and do it and see how long they last. But they shouldn’t be able to get a single dime of government funding to prop it up. That is a core value of this country and if we betray it, then there really is no difference between us and the likes of the Taliban.
I think “non sequitur” is the Latin you were looking for, and no … my comment about interracial marriage isn’t a non sequitur. Will these institutions also be allowed to disallow spouse coverage for employees who have same-sex spouses? Shall we carve a special religious exemption for that as well?
Many churches were adamantly and dogmatically opposed to interracial marriage at one time. Those churches joined the rest of Jim Crow society in being dragged, kicking and screaming, to accept them because the law said so. No religious exemptions were offered, and it was the right response from the government.
The reasons to mandate contraceptive coverage have been offered time and again (including the above comment). Here is a typical example, from the link provided there (emphasis mine):
Society has very good reason to mandate that these services be provided for free. Religious dogma should not be allowed to interfere with that mandate. Since the data shows that providing contraceptive coverage actually saves money, the Catholic Church is effectively demanding a subsidy to impose its dogma on its employees.
The worst that could happen if a religious exemption were allowed for interracial marriages is that those churches would be allowed to discriminate in hiring. That is, and should be, illegal.
A religious exemption like this is a terrible, terrible idea and should be stopped in its tracks.
When I said, “Then again, I still prefer a system wherein we don’t assume that ANY employer is on the hook for this anyway,” it was a roundabout way of putting in a plug for a single-payer system. I have thought for a long time that while it’s great for employers to offer this benefit, they should not have to or be assumed that they will. In my ideal world, this entire discussion would be moot because the employer would not be providing or subsidizing insurance at all; the government would be and under that system I imagine that prescriptions, including of the contraceptive variety, would be covered.
Then I am very happy to retract what I said and apologize for the confusion.
I would sure like to have a single-payer or similar system, too, but it’s just not in the cards right now. Metaphorically, we have to work through health care quality and access “triage” before we can get to the systemic-level “surgery” of really fixing our health care system.
unmarried people with regard to the availability, cost, and use of birth control. Of course, this is absolutely tainted by my own life experiences, and perhaps there is a whole world out there that I am unfamiliar with and need to be enlightened about. What I’ve learned about people is that some act responsibly or others don’t. I’ve know women who have paid for contraception even though it was a hardship, because it was important to them, and they felt their responsibility to avoid unintended pregnancies. I’ve also know women who’ve had inexpensive contraception available to them who used it intermittently or not at all, and while throwing caution to the wind never bothered to insist on using other forms of contraception, as well the men they were with, who were equally responsible for the preventing a pregnancy. These women either go on to have multiple abortions, or a very large family, often single parent families in nature. I have little faith that offering birth control for free will significantly limit irresponsible behavior. What it will do is transfer some of the cost of pregnancy prevention, for those women who choose to use it, to men, and take the cost burden off of women. That is a great idea and long overdue.
…but here is another article on the compromise, which I find perfectly reasonable and would now like to go on record calling on the Catholic Church to quit its bellyaching.
I just wish that this is how the President acted on other controversial stands – put something bold out there and stand by it for a little while THEN compromise, rather than cave at the drop of a hat. Part of my reaction in previous comments has basically been an exasperated, “You cave time after time on things that are political and moral no-brainers, yet THIS was the issue on which you chose to pick a fight!?”