Chris Korzen says yes, and that it comes in the form of the Capps Amendment, which “clearly states that federal funds cannot be used to pay for so-called “elective” abortions, ensures that private plans participating in a proposed regional health care exchange system will neither be prohibited from nor required to pay for abortion services, prohibits the preemption of state abortion laws (such as those requiring parental notification and consent), and extends existing conscience protections to health care providers participating in the exchange. It also attempts to chart a common ground course by requiring at least one plan in each regional exchange to include, and one not to include, abortion coverage.”
That last part strikes me as particularly stupid — what’s the point of requiring that one plan in each region not cover a specific procedure? But that aside, I can see how the Capps Amendment would appease those who think that “common ground” on abortion is actually possible. I happen to think that the common ground message is a good one, but that’s mostly because it sheds light on the fact that anti-choice groups are doing absolutely nothing to try to decrease the abortion rate. “Common ground” on abortion, to most people, means making abortion less necessary, or finding ways for pro-choice and “pro-life” groups to work together to make abortions less common. In reality, it’s only pro-choice groups that are doing the groundwork. Extending “pro-life” groups the opportunity to actually decrease the abortion rate and watching them reject the offer is pretty good pro-choice PR — and it’s a nice reminder to those folks who identify as “pro-life” but who actually want to see abortions decrease that maybe the pro-choice movement is more on their side than the anti-choice one.
But translating that into health care policy gets a little stickier. I understand that some Americans — even many Americans — don’t want their tax dollars subsidizing abortion. But at the end of the day, abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures in the country. It’s a procedure that one in three women will have in their lives. The fact that such a common surgical procedure is already not covered by Medicaid in most states is abhorrent. The fact that we’re arguing about whether a universal health care program should cover basic reproductive care is embarassing.
Yet here we are. And since abortion already isn’t covered by Medicaid in a great many states, even some pro-choice advocates are asking what we have to lose by adopting a so-called “abortion-neutral” policy. I’m not unsympathetic to that, but I would be wary about ceding ground to anti-choicers on this one. I would also counter the abortion scare-tactics by asking, “What about birth control?” I can almost guarantee that anti-choice groups will oppose birth control coverage, too, but it’s a less popular position to stake out. It’s worth emphasizing the fact that these groups oppose nearly any coverage of reproductive health care, and that abortion is just an easy target.
I guess the argument can be made that, if you more-or-less take the abortion issue off the table with the compromise, you get rid of the easy target to some degree, and force them to start talking about things like birth control about which they are clearly nuts. I’m not sure I entirely buy that argument, but it’s not obviously wrong.
I would be verrrry afraid that guys, presented with the “What about birth control?” question, would be quick to say “Well, of course they shouldn’t be REQUIRED to pay, that’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY since you happened to be born with a uterus!” (Or other uses besides contraception — which are far more widespread than many people realize).
Just like it’s disabled people’s “responsibility” to pay for their own “extra” care for daring to be non-abled. And the attitude that anything beyond what a cis white het upperclass male finds absolutely necessary is therefore “extra” or “elective” or “a luxury” … and if you do happen to access that stuff, looks at you as though you’re living the high life or “getting away easy”…
I understand that some Americans — even many Americans — don’t want their tax dollars subsidizing abortion.
I don’t want my tax dollars subsidizing Viagra (or any of the other me-too drugs), especially for old men married to trophy wives half their age (or younger). So let’s write that into the bill, shall we?
Snark aside, reproductive care must be covered in full, no exceptions.
Dude. Bush used my taxes to fund a war and I want to consider myself a pacifist. So why do we need to capitulate to these crazies?
Yeah, but if you get to the point where you’re telling ~3/4 of the population that the services they see as vital are actually some sort of luxury, you’ve pretty much lost haven’t you?
I’m not a big fan of any of the bills currently floating around, and I’m still yet to be sold on a government option being the best course of action when it comes to health care (not that I have a better idea, btw, I just see pretty much every option from single payer to status quo to be shit), but if we’re going to start going down this road we need to be aware of what the implications are going to be.
Trying to find common ground on abortion is as bad idea. Its politicizing care. If we want to talk about universal or socialized medicine, we have to start from a point of saying that behaviors, procedures, or medications someone might object to simply cannot be used as a political football. The very second we capitulate, the second we make even the smallest of concession, we have created a system in which the poor will be punished and prevented from living their lives in certain ways. Thats the end result of any compromise on this issue: people poor enough to be on the government plan being told how they can live their lives and having their choices monitored and dictated by the political interests of asshole bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle. This isn’t something that can be fixed later, once the precedent is set theres no way moralists, public health advocates, and every brand of paternalistic asshat from across the great spectrum of political thought is going to give up the ability to use fucking health insurance as a cudgel to keep people in line.
@William, yeah, I think you’re saying it great. If the government is going to be offering a health care option, than it had better pay for health care! You can’t use your philosophical differences to dictate what your taxes pay for. If your government goes to war, even if you oppose it, your taxes pay. If your government has a heath care option, than your taxes pay for abortion. Even if you don’t like it. Your philosophy can inform your voting record but you don’t get a line item veto of government policy while filing your tax returns.
Unfortunately we already have the precedent, as medicare won’t fund abortions, so we have to fight against that… HOPEFULLY we can set down a strong precedent that health care will not be politicized now. But I’m afraid we won’t be able to do that.
But, as terrible as it sounds, we have a foothold right there too. Your average American making four times the poverty level isn’t going to want to put up with medicaid (or even medicare) level treatment. People who were previously on employer funded PPOs aren’t going to tolerate VA level treatment in Obamacare. Thats a wedge, thats something to grab onto. My biggest fear with health care reform is that Dems are going to be so desperate to make it happen, and so confident in the ability of the government to not fuck something up for the first time in recorded history because they happen to be in charge, that they won’t anticipate problems in the system. One of those problems is the politicization of health care.
I guess the argument can be made that, if you more-or-less take the abortion issue off the table with the compromise, you get rid of the easy target to some degree, and force them to start talking about things like birth control about which they are clearly nuts.
There’s no reason to give any ground. None. Stop taking targets off the table, period.
You have to begin negotiation by asking for more than your wildest dreams or you will end up with nothing worth having. So abortion stays on the table. And absolutely everything else you can you might want later.
Tata,
I think what she meant was Abortion is a non-negotiable. It’s legal, that’s how it’s going to stay so let’s focus on other ways to decrease the abortion rate.
That may be what she meant. That’s not what she said.
The people opposing any kind of health care plan at the “town halls” are not going to come around because abortion isn’t covered. They aren’t going to come around, period. Here’s the thing — Obama said he was pro-choice. Obama said he was going to reform health care. OBAMA WON THE ELECTION. This is a democracy and the people have already spoken. Whatever ground we give to these crazy-angries is ground that is just thrown away. Nothing will come of it, they won’t move an inch closer, and *they lost already anyway*. Why why why won’t the Democratic party use the mandate they do in fact have? On Inauguration Day was I imagining huge joyful crowds? How can these nasty fits work every damn time?
Thats a double edged sword. Obama, in winning the election, always took pains to talk about compromise, common ground, and building coalitions. His background is as a community organizer, which means his job description was to convince people with different interests and values to word towards a common goal in exchange for giving up some of their individual goals. And lets not forget that his stance on abortion has been…equivocal, at best.
The problem here isn’t just the asshole screaming at townhalls. The problem is that in any political situation, and especially in one with a figure like Obama, negotiations are the rule. Abortion has been put on the table as part of those negotiations from the get go because it is the kind of thing that is going to polarize. Obama can’t make health care out of whole cloth, he needs to get the House and the Senate to agree upon a bill that he can sign. That means bringing in conservative Democrats and bringing in enough Republicans to both avoid procedural challenges and to sidestep political backlash in the mid-term elections. Throwing women under the bus by sacrificing abortion would go a long way towards securing a legacy.
William — I’d be against throwing women under the bus even if I thought it would work, but here’s the thing: it won’t work. It’s like tossing a hungry ogre a lima bean in hopes of saving yourself. The pat-on-the-head lecture about “how the democratic process works” isn’t the voice of wisdom and experience, it’s the off-the-deep-end naivete of “sure, my legs have been chewed off by ogres but indubitably lima bean # 2 is gonna save the day!”
I wasn’t trying to say that throwing women under the bus was going to work or that it was a good idea. I was saying that when you vote for a guy who bases pretty much his whole public imagine on being indecently reasonable and trying to find common ground between people who value their civil rights and people who want a theocracy, you’re going to end up with…well…him attempting to compromise with the kinds of people you ought not compromise with. I’d love to see Obama say “eat a bag of dicks” to the Christofascists, Birthers, and general conspiracy theorists who are howling about publicly funded abortions and death panels, but I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life, seen the man’s rise to power, and I’m not holding my breath.
My position isn’t that the democratic process is going to make a public option work. My position is that the democratic process is going to fuck things up because the only people with seats at the table are assholes, sociopaths, authority fetishists, and one really nice guy who thinks that if he just parcels out enough of other people’s civil rights he can save the world and secure his place in history. I’m not speaking from some kind of optimistic pragmatism, but rather cynicism. I don’t want to see women thrown under the bus, but I have the distinct feeling that thats exactly what we’re going to see.
I will probably get flamed for this but I do not see why any elective procedures like cosmetic surgery and things like contraception should be covered by insurance (though elective abortion could be covered since an abortion is a one time cost compared to a baby which is a much larger cost). Insurance is to make sure that you do not get hit by a huge bill for some illness accident you didn’t expect. Contraception is something that can be planned for.
Moreover, people seem to be under the impression that insurance makes things cheaper. It doesn’t, it just redistributes the costs over a larger population and adds some overhead in the process. So something like a sickness is fine for insurance since most people are healthy at any given point and the cost of a sick individual is absorbed among them. Something like contraception is not all that great to be covered since most people require it and the redistribution doesn’t save much and may actually cost more.
Contraception may not be necessary to YOU, but it IS necessary to a lot of women out there who do not want to get pregnant. The pill is ALSO necessary for women with certain medical conditions that make them have very painful periods. Would you tell them that they can/should plan for this? That they should miss work or school and just suck it up?
MOST meds are required at some point. There are the same (possibly even more) people who are meds like lipitor and aricept–meds that aren’t taken for just a short time (and this will increase as the population ages). There are mentally ill people who must take their meds for the rest of their lives. There are people who take SSRI’s.
Would you then decide that those meds must go as well? Or is it just teh icky pill, used by teh icky women, that’s up for grabs? (BTW, either option is repugnant.)
The point isn’t to save corporations money–it’s to make health care accessible and affordable for everyday people. If you were actually a leftist, you’d get that.
[...] and Health Care: Is There Common Ground? – Feministe Do We Want to Have Another Child? Factors That Can Influence the Decision – Queercents How Do [...]
leftie leftist… it’s the whole concept of setting up a fair society without knowing your place in it. In that case you can’t say you “plan” for contraception because you DO NOT KNOW if you will be male or female.
It is really unfair to call your situation at birth something “elective” you “plan” for, and spreading the costs of contraception between both men and women would be eminently fair.
So this is going to turn into a Social Darwinist experiment, hm? In which case, why fucking bother with reform? Just let all the sick and old people die, they cost too much if you keep them alive anyway.
And you misunderstand insurance. Catastrophic insurance is only one part of health insurance’s purpose. One part. It is also meant to cover preventive measures and long-term treatment measures as well. The majority of insurance use is from those sorts of longer-term measures, not only from “I got in an auto accident and broke my legs” and the like.
And, well, hey you guys: I called it in comment 2!
Contraception, too, costs less than bearing and raising a child.
Hey William, sorry for misreading you. It is just crazy-making that women get thrown under the bus for *nothing*, over and over.
Amandaw — you sure did!
Perhaps you’re not aware, but you’re using a false analogy in an attempt to support your argument. Cosmetic surgery and contraception are neither equal nor particularly similar. Cosmetic surgery, for instance, tends to cost a huge amount of money and require work from an entire team, while oral contraception costs relatively little and requires virtually no supervision in many cases. Also, as others have noted, contraception is an extremely common and sometimes medically necessary issue, whereas cosmetic surgery is both uncommon and almost always (with a few important exceptions) purely narcissistic. I could go on, but the underlying point is that you’re comparing apples and oranges in a fairly disingenuous fashion.
Oral contraception for the entire period that a woman is likely able to have children is likely going to run less that $15,000.00 even if you assume that there is no group purchasing discount, co-pay, or deductible. That, too, is less than the likely cost of having a child. So your cost argument doesn’t hold water.
My insurance covers a lot more than catastrophic illness. Hell, if I eventually come down with type II Diabetes (I’ve got a family history and I enjoy foods that enrich my life, if not my health) insulin will be covered. If I get drunk and break my nose in a bar fight, that would be covered. If tomorrow I decided to take up smoking meth and needed a 28 day detox, that would be covered. Insurance is there to cover whatever the insurer and the policy holder agree it will cover. My insurance company doesn’t cover those things because they’re good people, they do it because they have to in order to attract customers in a competitive and highly lucrative market. The market has created a situation in which policy holders demand (and are able to receive) quite a bit with the insurers still making a healthy profit. If there wasn’t money to be made, even offering all of these services, the companies simply wouldn’t exist. Things are only what we make them to be, there is no objective meaning or standard to which we would like to appeal, your definition simply doesn’t apply.
And if those whores don’t want to have kids they can either keep their legs shut or pay for the pill themselves, right? Why should WE have to pay for them to get laid? God knows theres no medical, moral, or rational reason why we should cover their sin. I’d like to address this point with some reasoned response, but really, what the fuck?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you aren’t a medical service provider and have never dealt with insurance billing. Heres how it works. If I provide a service I send the insurance company a bill. They then look at the bill and tell me what they’re willing to pay. We go back and forth for awhile, and eventually we come up with a number that is significantly less than what someone without insurance would have paid. With other companies, there is a set rate they say they will pay (which is always lower than what is otherwise customary) and I simply cannot accept that insurance unless I’m willing to be paid that rate. Insurance companies get to do this because they have a large number of policy holders and are a valuable source of customers to providers. Having insurance is like being able to go to Costco or being in a Union; the collective buying power of the group allows it to demand lower costs.
Again, I’m guessing you don’t know how these companies work. Yes, overhead is added by the redistribution cost, but the only income for an insurance company is not premiums. Premiums are invested, often along with private investment, companies are bought with that money who in turn feed their profits back into the company, and pay-outs are reduced by preferred provider options and the like. The equation is not nearly as simple as Premiums – Pay-outs = PROFIT!!
Wouldn’t the same logic follow for contraception? Cut out the men, the women under child-bearing age, and the women over child-bearing age and you’re looking at people on oral contraception being the minority. Add a small co-pay and collective buying power and you’re starting to look at a highly absorbable cost which translates into a significant increase in quality of life.
Hey, its cool. It’s a heated issue in a lot of directions and I know that cynicism is easily misread. Besides, looking back, I can see where there might have been some ambiguity on my part. No apology necessary.
If I may quote the brilliant Toby Ziegler:
“I don’t know where you got this idea that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for things of which they disapprove. A lot of them don’t like tanks!”
[...] so I figure it’s time to start linking to other blogs that I read. Today’s subject is a post over at Feministe, “one of the oldest feminist blogs designed by and run by women from the [...]