House of Eratosthenes

Regarding the “insurance for contraceptives over the religious objections of the employer” hoop-de-doo, A Republican Senator has offered up a new amendment and the White House is none too pleased.

Unbowed by the dust-up from last week’s contraception debate, the Obama administration has jumped feet-first into the next round.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, in a statement to The Huffington Post, weighed in heavily against a toughly-worded measure being considered in the Senate that would greatly restrict women’s access to critical health care services.

“Let’s be clear about what’s at stake,” said Carney. “The proposal being considered in the Senate applies to all employers — not just religious employers. And it isn’t limited to contraception. Any employer could restrict access to any service they say they object to. That is dangerous and it is wrong. Decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss.”

The measure, proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) would amend the Affordable Care Act to allow any employer to exclude any health service coverage, no matter how critical or basic, by claiming that it violates their religious or moral convictions. Moreover, according to the National Women’s Law Center, the amendment would remove critical non-discrimination protections from the Affordable Care Act. For instance, an insurer could deny maternity care coverage to a same-sex couple, an interracial couple or a single woman for religious or moral reasons.

Is anyone besides me taking note of what an impressive job The Modern Left is doing, of monopolizing entirely any & all discussion about the potentials. The ifs, and the maybes and the coulds. Could, might, possibly, what-if. It really is quite an amazing thing.

Let’s see. If it is possible to envision a thing happening…if “the National Women’s Law Center” says it could happen, which means some spokesman from there went on record with it…the entire debate needs to shift to that hypothetical. I saw this before with the whole parental-consent thing, someone came out and said “Who knows how many of those fathers you would be obliging this young girl to inform of their pregnancies, might have caused those pregnancies in the first place.” Few-to-none had the decency to ask: Hey waitaminnit, just how often does that happen?

On the left, if you can imagine it, not only is it reality, it becomes all the reality that matters. By the next day, it’s the only reality anyone’s talking about.

What if that worked the other way? I see gay marriage is back in the news; must be an election year. Some on the right have spoken in worried tones about churches being sued for refusing to conduct such ceremonies, but this concern has not managed to capture any currency from what I can see. Which it seems to me it should. It’s happened, for one thing; for another thing, this is part of the track record we’ve seen played out again and again, politicians get all excited about some new piece of legislation, we argue about some appealing aspect of it, it passes, and it turns out the whole thing was about creative new ways to get lawsuits started.

Conservatives are just not very good at discussing possibilities. Even when it’s rather silly to discuss the possibilities as mere possibilities, as opposed to near-certainties, they struggle to move the larger public into any deliberation about them. It seems if they enjoy even a scintilla of success there, all it takes is for a liberal to crack a joke about it, and said larger-public drops it like a hot potato.

Meanwhile, a lefty just makes a comment about dads impregnating their own daughters, or mean ol’ bosses forcing their female employees to carry pregnancies to term by refusing to pay for their birth control? And mission accomplished. That becomes what the whole topic is all about. Suddenly we’re all engaged in a Good Fight to show this theoretical nasty discriminating employer what’s what.

And then there’s Sonic Charmer‘s point: Somewhere along the way, we seem to have accepted the idea that these “health plans” have to include everything, because if there’s any one single item missing, no matter how nominal the cost of that product or service might be, failing to include it in the plan is equivalent to denying the insured any access to it.

I’m afraid I have a good understanding how we got suckered into that. How a rational and knowledgeable grown-up falls for it, I don’t know, but it’s clear the snake-oil has been sold to our national discourse, successfully, and that does not speak well for those who participate in it.

I went on an ol’ facebook roundabout with an idiot who equated the Komen foundation’s removal of support for Planned Parenthood (PP), which they’ve since rescinded. This person’s insane logic was:

1. A tiny fraction of the services of PP go towards breast cancer screening.
2. It therefore follows that if you don’t want to support PP, then you want women to get breast cancer.

What happened to these people? It truly boggles the mind. As a Christian, I console myself with our belief that the wicked are blind and that there really is a darkness in the world which is twisting things for evil.
- LDiracDelta | 02/15/2012 @ 12:59
Oh bother. My editing sucks. The first sentence should be:

“I went on an ol’ facebook roundabout with an idiot about the Komen foundation’s removal of support for Planned Parenthood (PP), which they’ve since rescinded.”
- LDiracDelta | 02/15/2012 @ 13:00
And the simple solution? (yes, I read that post first)

Quit tying health insurance to employment.
Insurance companies will cover whatever will get them the most amount of clients.
Employers will no longer be required to cover things that are unethical to them.
Employees can cover what they want based on their life and risk factors.
- tgoon | 02/15/2012 @ 15:40
[…] has government queering a market helped matters? Rarely if ever, according to Sowell.Update: via House of Eratosthenes, Senator Blunt is trying to redistribute power to employers, and the White House is having none of […]
- NARAL Is Orgasmic That Women Can Get Birth Control Without A Copay. Drugs They May, You Know, Need? No’ So Much : The Other McCain | 02/16/2012 @ 04:28
Linked you here.
- smitty1e | 02/16/2012 @ 04:29
When will it be noted that teachers abuse more young than priests?
.
- TMI | 02/16/2012 @ 13:05
@TMI,
This excessive interest in ‘facts’ marks you a troublemaker.
R,
C
- smitty1e | 02/16/2012 @ 13:58
Yeah, I ran across a liberal FB friend (in Morgan’s terminology, the “Hello Kitty of Blogging”) who posted a link on her wall (“The vote goes out on this tomorrow, does it bother you as much as it does me that this is not in the news?”) to a section of MoveOn.org’s website…where said entity is circulating a petition that enraged liberals are encouraged to sign. It purports to demand that the US Senate kill the Blunt amendment. My response to her post:

If my employer is helping to pay for my insurance (and he does pick up part of the monthly cost), it is fair for him to have some input in what is covered, don’t you think? If anything, it’s gone too far in the other direction – government has passed numerous laws REQUIRING coverage of any number of procedures or treatments, including the ones the insured doesn’t care about. That’s one reason health insurance is so expensive in the first place. If anything, Senator Blunt’s amendment may help keep costs down. Stop believing the hysteria that Catholic employers are out to deprive you of “reproductive health care.” I doubt most of them would care.

Someone else, one of this woman’s other friends, came along and wrote:

It isn’t in the news because they don’t want to talk about the fact that they are trying to force the Catholic Church to fund something they don’t believe in. What happened to the “seperation of church and state” that the left is always howling about? It only applies when they want it to. If people want coverage for birth control or abortive drugs they can go work somewhere else. No one is forcing them to work for a Catholic or whatever religious organization.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.
- cylarz | 02/17/2012 @ 00:03

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DangerousWednesday, February 15th, 2012

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Wednesday, February 15th, 2012