Anti-Choice Fail
Some excellent news from Jessica Arons:
Today, in a huge victory for women’s health, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that most employers will be required to cover contraception in their health plans, along with other preventive services, with no cost-sharing such as co-pays or deductibles. This means that after years of trying to get birth control covered to the same extent that health plans cover Viagra, our country will finally have nearly universal coverage of contraception.
Opponents of contraception had lobbied hard for a broad exemption that would have allowed any religiously-affiliated employer to opt out of providing such coverage. Fortunately, the Obama administration rejected that push and decided to maintain the narrow religious exemption that it initially proposed. Only houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt. Employers covered by the rule will have a year to comply.
This is why I’m supporting Ron Paul.
Someone should forward this to Dana Milbank and try to explain to him which side was fighting to reduce unwanted pregnancies and which side was working to increase them. Anyway, I’m sure that would all change if pro-choice activists would sit down with Focus on the Family and tell them to cut the bullshit.
…much more from Sarah Posner. Carmon on the value of “caterwauling.”
Years of trying is right. Equity for birth control coverage has been a major issue among women’s health and health care reform activists at least since the 1990s.
It’s worth noting that the regulations that Sebelius released doing this are part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
The ACA is just an example of the third term of George W. Bush. It’s the most Republican bill no Republican has ever voted for ever. Paul/Cockburn ’12!
Way to troll your own blog. Just for laughs, how about explaining the point of your hippie-punching?
In fairness, ACA is almost exactly the same as Romney’s Massachusetts plan and the Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s. By any metric it is, in point of fact, a “Republican”/conservative healthcare reform plan, as opposed to the actually progressive single payer or national healthcare approaches. The current lack of support among Republicans just reveals how far into whackaloon extremism the party has drifted in the interim.
Come on he did the best he could and this is even better than when Medicare was created! Besides taking Romneycare and nationalizing was necessary to be sensible, centrist, and bipartisan. Don’t let the hippies get you down–the President just can’t do things on his own (except for bravely fighting our War on Terror).
Same troll, same tactic, new name now that he’s been called out.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the ACA is the best the Democrats and Obama could have done. The claim that anything more was impossible is always made without any actual evidence to back it up and is transparent excuse making for the failure to do better rather than an actual analysis of what was possible.
The ACA is, however, certainly the least possible reform that could actually be called reform and the most Obama tried to do, and Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into trying to do that much. Without John Edwards and Hillary Clinton pushing the reform issue in the primaries Obama would never have campaigned on the issue and the issue would never have become central to the broader 2008 congressional campaigns.
Please, DNFTT.
He’s coming into a thread about a popular action that liberals of all stripes can get together on, and doing his best to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Naah, joe, he’s just trying to cut short the sensible progressives’ happy dance over this news.
Sorry, there are too many layers of irony in this comment for my little brain.. I can’t tell what your straight point is.
He’s coming into a thread about a popular action that liberals of all stripes can get together on, and doing his best to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I too am very upset at this derail by noted LGF troll Scott Lemieux.
This observation is not wholly without merit.
This more or less boils down to whether you think Lieberman and Nelson would have voted for anything more progressive. I’m fairly certain in my own mind there’s no way in bloody hell they would have done. But there’s no real way to prove it one way or the other.
Uh, no. Not at all. The ACA was, in the end, passed by reconciliation because a 60th vote was not available after Ted Kennedy’s death. Lieberman and Nelson were completely irrelevant.
No it wasn’t. The ACA passed on Christmas Eve 2009, with 60 votes.
The reconciliation package that was passed later was a short list of minor tweaks to the existing ACA.
Uh, no. Not at all. The ACA was, in the end, passed by reconciliation because a 60th vote was not available after Ted Kennedy’s death. Lieberman and Nelson were completely irrelevant.
You’ll forgive me if I ignore all of your future assessments of whether passing more progressive health care reform was politically viable.
The reconciliation package that was passed later was a short list of minor tweaks to the existing ACA.
Keep splitting that hair forever, jowell
The difference between a 3000 page bill and the 10-page reconciliation package is a “hair?”
Um, no. Not really.
That 99.9% of what the ACA did could NOT have been passed through reconciliation is NOT a “hair.”
The ACA doesn’t pass at all without the reconciliation vote and no bill goes to the President’s desk. Voting in the House was contingent on the Senate agreeing to take a reconciliation vote. Without reconciliation you get 0% of the ACA, not 99.9%.
I’ll add that things like a public option and other serious cost control measures fall well within the bounds of budget reconciliation rules, so the fact that they could not have gotten 60 votes is irrelevant to any consideration over whether they could have been passed as part of the reconciliation process if the White House had decided that that’s what it wanted.
Er… this is only true in the narrowest of technical senses. Without reconciliation the ACA doesn’t pass, yes. But reconciliation couldn’t have been used to pass a more robust ACA because a majority of the Senate wouldn’t have gone for it. Period.
A majority of the Senate disagrees with you and they are the arbiters of what does and does not fall under reconciliation.
Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t believe there were fifty votes for a more robust bill. There were fifty people who said they would have voted that way… and conveniently waited until it was very clear a more robust bill would never have come to a vote to say that.
The SENATE kneecapped the ACA. Not the White House. Blame where blame is due.
I’ll add that things like a public option and other serious cost control measures fall well within the bounds of budget reconciliation rules, so the fact that they could not have gotten 60 votes is irrelevant to any consideration over whether they could have been passed as part of the reconciliation process if the Senate had decided that that’s what it wanted.
FTFY. I know you want to blame Obama for everything, but overlooking the existence of an entire house of Congress just makes you look like an idiot.
The fact that a bill was passed after so many false starts, so much deliberation and negotiation, so much congressional grandstanding, and after Republicans won a special election in which their candidate pledged to stop the bill only goes to prove the White House steamrolled all opposition to get exactly and precisely what it wanted. In every detail.
I’m sorry. This is absolutely no reason to believe that what passed was the best that could accomplished.
/snark
Obama wanted no reform bill at all but, after the Democratic primary season made reform a front-and-center issue, was politically constrained to exhibit support for some sort of reform, and the reform the White House got is the reform the White House “supported.” The only reason there were so many starts and stops was because the White House thought that bipartisan cover was achievable and was a more important goal than passing a bill.
That doesn’t mean that the White House steamrolled anyone, but the White House did get what it tried to get. Speculation that the White House couldn’t have gotten more if it had tried from the beginning to get more is, in fact, mere speculation. Maybe more could have been achieved, maybe not, but we’ll never know because the White House never tried, and the White House never tried because the White House never wanted more.
This is wrong. Obama was OUT IN FRONT of this issue during the primary. He got there first and MADE it a front and center issue, it did not become one and then he raced to get in on it. That would be pretty stupid if he didn’t want a piece of it.
There’s a legitimate critique lurking in there. The White House did indeed fuck up the health care push in many respects, and one of the reasons they did is because they genuinely wanted a right of center, market oriented, insurance company friendly reform plan.
But the final plan was actually further to the right of where the WH positioned itself, and it ended up there because of the SENATE. The Senate screwed this pooch! If the votes in the Senate existed to create an American version of the NHS, do you think Obama would have vetoed that? He would not have.
This is utterly delusional.
When Scott Brown was elected, Obama was the guy insisting on going forward on HCR, arguing that it would be a betrayal of years of promises to the Democratic base to abandon the effort, when he was being advised to do exactly that and “focus on jobs” by the people around him.
When Scott Brown was elected, Obama was the guy insisting on going forward on HCR, arguing that it would be a betrayal of years of promises to the Democratic base to abandon the effort, when he was being advised to do exactly that and “focus on jobs” by the people around him.
This. The evidence is clear; if Obama had walked away from the ACA after Brown won he would have had the support of the median votes in the Senate, much of his staff, and much of the media. He was absolutely not “constrained” to keep pushing. (Of course, the idea that he “didn’t want reform” in the first place is just the purest question-begging anyway, but in this case it’s easily falsified if you know anything about the actual process.)
I thought that was all Pelosi, but some evidence suggests it was more a meeting of the minds.
Gonna have to call bullshit on that one. In the starkest of terms at that.
This:
is a rather extraordinary claim! There is absolutely no reason? What about all the prima facie reasons e.g., the Republican’s always want to kill health reform, the Democrats didn’t have a fully united part esp. at the margin, etc. etc. etc.? I agree that it’s slightly hyperbolic, but it’s really there to counter the “there was a much better outcome just there for the asking” line.
I agree that it’s better to be both more accurate thus more judicious in ones claims, but…exemplify!
Does anyone (seriously) make a strict impossibility claim?
Seems rather overstated (and evidence free!).
Seems wrong (and evidence free!). (At least, once in the presidency.)
This is a really extraordinary and interesting claim that I really would like some evidence for. And some conceptual clarity: Obama is a Democrat. Democrats have been pushing and campaigning on health care for forever. In that environment, most prez candidates end up supporting health care. What was distinctive about Clinton’s and Edward’s campaigning that flipped Obama? Indeed, what’s the evidence that he was resistent to health care reform before then?
As I recall matters developing–and it’s certainly possible that my recollection is imperfect–health insurance reform wasn’t a particular issue in the 2008 election cycle until John Edwards first made it one. Democrats have long been in favor of reform conceptually, but they hadn’t dared to make it a major campaign issue since Clinton’s miserably failed efforts at reform.
When Edwards started pushing the issue, Hillary Clinton was ready and able to put for a coherent plan. Obama wasn’t. He was late in responding and his first effort at putting forth a plan was patently ridiculous and showed that no one in his campaign had any familiarity with or concern about the issue. Obama offered an exchange based plan that forced companies to issue coverage without respect to preexisting conditions without having any kind of a consumer mandate to purchase at all. While the mandate has it’s political problems it’s uniformly agreed by people knowledgeable about health reform and economics that it’s an integral part of any plan to make coverage universally available at an even remotely affordable price to people who have preexisting conditions.
Releasing a plan somewhat like the ACA but without any kind of a consumer mandate at all was, IMO, such a fundamental mistake that it served as proof that Obama and his policy people hadn’t even bothered to familiarize themselves with health insurance reform issues and frankly didn’t think that reform was a big deal or at all necessary. It’s not that they didn’t become health policy wonks overnight; it’s that they put forward a plan that anyone who’s economically literate, had a basic understanding of insurance, and who consulted with someone knowledgeable about health policy would dismiss out of hand more-or-less instantaneously. It’s the kind of plan that you only put forward if you hope the issue will just go away. Obama didn’t add a mandate to his plan until it became clear that the issue wouldn’t go away and until someone sat him down and told him that his plan was garbage.
Interesting. That relies a lot on speculation, but perhaps we can get some backing.
Oy…it’s nasty. I did find an article:
The surround paragraphs detail Edwards’ plan and positioning, which indeed was much more elaborate and pretty good.
The article overall suggests that there was health care momentum already. (Medicare Part D and SCHIP certainly would have helped its saliency.)
Graphs in this article, however, suggest that health care wasn’t necessarily make or break. They certain suggest that Obama could have though to put it aside. Indeed, I remember a lot of calls for that to address other issues (e.g., the economy).
I think one can agree that Edwards was the best and out front on this issue without agreeing that Obama was inherently retrograde or was forced by Edwards to adopt a position, much less actually commit to the issue post-presidency. Obama did have a “let congress do it” and thus the pro-reform forces in congress had a lot of say, but that’s been his way all along and, arguably, it was a reaction to the Clinton effort.
“As I recall matters developing–and it’s certainly possible that my recollection is imperfect–health insurance reform wasn’t a particular issue in the 2008 election cycle until John Edwards first made it one. Democrats have long been in favor of reform conceptually, but they hadn’t dared to make it a major campaign issue since Clinton’s miserably failed efforts at reform.”
Maybe you’re being a bit overly literal? I mean, given how long the party had been pushing for universal healthcare (to the extent that, ultimately, the entire caucus did in fact vote for the ACA), that the front-runner for most of the race was the person more associated with the cause than anyone else in the country, etc. etc., it’s pretty far-fetched to think that healthcare reform could ever NOT have been a major issue in the Democratic primary, and/or that a Democratic President and large Congressional majority wouldn’t make an attempt at passing a universal healthcare bill. Whether Obama wanted to or not is mostly irrelevant; it was THE defining issue of his party.
In fact, I think it’s actually possible that Obama would have preferred to do something else (energy reform of some kind really stands out) first based on the way he campaigned, but that just wasn’t going to be possible because his Congressional caucus was itching to get to healthcare reform.
And yet you’ve been asserting these things as if they’re unassailable truths.
John Kerry made a Universal Catastrophic Insurance program the centerpiece of his domestic agenda in 2004. Now, obviously, domestic politics weren’t as important in 2004 as in 2008, but that’s not a reflection on Kerry.
Now this is pretty funny. Great name!
The Massachusetts plan wasn’t “Romney’s Plan.” It was a compromise plan negotiated among numerous actors, one of which was the Republican governor, who was trying to get the least-bad deal he could. As was the Heritage Foundation’s feint during the 1990s debate over health care reform.
Could it be that your opposition to tactical retreats in politics has made it difficult to recognize when others are engaged in such a tactic?
Exactly. Gitmo, civil liberties, the escalation of wars in several countries (mostly secret), refusal to prosecute admitted torturers and war criminals, the NADA, failure to pass cap and trade…tactical retreats! Vote Obama in 2012 and soon our Dear Leader will be on offense again!
Piss off, troll.
With all these brilliant tactical retreats, I can’t wait to see what an actual Obama victory looks like! Im sure it will be very sensible, centrist, and bipartisan too. I can feel the thrill going up my leg already.
Obvious troll is working too hard.
I am all for critiques of the Obama Administration, as god knows they fuck up left, right, and center, but your tone and the implications thereof are uncalled for.
Present to me an alternative to Obama that 1) has a decent chance of putting someone better than him into power, and 2) doesn’t carry with it a risk of putting Republicans into power that’s massively disproportionate to the chance of 1. I will happily explore that alternative.
One can never work too hard for Obama, joe. I take my inspiration from you! I can’t wait for more bipartisanship, sensible centrism and bringing it Republicans to the table come 2013, can you? Also victory in the Global War on Terror is right around the corner.
Murc,
You’re being trolled.
Yeah, I know, but this guy is actually better at it than a lot of our trolls, so I thought I’d throw him a bone.
I mean, he’s still not GOOD, but he’s no HonourableBob.
He’s “better at it” because he’s actually engaged in a destructive, strategic kind of activism, instead of just having fun.
Lord knows I understand how fun it can be to argue with idiots on the internet, but our side needs to start recognizing, and ceasing to enable, this rat-fucking by the other side.
WATCH YOUR TONE
I was going for middle C. Am I flat?
Normally I’m a lot more sympathetic to posters calling out JFL for being too Obama-friendly. This guy is just too obvious of a troll.
Is this really an anti-choice fail?
I think of it as more of an anti-equality fail. Equal access to contraception and choice are both part of health care continuum
in the larger issue of equality.
Hey opponents of contraception – don’t use contraception. The rest of us will carry on like a modern society and reduce unwanted pregnancies in a safe and effective manner.
And for the hypocrites who bray and bray about how your money is being taken to fund this: tough shit! My tax dollars subsidize your religion against my wishes every day that there exists a tax exemption for religion! So man up, shut up, and move along.
Hey opponents of contraception – don’t use contraception.
Oh, Jesus, don’t encourage them to reproduce more than they are now…
I am afraid that encouragement, or its lack, are totally irrelevant in this case.
Except when they try to keep people who aren’t opponents of contraception from using contraception. Like all of those “Fetii are people too” amendments.
Very good news indeed.
Milbank would think that by disagreeing with him you are proving that you’re an unreasonable extremist, and by attempting to show that he’s wrong, you are proving yourself obnoxious.
He’s poxing both houses, so he knows he’s right. He does all his house-pox shopping during 2-for-1 sales.
The announcement is election year pandering of the best possible sort, even if it doesn’t compensate for the disastrous Plan B decision:
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/01/06/399503/cvs-refuses-to-sell-texas-man-emergency-contraception-for-his-wife-suggests-hes-a-rapist/
Well, baby steps. The elimination of co-pays will be a help for many women.
A little perspective, please.
This decision will effect multiple orders of magnitude more people than the Plan B decision. As in, tens of millions instead of thousands or tens of thousands. This is vasty more important than the status of Plan B.
If the situation was reversed – if the administration had first ruled that contraception didn’t have to be covered, but later moved Plan B to OTC for minors – there isn’t a ghost of a chance that you or anyone else would be claiming that the Plan B decision more than compensated for the contraception-coverage decision.
Keep on defending the Tories er, I mean “Democrats”, joe.
If you can point together any explanation of why what I wrote was wrong, have at it.
I won’t hold my breath. I think that judging everything based on how much it helps or harms your talking points about Barack Obama really is all you’re capable of doing.
Surprise me.
Oops, didn’t see the handle.
Go away, sock puppet.
“Sock puppet”? Can’t debate me so now you’re making unfounded accusations and personal attacks? You seem to do this a lot with Glenn Greenwald too.
Just so you know, it’s not too obvious what you are and what you’re doing.
No, not at all.
What? What is it that “I am doing”?
Not being fed by me anymore.
Oh noes!!!
To be fair, sockpuppets don’t have handles…Essentially they get fisted by their masters. Kind of appropriate when you consider this guy is stooging for people who fully intend to fuck him over.
I too don’t understand the measure by which the Plan B decision – which is disgraceful – outweighs this Good Thing.
It’s a silly argument. This decision is very good. The Plan B decision was very bad. We should praise good decisions and criticize bad ones. How we weigh them against each other isn’t very important, especially given that the choices we have this fall are 1) Barack Obama and 2) someone much worse (who continues to be guaranteed not to be Ron Paul, fwiw).
It might make the difference between a motivated voter and an unmotivated one.
Really? You think that voters are going to be motivated–either way–by the the way that they weigh the Plan B decision against the contraception coverage decision? I kind of doubt it.
Those who care about reproductive rights are much more likely to be motivated by a comparison between Obama and whomever the GOP ends up nominating (who I still think will be Romney but he’s feeling just a little more evitable this week than he did last week).
I think you’re mostly right; it’s overly wonkish to think a large-enough-to-matter group of people are going to split hairs as finely as We Genius Commenters On The Internet do it.
But people have their tipping points, and yeah, there might be a small set of people who think Plan B betrayal outweighs the latest good thing. And it’s between Obama and the GOP but also between voting and not voting.
Cancel-my-subscription types are a joke for a good reason, but some subscriptions do get cancelled.
I have to agree with IB on this one. I think the two are rather a wash and that the combination will have little impact on the election (though there might be a slight boost from this decision).
The Plan B decision entrenched the standard that it’s acceptable for the government to consider science irrelevant when it comes to public health policy for women.
Throwing science out the window in matters of health guarantees you the undisputed heavyweight title.
The Good Thing is just a happy coincidence. This one time, the “we don’t need no stinking science” basis (e.g., insurance companies’ interest in having contraception coverage) for the policy happened to be good for the public health.
I agree. Unfortunately, I do not think this gets much traction among the electorate, mostly owing to a widespread, misplaced queasiness about adolescents and sex.
The Plan B decision was a disaster in every respect, not least in that it was pretty much what we could have expected from Bush and created a lousy precedent. (The weird patriarchal tone assumed by the First Dad also stays in the mind.) This is a good decision, not a great triumph the minimum one should expect from a Democratic administration, and as long as it’s going to be trumpeted to the skies we might as well remember the other.
I still don’t get what the measure is, although I agree that the one is bad and the other is good.
Okay, I give up: how does “one should expect from a Democratic administration” contradict “a great (decision)?”
Shouldn’t the question of whether it is a good or great thing be judged by the actual merits and significance of the decision? As opposed to some kind of partisan point spread?
I’m supposed to discount when the Democrats do something positive, because it’s the Democrats that did it?
Um, no. This is a much, much larger, more significant actions than the Plan B decision. It’s not even close.
By your logic, we should laud this decision more if it was made by a Republican administration than by a Democratic one.
And that’s nuts.
It is a matter of expectations and potential political cost/benefit. This is, in fact, the least we should expect from an actual Democrat. From a Republican, it would be unexpected and come at some political cost to them. so yes, we should applaud it more form a Republican. For somebody that constantly trumpets “realpolitik” to justify Obama’s moves, you sure do not seem to have much grasp of it.
“What” is a matter of expectations and political cost-benefit?
Here’s the claim: it doesn’t compensate for the disastrous Plan B decision
You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m measuring the good of this decision by its actual effect on people.
I daresay I understand it a hell of a lot better than you do. There is a time and a place for everything, and not everything should be judged by its realpolitik difficulty.
Your statement to which I responded:
So yes, this decision would have been more lauditory coming from a Republican. Please do try to keep up with what you have actually said.
Joe, who own da chiefs? Owwwnnnzzzees. Owwwnnnssses.
This.
Applauding Obama for doing the very least that should be expected from a generic Democrat is crazy. Applauding Obama for doing that which he didn’t really support but which he was politically constrained to do by forces outside his control is crazy.
You also don’t need to applaud Obama to note that he’s better for the duration of his Presidency than the alternative, just like you don’t need to fluff the ACA as being great policy or pretend that it’s the best policy that could have been enacted in order to recognize that the ACA is superior to the status quo ante.
So, it is equally crazy to denounce a Republican for doing the very least that should be expected for a generic Republican? Be consistent: we either judge politicians’ actions by how consistent they are with their party’s platform, and apply judgement of “good” and “bad” only when those actions exceed the party as a whole, or we don’t. Which is it?
And we can conclude that Obama didn’t really support this, and was “constrained,” why?
If Ralph Nader, running on the Green Party platform, implemented its policies on coal-fired power plants and overseas military bases, Dr. Dick and R Johnson would not applaud, because he was merely doing what we would expect of a Green.
Similarly, if a Republican were to win the Presidency and institute a ban on foreign aid to family-planning organizations, they wouldn’t boo, because he would just be doing what is expected of a Republican.
That is, if we are to take their comments seriously.
You really need to learn how to read, Joe. I never said that we should not applaud this move, just that it was not a reason for handstands and celebrations in the streets. Do you stand on your chair and applaud when your child brushes their teeth or ties their shoe laces?
Nastiness doesn’t hide a climbdown.
Nor does inventing “handstands and celebrations in the street” as a straw man.
There’s a difference between the amount of applause/distain appropriate for and the assessment of the relative benefits and harms of each move.
I think Joe’s direct assessment of the relative benefits/harms is correct. The Plan B fail was bad, but if we only get one of these it’d be hard to swap the two.
How much (public) applause is appropriate is, to my mind, the likelihood that such applause (or condemnation) will have beneficial effects. As this is a comments section of a blog on the internet, go nuts either way.
How to weigh as evidence about the Obama administration as a whole is tricky.
And given the importance that certain voices around here attach to “caterwauling” when a Democrat does something wrong (or even is suspecting about thinking about doing something wrong), shouldn’t it be obvious to those same voices that applauding when they do something right is also important?
joe from Lowell says:
January 21, 2012 at 9:53 am
Perhaps learning to read and paying attention would help. From about an hour before my post to which you object and over 12 hours before your response:
Do try to keep up when you are trolling.
Applauding Obama for doing the very least that should be expected from a generic Democrat is crazy.
If you wanted to elect a person to do Sensible Things and they did a Sensible Thing should they get praise? What if they did Not Very Sensible Things a bunch of the time? Should you complain about the bad and be indifferent to the good or what?
I do not think anyone (except the troll) is arguing that we should not applaud this move, but rather that it is hardly cause for handstands and hoseas.
With respect to the administration’s role in passing the ACA the proper response is not applause but rather “that didn’t totally suck, but it’s pretty much the least that can be expected and there’s a hell of a lot of room for improvement, so next time let’s try to do better.”
With regard to the decision to require medical insurance, with limited exceptions for religious employment but not religious employers, to cover birth control without a co-pay there isn’t really any better that the decision could have been. Sometimes the least that can be expected also happens to actually be the best or very nearly the best policy; in such cases there’s nothing wrong with applauding the least that can be expected so long as you don’t let it go to your head.
That’s just silly on several levels. ACA is a massive, massive achievement. How many times have the Dems tried at comprehensive reform and not gotten it (sometimes because they thought they could do better!)?
It was a tough tough fight. Obama, Ried, and Pelosi held it altogether and produced something which is a huge improvement in spite of a pretty strong effort by Republicans to kill it.
Is it my ideal, now. But I’ll applaud the hell out of it.
Aside from the merits, I fail to see how your approach is likely to make anyone involved do overall better. I would think a “very well done! on to the next step” would be more likely to be effective.
I wouldn’t go that far. It’s a matter of degree. It’s fine to note that the Administration did a good generically Democratic thing and give that fact its due recognition and appreciation. There’s no necessity for hats in the air and no reason not to remind everyone that a rotten choice in the same department was made not too long ago and women are continuing to pay the price for that decision. Well, Obama’s got his daughters to think of.
If there is a second term and Obama manages to fix this, I’ll be delighted. Until then, I think ongoing complaints are in order.
Exactly. I am happy that Obama did this and think some applause did this. I am also glad that we got some kind of healthcare reform and recognize that we would not have gotten it from a Republican. That said, the best I can say about ACA is that it doesn’t suck as bad as the status quo, but there is lots of room for significant improvement. As to whether we could realistically gotten anything better, I don’t know and neither does anyone else (though you may have reasons to believe one way or the other). What we do know is that Obama did not really try (or did not try very hard) to get anything better and that does rather piss me off.
Applauding Obama for doing that which he didn’t really support but which he was politically constrained to do by forces outside his control is crazy.
What exactly are you talking about here? Certainly not health care; there were no “outside forces” requiring him to pass health care legislation, and he certainly could have done what some of his advisers wanted to do and scale it down to almost nothing after Brown won in MA.
Regardless of the relative badness of the Plan B move/relative goodness of enhanced coverage for contraception, the linked article is a very good argument for organizing a boycott against CVS Pharmacies. If they’re going to employ such people and defend them, they should realize that there’s a price to be paid.
Boycotts of pharmacies are nice to talk about in theory, but kind of hard for many people to do in practice. There isn’t always another choice. I recently had to switch my prescriptions from the nearby Walgreens to the further-away CVS because Walgreens stopped accepting my insurance (without ever notifying me until the day I showed up to pick up my prescription, which was nice of them). I’m sure there is probably a Rite-Aid out there somewhere, but it is surely even farther away from where I live. But at least I could get there if necessary – I live in an urban area where choices are available, if inconvenient, and I do have a car. Not everyone is so lucky.
I don’t see any evidence of CVS defending those people. They were, apparently, violating the policy they’d been trained to follow.
I don’t know why I bothered arguing with the people who comment over at TheHill.com about this.
One thing I’ll note is that some of the few commenters who advocated this measure were both:
1.) Anti-Obama conservatives; and
2.) openly proclaimed a desire to halt population growth among “those people.”
So, it is true that certain people support birth control for eugenicist reasons. It’s just that these types tend to be self-proclaimed conservatives, not progressives as is often claimed.
Ever read the comments on Yahoo news?
It’s like the people who got thrown out of the John Birch Society for making people uncomfortable found a place to chat.
That’s impossible, because
Robert Byrd was in the KKKsome liberals praised StalinMargaret Sanger said some stuff.I guess it depends whose choice we’re talking about, doesn’t it?
Corporations are people, my friend.
“…and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Human rights > Corporate rights.
There is no “human right” to spend someone else’s money on having-sex-without-getting-pregnant. Or anything else.
Actually, I was talking about HUMANS’ rights, in contrast to corporate rights.
And, as we all know, equal protection under the law is, indeed, a right, including equality between the sexes.
Certainly. I don’t think any law should say that insurance companies have to pay for the pill for men but not for women.
But, then, that really isn’t remotely at issue here, is it? There’s no “equal protection” issue.
spend someone else’s money
You’re really not up on this whole insurance thing, are you?
Nah I think Dave’s tipping his hat to the fact that he hates the idea of private insurance as well, or at least the idea of functional private insurance.
After all, that would look scarily like government. Libertarian he-men like Davidus only like programs that pretend to help ordinary people for the sake of robbing them blind.
Sure. Insurance is the voluntary pooling of risk. This is neither voluntary nor risk pooling; this is simply the transfer of wealth from a less favored group to a more favored group.
You mean like the way capitalism works to channel wealth from the workers who create it to the rentiers who consume it?
Except for the part where all insurance requires government to regulate the minimum amount that can be classified as coverage, anyway.
The wealth is already being transferred, in the form of a benefit the employer offers employees; this simply removes a constraint employers have been placing on how employees may use the benefits they’re earning as a condition of their employment. Would you say the employers should be “free” to tell the employees they can’t use money from their paychecks to buy brith control pills? How is this different?
Oh, good. So I can take back the part of my taxes that go to GWOT or the F-35, right?
Bleephole.
There’s actually a legitimate rebuttal to this argument:
No person has a right to have tax dollars spent on F-35s and the War on Drugs. The government is completely free to spend that money on those things, or not, as it sees fit.
The government is empowered to do all sorts of things that nobody actually has an individual right to have done.
Even if the basis of your statement was true, (and it isn’t because tax monies should be used in any way the polity sees fit), it would still be smart to subsidize birth control simply as part of harm reduction.
Run along now, Davy boy.
Mmmm… Male libertarian snarking at the idea of women having liberty in the area of reproduction. Color me shocked.
Hmm. Liberal not even grasping the fact that the government telling one person to give money to another person has nothing to do with a person “having liberty.” Color me dismayed but not in the least bit surprised.
Women have no more liberty after this decision than before — but of course the men and women running religious institutions have less.
Liberal not even grasping the fact that the government telling one person to give money to another person has nothing to do with a person “having liberty.”
When you have no money and you’re begging on a streetcorner remind me to tell you this.
Libertarian who doesn’t understand the basics of how the real world works? Even less surprising.
Government redistribution has in fact been responsible for quite a lot of liberty. My grandfather had probably an extra twenty years of life and liberty because the government took money from people and paid for his VA care. Both my parents had the ability to have three children and raise them moderately well (dramatically expanding their liberty) because the government took money from people and gave it to them to go to college. I have the liberty to not worry about the safety of my home or workplace because the government takes money from lots and lots of people and ensures the enforcement of building codes.
You are wrong.
You are also wrong.
You’re assuming that “liberty” has something to do with the choices and breadth of experiences and actions that are available to someone, and not merely a formulaic description of whatever happens in the absence of public policy.
Silly Murc.
Does that mean I can refuse to pay those portions of my taxes that contribute to “faith based initiaitves”, abstinence only sex ed, the military, the School of the Americas, the war on terror, and the drug wars?
There’s actually a legitimate rebuttal to this argument:
No person has a right to have tax dollars spent on F-35s and the War on Drugs. The government is completely free to spend that money on those things, or not, as it sees fit.
The government is empowered to do all sorts of things that nobody actually has an individual right to have done.
Note that David N. didn’t say “I have a right not to have my money spent on…” but “Nobody has a right to have money spent on…”
This is liberty as a toddler understands it – the liberty not to share. “Mine!”
Forgive me if I value a woman’s liberty in controlling her body more than a religious leader’s ability to restrict the liberty of his employees.
There is no right to choose to discriminate.
David N. is a pretty smart guy.
I wonder if he cares to take up the argument that it isn’t discriminatory to refuse to cover contraception.
You know, I’m not sure how smart he is. Though I am sure that the smarter he is, the more his opinions speak ill of him.
Another reason why Obama is even better than FDR. Best president in *history*.
Don’t forget the vicious opposition that Obama has faced, unlike FDR who was universally loved and admired (except by backstabbing Gerald L.K. Smith-curious progressives, or course).
DNFFT
There’s nothing in the world that’s more tiresome than someone who sees what he thinks is a troll, sees people making substantive points in agreement or disagreement with the apparent troll, and who tries to shut down substantive discussion by yelling “DO NOT FEED THE TROLL!”
See, some of us think that trolling is quite a bit more tiresome than that.
How’s the “substantive discussion” with Ben/Mike from Lawrence going? Lots of illuminating back-and-forth?
DNFTT!
Too late.
As much as it pains you, there have already been quite a few thoughtful, substantive discussions between me and other commenters.
I do love the way that you don’t deign to notice any difference between “having a different opinion than you” and “trying to derail a thread as part of a ratfucking operation.”
Hey, that right-wing troll guy is pretending to be a disaffected lefty for this particular operation, so I think I’ll defend and side with him!
You are such a tool. An implement to be grasped and manipulated for purpose.
It does not pain me in the least. I have always said that you sometimes make substantive contributions. On the other hand, you also have a tendency to troll those who disagree with you, as you did here to R Johnston and now me. It was the latter I commented on. I have not really attacked you in this thread (or anywhere recently), so this is rather uncalled for.
Does he have an evilly beard in your nightmares?
LOL
Any post of joe’s with no more than five letters in it doesn’t even make the playoffs of the most tiresome thing he’s ever posted.
Do you remember when you used to, once in a while, write comments on subjects other than how much I get to you?
Think hard. You have to go way back, but once upon a time…
“This is why I’m supporting Ron Paul.”
Say it ain’t so,
JoeScott.Ron Paul is not worth a warm bucket of spit.
This is the kind of thing government is supposed to do.
Your snarkasm meter needs adjustment.
Ron Paul is not worth a bucket of warmspit.
Adjustment completed. Thanks.
This is unfair. If I had a bucket of warm spit, I would probably be willing to trade for Ron Paul. Owning a congressman, even a wacky one, has more utility than owning a pail of tepid saliva.
Yes, but which gives you more of the “Yeeeeee” shivers?
Mmm-mmm-mmm: salty wingnut tears.
Unlike Republicans, we don’t base our positions around what will piss off the opposition…but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it when it does.
[...] original post here: Anti-Choice Fail : Lawyers, Guns & Money ch_client = "trevone"; ch_width = 550; ch_height = 250; ch_type = "mpu"; ch_sid = "Chitika [...]
I think contraception is great. Many methods, all affordable.
I just don’t get why your health insurance should pay for it. Same goes with other drugs such as viagra.
I need a cancer drug…I have a co-pay.
I want contraception….not so much.
How does that make any sense?
Contraception is preventive medicine, not a treatment.
The policy is no copays for preventive medicine. It makes sense because it lowers costs later. This is especially obvious in the case of contraception.
The policy is no copays for preventive medicine.
Pregnancy is not a disease.
I think the government should force someone to pay for my food. It’s certainly more important than any of this.
Free FOOD, I say…and underwear…that’s pretty important as well. I just want someone else to pay for it.
Pregnancy is not a disease.
Neither is hypertension. But my insurance covers medicine to prevent it, if that’s what I choose to do.
HonorableBob,
Peddling silly propaganda hurts your credibility. Develop some intellectual curiosity and inform yourself. Find out what pregnancy is, what are some of the main anatomical and physiological changes associated with it, and the morbidity and mortality of the pregnant vs. non pregnant state.
Regardless of the other issues, paying for contraception is in the insurance providers’ financial interest. Contraception is a lot cheaper than a birth (especially if there are complications, but even when there aren’t), as well as a future person (the resulting baby) who will then also have to be insured.
Assuming this is trolling… well done, Bob! This is the way its done. Solid B+, maybe an A- on a good day and without your baggage.
Assuming its a legit comment…
Because its health care? Increased cheap access to contraceptives is a public health issue, and they have public health benefits VASTLY out of proportion to their costs. Unintended pregnancies impose huge financial and social burdens on people.
You could argue that people shouldn’t have sex, of course, but that’s… well, that’s laughable.
It is beyond laughable to beat your head against a stone wall absurd. People have always had sex and will always have sex. There has never been a time in human history or any culture in the world where everyone only had sex only while married.
Also, sex is awesome, and should be encouraged.