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US Justice Blocks Implementation of ACA Contraceptive Mandate
theodp writes "First approved for contraceptive use in the U.S. in 1960, 'The Pill' is currently used by more than 100 million women worldwide and by almost 12 million women in the U.S. But just hours before the Affordable Care Act was to go into effect, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a stay temporarily blocking a mandate requiring health insurance coverage of birth control, and gave the Obama administration until Friday to respond to the Supreme Court on the matter. Sotomayor's order applies to a group of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and other Roman Catholic nonprofit groups that use the same health plan, known as the Christian Brothers Employee Benefit Trust (PDF). The group is one of many challenging the federal requirement for contraceptive coverage, but a decision on the merits of that case by the full Supreme Court could have broader implications. One imagines Melinda Gates is none too pleased. So, will U.S. health care require a Department of Personal Belief Exemptions that are dictated by employers (PDF, 'The Trustees of CBEBT and the management of Christian Brothers Services are dedicated to protecting the employers participating in the CBEBT from having to face the choice of violating their faith or violating the law')?"
They need to quit acting like spoiled brats when they're told to get the fuck in line with an ethical society.
Whatever happened to "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"?
If I wanted to read stuff like this, I'd wander over to NBC News. Now please stick to what you're good at, delivering me fresh nerd porn.
Religious people can't simply leave it well enough alone, and just say "Well if you think contraception is wrong, just don't buy it." Instead, they have to dictate to others what they may or may not do. "We can't allow you to get contraception through our health plan!"
This kind of thinking is wrong and needs to be abolished. Let each person decide what they think is best for themselves. If someone wants to believe a person will "go to hell" if they do something, that's fine. That someone can simply not do it. But don't try to legislate or make it more difficult for others to do what they like to do, provided they're not hurting others.
Sotomayor is generally considered one of the most liberal Supreme Court Justices, but here she is issuing a ruling that will make conservatives very happy. In other words, she made the decision based on legal principles instead of her personal ideology. Don't hold your breath waiting for, say, Thomas or Alito to do the same, ever.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
By that logic you should also exempt organ transplants, blood transfusions and any other medical procedure that any group, religious or otherwise, objects to. In other words, you might as well give the fuck up and stop providing any coverage at all.
Just like if one's personal faith entails, say, pacifism (of the no support for institutional violence variety), that does not mean that one gets to opt out of, say, taxes that support the military, the police, or the prison system. Not sure how mandating that birth control is part of a federally stipulated health care package and religious (yet Sisyphean) objections to heterosexual sex are going to change that reality.
You either have healthcare or you don't. No picking and choosing what procedures or medications fit your chosen lifestyle.
A) This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events. Contraception is none of those, being completely knowable, 100% predictable, and inexpensive.
B) In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover. It's the central conceit of Obamacare that Big Fed knows best and is going to make sure you get it, pounded down your gullet if necessary.
Part of the problem is if they don't get a cutout on this then they won't get a cutout on say Abortion Coverage (which many Christians considered Murder). Plus there is the nasty trick of the Morning After Pill which is considered a contraceptive but is in reality an Abortion Pill.
There needs to be cutouts for a great many things (like pregnancy coverage for MALES and Prostate Coverage for FEMALES).
oh btw i stand as somebody that has FAILED to get coverage under ACA (i can't afford insurance and don't qualify in my state for medicare).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
... Viagra coverage for men, too. Only seems fair. If you can't get it up, it must be part of His plan.
Frankly, I've never understood the Church's fanaticism about birth control and sex without conception. I guess their `thinking' is along the lines of what comedian Chris Rush said when he joked (paraphrasing): "Don't you know that when you masturbate you're murdering millions of potential Christians?"
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Everyone can get access to as much healthcare as they want. This simply is a determination of whether very specific religious organizations are required by law to pay for something they find unethical. Just because something isn't covered by insurance doesn't mean it is denied to them. They must simply pay for it on their own. This isn't something that even costs that much.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
Contraception is something that allows you to manage the unexpected.
> In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover.
In other words, there are no standards and no concept of consumer protection. Corporations are just free to run roughshod over you. This could be your fundie employer or your crass insurance company that has an obvious conflict of interest.
You have no clue about Guilded Age you seem to long for so much.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're absolutely right. So many of us come here for content relating to computers, software, science and technology that just isn't covered properly by the mainstream press. Yet we get presented with totally irrelevant crap like this.
The godawful beta site is just making things worse. Not only is the content rubbish, but the presentation is rubbish, too.
Clearly the current approach is not working. The trend is toward driving existing users away, without drawing away new readers.
I sincerely hope that whoever is in charge at Slashdot or Dice tunes into what's happening here. Slashdot should not strive to be reddit or Digg or whatever the flavor-of-the-month social news site is. Slashdot should return to providing apolitical discussion concerning science and technology. Slashdot should drop this half-assed beta that everybody hates.
Those running Slashdot need to look no further than the GNOME 3 project to see how stupid decisions can totally destroy and ruin what were once vibrant communities. Please don't let that happen here!
The past success of Slashdot wasn't due to chasing the latest shitty web design trends or spewing out politically-charged articles. It was due to that sort of junk being avoided!
Is this an actual religous organization though or is it just a wholy owned subsidiary of a Church? At what point does such a subsidiary become a secular entity? The mormon church owned Pepsico at one point in time? Would that mean that Pepsico gets a "religious exemption".
That's absurd of course.
Being owned by a church doesn't make you a church.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is about what the government expects employers (another type of government) to provide as a minimum standard. These church organizations only "pay for abortions" if their members CHOOSE to go get them. Why don't they just TRUST their members not to get abortions?
This is ultimately back to that old fight the pre-tea party people liked to bring up about only paying 2/3 of my taxes because the gubbrtmint funds 14 things against my religious beliefs. Insurance companies that know better are jumping on this bandwagon because it's good to beat up the government.
Employers are paying for "healthcare" by putting money into the hat for employees that's where employer's rights stop. The GOVERNMENT says what conditions and circumstances that policy must follow to cover EVERY WORKER'S RIGHTS.
The Supremes are already busy ensuring that individuals have no recourse and that only corporations have any rights. So it would be situation normal for them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since when it is an issue obeying the law on the basis of "religious beliefs"? If there were a religious organization that believes in human sacrifice do they get an exemption of obeying the law of homicide?
There are many laws that can be dismissed on the basis of "religious beliefs": sacrifice, torture, divorce, adoption, medical care, anti-racist laws, equality laws, holidays, and the list goes on. If the Little Sisters of the Poor have issues with the law of the land they are free to go to other countries that are more compatible with their."religious beliefs".
What hypocrites the Little Sisters of the Poor are. Birth control health coverage would firstly help those poor woman that the non-profit group says they care about. It would help to get those woman an education and some chances of escaping their status.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I find most wars unethical - yet I have to pay for them.
This isn't about healthcare; it's about health /insurance/; big difference.
Any retail store and anybody you work for ALWAYS have quirks. We are going to have to live with that. There are gotcha problems every which way you go (even where you step).
Ask any avid brick & mortar shopper. You want something? You'll have to learn who offers what.
As long as all customers/employees are treated the same when they come through the door you should be happy.
You don't like what they offer? Don't go there. Don't seek employment there. Move to a different place... look there.
That was Zen, this is Tao
Technically, you are free to work for any employer or no employer at all. You are also free to buy contraception (or organ transplants on your own). You are free to buy your own insurance as well. The problem is that you disagree with your employer on a benefit that they are paying for. Just like any other employer policy, if you do not like it, you are free to leave (or in this case buy your own). If the religious convictions of your employer bothers you, whether they are right or wrong, technically no one is holding a gun to your head to work there.
But the governments demand is for EVERYBODY THE SAME THING. That is the KEY point of the law here... Employers put money into the insurance hat, and insurance covers conditions based on the LAW not a bunch of trick back room contracts.
This is just like car insurance must provide minimum coverages A, B, and C for various events. If the government decides every policy needs to include windshield wipers and tail lights (to improve road safety) then the insurance companies adjust their plans.
These church organizations only "pay for abortions" if their members CHOOSE to go get them. Why don't they just TRUST their members not to get abortions?
What have abortions got to do with it? This is about contraception, not abortion.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Please, please, for the love of debate, never again accuse somebody of committing the "straw man fallacy" when in fact they have not.
You have committed what is now called the Straw Man Fallacy Fallacy. That's when you commit a fallacy by accusing a fellow debater of having engaged in straw man fallacy when they have not.
And please refrain from ad hominem attacks upon other people here. Please do not call other people here "assholes", for instance, just because they advocate an idea that you personally disagree with. That is very poor debating style.
This is not reddit. We engage in intelligent discourse here, like mature adults. Please apologize, refrain from engaging in immature behavior in the future, and we can then all move on to more important discussion.
Health insurance is weird and not traditional insurance in that sense. Health insurance also covers things like routine medical checkups and dental cleanings with little or no out-of-pocket cost to you, even though those too are completely knowable, predictable, and inexpensive. But of course you realize that.
Not realistically for most people. In the real world, your employer would be able to pick and choose what you got, and and if you wanted something else you'd have to go pay an arm and a leg on your own.
There's the issue of children. How do they afford to pay for contraception if they aren't hireable, cannot work, and their parents are dead beats and refuse to help them out? Then the issue for kids to get contraception, should be for their health insurance to pay for it. Also, some of the best forms of contraception cost quite a bit, like Paragard IUDs costs about $700 for the device to be inserted.
Kids and even young women in their college years are the ones who most need to have this covered by health insurance so they can afford to regulate their birthing processes, stay in school, and are afforded the opportunity to be as successful as they can be, until they choose otherwise.
The next step is for CEO of BIGCOMPANY to decide that cancer is something decided by God, and that paying for their employees to get treatment to cancer violates their religious beliefs.
Plus there is the nasty trick of the Morning After Pill which is considered a contraceptive but is in reality an Abortion Pill.
Wrong (almost certainly). The best evidence is that "morning after pill" works by preventing fertilisation, not by inducing abortion, as you'd know if you'd read the RA (though of course this is /, so there wasn't much chance of that).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Health insurance is weird and not traditional insurance in that sense. Health insurance also covers things like routine medical checkups and dental cleanings with little or no out-of-pocket cost to you, even though those too are completely knowable, predictable, and inexpensive. But of course you realize that.
I've heard it explained thusly: if car insurance worked like health insurance, then every time you put gas in your tank, got an oil change, bought tires, etc., you would file a claim.
And if it worked that way, car insurance would be ridiculously expensive.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It all gets very complicated. It can work the other way too - there are plenty of companies which are clearly commercial entities, but happen to be owned and run by people of very strong faith. Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby have made headlines last year over just such a scenario. A broad religious exemption can quickly turn into a situation where believers are 'above the law' - able to simply declare that it doesn't apply to them when convenient.
Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events
So health insurance should not cover pre-natal care for pregnant women? Colonoscopies for middle-aged men?
Presumably by your logic since health insurance should not cover birth control, it should also not cover cholesterol nor blood pressure regulating meds?
In a modern healthcare system, prevention is preferred over treatment when possible, and it's generally cheaper. A healthcare system that covers only treatment but no prevention is... poorly designed, with perverse incentives that encourage people to never see a doctor or do anything about their health (because it's expensive) right up until the point that they're in the emergency room, and then we cover that. Which is precisely what people in the U.S. do (and what people nowhere else do, because no rational person would prefer going to the ER over seeing a GP, all else being equal).
The other nice aspect of integrated health coverage is no goddamn billing and trying to screw you over with fine print.
I used to live in the U.S., and the billing there is insane and bureaucratic. If you go to the hospital once, for one day for an outpatient procedure, you will receive bills for months afterwards. The hospital itself, the anesthesiologist, the attending physician, the surgeon, the equipment, any drugs used, everything is billed separately and uncoordinated. Half of the bills are wrongly coded and your insurance denies them, requiring hours on the phone to correct. Nobody can tell you ahead of time what the price is, and what your out-of-pocket cost will be. It's a huge mess and extremely unpleasant for everyone except the useless paper-pushers it keeps in business.
Now I live in Denmark. If you go to the hospital, here is what happens: you go to the hospital, you have the procedure, and you leave. If appropriate, you have follow-up visits. At no point do you receive a bill or have to spend hours on the phone arguing with petty bureaucrats.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The MA pill usually acts as a contraceptive, but it can prevent implantation as an alternate method of action less commonly. Depends on timing.
News for nerds -- as if politics isn't bad enough, of what need have nerds for things which keep women from getting pregnant?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you are a male, then you cannot get pregnant, insurance should account for that, correct. Except you COULD find yourself in a relationship or somehow responsible for part of a pregnancy bill... It happens sometimes, YOOU could be one-in -a-billion, that's why is still called INSURANCE.
Insurance companies know exactly what those rates per capita are for men and price accordingly... They are just gaming the system or POLITICAL points because their business is about to become "services based" rather than "tricky contract based".
In return you'd get all of those services for just the price of co-pay (maybe not the gasoline, since it's the equivalent of buying food). But certainly repairs and routine maintenance would be at a lower cost.
Then again, we only keep cars for a few years. I can't really trade my body for a new model.
Yet we get presented with totally irrelevant crap like this.
This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. Below it is a 'tech' story that's nearly six hours old that has under 40. Seems to me this topic is of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and the Slashdot overlords are doing their job.
Usually even if you have healthcare you need evidence that you actually need a procedure or medication to get it covered, otherwise you'll have to pay it yourself or get it paid with a private insurance. Here we have universal healthcare coverage and contraception is obviously not covered unless you for some reason actually *require* it and a medic gives you a prescription (like for every other procedure or medication).
This is ultimately back to that old fight the pre-tea party people liked to bring up about only paying 2/3 of my taxes because the gubbrtmint funds 14 things against my religious beliefs. Insurance companies that know better are jumping on this bandwagon because it's good to beat up the government.
Wouldn't this be an argument for a small Federal government, no?
Why isn't a vasectomy or condoms covered by Obamacare? There's nothing in the law that specifies contraception coverage is female-only.
Some religions still consider the morning after pill "abortion" since it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo. Since they consider a fertilized embryo a human life, and the fertilized embryo has been killed by prevention of implantation, it is considered abortion for them. The fact that a fertilized embryo may have otherwise not implanted successfully is considered irrelevant.
If religion gets into private business then they have to abide by standard business rules. Their choice. The law doesn't apply to the nuns - only to the people they hire. It's against my beliefs to hire anyone that is stupid enough to believe that the earth isn't billions of years old, evolution, or science in general. But I can't legally not hire them as long as they get their specific job done. 2 sides of the same coin.
Contraceptives are technology. ACA can only be implemented with technology. This is policy about technology.
These church organizations only "pay for abortions" if their members CHOOSE to go get them. Why don't they just TRUST their members not to get abortions?
As someone uselessly pointed out, it's about contraception but your point stands. It's a worthy question and it has an answer that is not difficult to verify. They don't trust their own people because large organizations, all large organizations, are run by control freaks. It doesn't matter if the control is delivered in the name of an article of faith, in the name of king and country, in the name of making money, etc.
Control freaks are not people who are content to put forth their own views. They have no true confidence in the power of their own message. They certainly have no respect for your natural right to make decisions for yourself and then reap the consequences (separating the former from the latter causes insanity). What they prefer is to remove as many alternatives as possible to _make_ you conform to their vision of How It Should Be.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I've heard it explained thusly: if car insurance worked like health insurance, then every time you put gas in your tank, got an oil change, bought tires, etc., you would file a claim.
If it worked like the UK National Health Service, all those things would be free at the point of delivery.
Everyone would pay for it in general taxation. But that amount added to taxation would be only 40% of what American's pay for their health insurance. And the payments would be progressive (more paid by the rich, less or nothing paid by the poor).
This entire argument is completely skewed, it shouldn't be blocked due to religious considerations, it should be blocked based on the fact that government is dictating to the employers and employees as to how employers pay their employees! Where is the freedom? Where is the freedom to associate, freedom of contract? Where is freedom to run private property as one sees fit? Why are you all accepting as a fact that government can dictate to employers and employees must be paid in contraceptives rather than in cash?
The second valid argument is of-course the fact that government is dictating that insurance cannot BE insurance but instead must be some form of prepaid health management system.
What do contraceptives have to do with catastrophic events that insurance is supposed to cover? Why are contraceptives any more special than food or clothing or machine oil or fuel or housing for that matter?
Insurance is a bet that some event will take place and actuary science is used to calculate the probability of events based on individual participant's and then the bets are placed. What does it have to do with events that are of near 100% probability (that women will have sex?) Insurance is not there to provide you with every day items, in fact insurance shouldn't even cover child birth - it's an EXPECTED event, not an unexpected one, it's an event that people must prepare for and they even know with almost complete certainty when exactly this will happen and they must plan for it.
Medical complications during child birth might be covered by insurance but child birth itself is simply an expected procedure that should be paid OUT OF POCKET just like most doctor visits and most other things, like birth control.
The real issue is that it is a question of individual freedom, not a question of religious prejudice.
You can't handle the truth.
This is the very essence that said democratic process may vote unconstitutional laws, and be struck down by federal courts. Obamacare has many challenges ahead, some judicial in nature.
Catholics pay taxes.. The government does all kinds of terrible non-catholic things with the catholic taxpayer's money.
Just like taxes, the EMPLOYERS pay money into the "healthcare" pot, and the government decides what services are needed for EMPLOYEES and DEPENDENTS to be covered from that pot.
Freedom of religion applies to EMPLOYEES and DEPENDENTS not "corporate" entities. Not even with the Church as your employer should you have to give up a RIGHT the Government says applies to ALL PEOPLE.
I bet that 99% of them violate their faith in some way on a daily basis. Let's not kid ourselves here.
Not to nit pick, but the only way to effectively manage not having sex.
or kill job based health insurance other then some kind of add on system for high risk jobs / extended workers comp system.
You're assuming there are no medical conditions that are treated with birth control. Women I've known have had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) or endometriosis, both of which can be treated with long term birth control.
The total lifetime cost of paying for treatment is not insubstantial.
The government is forcing someone to buy the pills. The summary makes it sound like it's all nuns and priests, but there are secretaries and accountants working for these organizations. And if one of them is on the health plan, and wants the pill, then the health plan will be paying for the pills, so, the argument is that, by proxy, the priests and nuns are paying for the pills through their premiums.
In practice, people work where they believe, if there are strong divisions, so I'd guess the number of members of CBEBT who are on the pill to be small. But there have been no numbers released for that, so we can't know. Probably because the only people who could release the numbers would have their arguments harmed by the release of them.
Learn to love Alaska
In other words, there are no standards and no concept of consumer protection. Corporations are just free to run roughshod over you. This could be your fundie employer or your crass insurance company that has an obvious conflict of interest.
Since when is consumer choice allowing corporations "to run roughshod over you"? So, in order to fix your non-existing problem, you are forcing people to pay for something they neither want nor need. In essence, in order to prevent corporations from running "roughshod over you", you are allowing government to run "roughshod over you". Wouldn't it have made more sense to pass a law that says insurance companies must offer contraceptive coverage to the customers that want it? That way, you protect the consumer while still preserving their freedom of choice.
Rather than considering to a religious thing, think of it from a liberal point of view; you are forcing gay men to pay for contraception and maternity coverage that they obviously don't need.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
For many nothing and losing all. It is not hard to predict that there will be more uninsured or on Medicaid in April, 2014 than September 2013,
I've dealt with several end of life situations. I can only see cost, frustration,and misery being added by Obamacare in those situations. Although many may benefit by Obamacare, witness hookers, HIV+, uninsurable obesity related conditions, many will not benefit from it either. Others will actively be violated or suffer under Obamacare, such as those in disagreement over standard treatment vs advanced unapproved treatments.
Once we have universal healthcare provided by our government, this problem goes away. Perhaps in my children's lifetime.
My faith requires human sacrifice, therefore my HCP is required to facilitate this.
The current ACA has serious problems, although some parts are improvements. The mandate has a lot of problems. For some in my family, ACA+FDA would be a literal killer.
It's absolutely traditional: an insurance covers some risk which might happen in the future. Incentiving practices which help in reducing the probability of this risk or the magnitude of the claim is a very old strategy to try to reduce the cost of future claims. Typical health insurance claims cost much less if the problem is discovered soon and treatment administered as soon as possible, so incentiving regular checks or a healthy lifestyle ultimately helps the insurance's bottom line.
So health insurance should not cover pre-natal care for pregnant women? Colonoscopies for middle-aged men?
No something being sold as insurance SHOULD NOT COVER either of those things. It might however offer discounts to people who chose to engage in those activities and services if they believe a their risk of having to pay a claim goes down actuarially speaking for people who do them. Just like home owners offers discounts if you install dead bolt locks, and car insurance does for years of having a clean driving record.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Nonetheless, let's rip on the conservatives, because you don't like what they think.
Understand, I think the whole "conservative vs. liberal" program of thought is a narrow self-limitation designed to make sure that who can get on the ballot and actually win an important election is easily controlled by monied interests. A spectrum of this type is illustrated by two points and a line because it is literally one-dimensional thinking. The fact that there are additional points between the two extreme points is supposed to lend the appearance of depth and give people something to argue about while their nation goes down the shitter.
Having said that, I notice that most (key word: "most" - for you reactive types) of the "I don't like what you think, therefore you are EVIL and I am so much better and smarter than you!" sort of behavior comes from those who identify themselves as liberals. Many (key word: many) of them seem eager to make everything into a personal matter rather than debating the principles behind their beliefs. They really do seem insecure and childish at times. I suppose that's why the emotional "we mean well but never really define what that means because fairness!" rhetoric of what Americans call liberalism appeals to them.
That's in addition to the naive and sometimes stupid perspective of anyone who thinks "left vs. right" has any real meaning.
A simple request: if you are functionally illiterate, emotionally volatile, or for any other reason have difficulty comprehending what words like "most" and "many" mean and why I might use them instead of using words like "all" and "every", do me a favor: fuck off and grow up. It's really tiresome.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
News for Nerds =/= News for Everyone
Also, I find it disturbing this is portrayed as if forbidding access when nobody is forbidding access to anything. Or that somehow "modern sensibilities" authorize overriding the first amendment.
They don't for free speech and they shouldn't for religion. "Congress shall pass no law" is wording carefully crafted to forbid obfuscated, pleading violations as well as brutish ones.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
seeing how in the past places like McDonald's had health insurance plans that did not cover much and they made quite a bit off of the places can lead to places trying to pull BS like wait for some to get realty sick / have a high cost thing happen and then look for some religious thing maybe even border line BS to get out paying for it.
Couple of things to note: 1) The contraceptive pill doesn't *just* stop women from getting pregnant. Many women take it as it makes their periods less painful and shorter. Ergo the pill has a multi-faceted purpose. 2) If you (and I don't just mean the OP) believe that men shouldn't help cover the pill because it's not their responsibility, then they should stop having sex with women who aren't on the pill. There's a reason why women take men to court to help pay for the children those men helped to create. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
They don't trust their own people because large organizations, all large organizations, are run by control freaks.
Would you include the govt. as one of those large organizations? Kinda worrisome when you realize govt. tends to have a monopoly on force.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
No picking and choosing what procedures or medications fit your chosen lifestyle.
So many wind up subsidizing those with the most egregious and dangerous vice ridden lifestyles, as well as those that are anathema.
Freedom is simply incompatible with some parts of this ACA.
My response to them would be:
"If this were a matter of the employers chosing for themselves, plaintiffs would have a valid point. If this were a matter of plans churches were offering to their clergy, plaintiffs would have a valid point. But this is a case where the employers in question are not making personal choices and are not acting as a church, but are acting as ordinary employers offering coverage to employees who don't necessarily follow the same beliefs as their employer. And an employer does not have the right to dictate to their employees based on the employer's religious beliefs. Plaintiffs aren't asking merely to be allowed to follow their own beliefs. They are asking to be allowed, as an ordinary employer, to say that because they don't believe in X that their employees are not allowed access to X either. If plaintiffs arguments are valid, then it would be acceptable for a business run by a Jehova's Witness to offer coverage that forbade treatments involving blood transfusion simply because the business owner followed that belief system. And we don't permit that. We don't allow a business owner to force his employees to follow his beliefs just because they work for him. We don't allow him to say "Profess to follow my beliefs or you won't be allowed access to health insurance.". To allow that wouldn't be freedom of religion, it would be the antithesis of freedom of religion."
Technically speaking the risks are insurance claims due to unwanted pregnancy. Assuming unwanted pregnancies do actually cost the healthcare insurance money, reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies reduces the claims to be paid. Subsidizing contraception is an investment made to prevent more claims, and it might be a good investment if the money invested is less than the cost of the claims it prevented.
Because the average healthcare consumer doesn't really have any choice, putting all the power in the hands of corporations.
Are you being willfully ignorant here?
A lot of people neither want nor need public schools, they pay for them anyway.
I believe that happened. And now the corporations are bitching.
It isn't a religious thing explicitly - it's a cynical "conservative" ploy to attack and undermine the ACA by using religion as a means to cut out parts of coverage. Note, of course, that this all simply means that these services are covered and must be paid for if utilized, this attack on the ACA is about pushing to make sure it's not available at all.
Oh hogwash! There have been millions of families who have went thier entire lives avoiding pregnancy by using commonly available contraception methods. The entire point of a contraceptive is to "manage" the risk of getting pregnant. I am nitpicking here: you advocate prevention. If you prevent something from ocurring you avoided it entirely but if you manage something, you couldn't avoid it all so had to deal with it but hopefully managed to sway the outcome in a favorable manner. No contraceptive claims 100% effectiveness and most folks know that. It works fine for the overhwelming majority. The only 100% preventative cure for pregnancy is abstinance as you claim but there are many here on /. that will claim that even abstaining can't prevent all pregnancies.
'The Trustees of CBEBT and the management of Christian Brothers Services are dedicated to protecting the employers participating in the CBEBT from having to face the choice of violating their faith or violating the law'
I think they must misunderstand. The ACA does not require people who have a religious opposition to birth control to take the pill. Similarly, I'm sure the ACA does not require Jehova's Witnesses to accept blood transfusions, but an insurance company operated by Jehova's Witnesses and catering to them would still have to cover transfusions.
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Nobody questions that, it's obvious that the coverage needs to be mandated and defined in the law. The problem is more "does it makes sense that contraception is included in the basic healthcare coverage mandated by law?".
Should it cover prenatal care for pregnant men? It does and that's why it's stupid.
Except it doesn't, and people who keep repeating that are lying. I work in medical billing and I'm willing to bet that if I submit a claim for a C-Section on a guy tomorrow, it will be rejected by the insurance company's computer for patient gender not matching the procedure.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to pass a law that says insurance companies must offer contraceptive coverage to the customers that want it?
That's what Obamacare did. Now Christian Brothers Services, the Chick-fil-a of the insurance world, is complaining that the law says they must offer contraceptive coverage despite the fact that their Bible says not to.
No, they are forcing the customer to pay for services they don't need. The employee is not the customer. The company paying for the insurance is. If the employee wanted to forgo the insurance plan offered by the employer and pay for their own, contraceptive providing coverage, there is nothing the employer could say about it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
A panel of experts, including Doctors, determined that contraceptive should be part of a rational medical insurance plan.
Sadly, reality is much more pathetic than that. It was included in the plan because of the efforts of Senator Barbara Mikulski to get them included. Her efforts were mainly aimed at helping women, which is why vasectomies aren't covered.
By now you should not expect the ACA to be reasonable and well planned.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events.
True and a baby very much fits that description.
In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover.
For most people no you could not. Most people get their insurance through their work and the type of insurance was chosen by someone else, probably for cost reasons. You did not get to chose most of the specifics of the coverage available to you.
The insurance provider is required by law to provide coverage for contraception, but it's still free to charge what it wants for that coverage based on risk. Why don't they create a plan which they offer only to specific groups people where that plan still provides coverage for contraception/maternity/etc, based on a vastly reduced risk factor. The risk of a nun wanting contraception is very small, but not non-existent I'm guessing. The risks of a nun needing maternity care are slightly higher (e.g. in cases of rape, where the nun would never choose to abort or prevent pregnancy with a morning after pill). The point being, because the risks are low, the insurance provider can say: Hey, on our plan, you won't pay for cover of contraceptives, maternity, family planning etc, but we will still provide the cover if it happens, because the risk is so low the cover can be paid for out of a little bit of the general risk pool. Every insurance provider manages has a general risk pool, where they aggregate all the possible events that occur so infrequently as to be entirely stochastic over the time periods in question, for example, a year, 5 years etc. They just can't plan for covering the expenses down that level of risk detail, because the stats don't work at such low frequencies. I'm sure there will be cases, but very rarely, in which maternity care and even possibly contraception might be medically necessary for someone who hasn't acted against their faith. Again, the case of rape springs to mind, but there's also the use of oral contraceptives to deal with disease related hormonal imbalances, and probably others.
There are sensible ways to do this where faith doesn't need to be compromised, so yeah, this is about a certain group of people trying to enforce their own way on other people. Cristian Scientists refuse a wide variety of modern medical procedures becasue it goes against their faith. Will they get to challenge mandatory health care in it's entirety?
All sorts of other insurance would fail your criteria. Flood insurance, auto insurance (who goes through life with no accidents?), life insurance, dental insurance and so on.
Or for that matter pregnancy, anything arising from old age, any pre-existing conditions etc. should not be covered.
Your definition of insurance is some abstract ideal that does not correspond to reality.
Because the average healthcare consumer doesn't really have any choice, putting all the power in the hands of corporations.
The customer is the employer that is paying for the coverage. They have lost choice by this law. Again, I have no problem with the insurance companies being forced to offer a particular coverage. I think that is a great idea. I have a problem with the customer being forced to buy it.
A lot of people neither want nor need public schools, they pay for them anyway.
This is a local issue, not a federal one. Schools are paid for by local and state taxes.
I believe that happened. And now the corporations are bitching.
No, the customers are bitching because they are being forced to pay for services that violate their religion.
It isn't a religious thing explicitly - it's a cynical "conservative" ploy to attack and undermine the ACA by using religion as a means to cut out parts of coverage. Note, of course, that this all simply means that these services are covered and must be paid for if utilized, this attack on the ACA is about pushing to make sure it's not available at all.
Yes, in this particular case, this is a religions thing. And again, I have no problem with the patient paying for contraceptive coverage, if they so choose. I have a problem with both the patient and the employer paying for coverage even if they do not want it.
You are basically saying that the government decides what coverage needs to be provided and not the people.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Don't act like your side doesn't get equally onerous interpretations of law crammed down everyone's throat as well. This country is 100% quid pro quo, tit for tat, and all the rest. While we make people pay for things they aren't gonna use, you make us pay for you to tap all of our phones and buy the drones you'll use to make sure we're complying with whatever thing it is we said we wanted you to pay for. For whatever greedy fucking reason, one side can't just contribute to people who want contraceptives because somehow that gets bent into the weird idea that since they're paying for it, then everyone HAS to take them and they're gonna put a camera on your xbox to make sure you take them. The other side is just as ludicrous as the other! I see through your victim playing.
In a small number of cases, The Pill is prescribed for reasons that have nothing to do with contraception.
If a licensed doctor prescribes a medication, no-one other than another doctor should be questioning it. Not the pharmacist, who is only authorized to advise about drug interactions, not an insurer, and certainly not the employer.
This is how insurance works, if a group of people have lower risk factors for certain things then the premiums come down. So if these particular employers want the premiums to not include birth control then they should tell their employees not to have sex or whatever. That way if the employees end up costing the insurance companies less in terms of birth control then the premiums will adjust accordingly (though they would probably will go up due to increased demand for pregnancy care and terminations). Campaigning to have their employees treated as a distinct category for actuarial purposes would be mildly logical and certainly better than campaigning to give their employees worse healthcare.
I would like to see some authorized claims on pre-natal care for men to verify your assertion.
The idea that the PPACA covers pregnancy related claims for men is a conservative meme that has no relationship to reality. It's based on the fact that the PPACA does not allow rate differentiation between men and women, that is the cost of covering pregnancy is distributed over the cohort of both men and women.
Wow, someone's mad about being a 40 year old virgin.
The preferred way for church leadership is to just do it with children before they are of fertile age.
I would never have posted this, but with the new /. layout coming soon, I might as well burn my karma before it gets worthless anyway.
No, the recipient is the customer because it is part of their benefits package. Their employer is simply negotiating on their behalf.
The fucked up thing about this statement is that you see the corporation as the customer and insist that the corporation has a religion. Of course, opposition to contraceptives is idiotic, but that's pretty much true of most superstitious beliefs.
No, I'm saying that the government should push to ensure that the people get access to coverage that corporations want to cynically refuse in favor of unscientific, superstitious ideals.
Just because something isn't covered by insurance doesn't mean it is denied to them.
Actually in many cases it means exactly that, specifically for people who are poor. The cost of contraceptive medicine might not sound like much to you but for many people it is prohibitively expensive. By allowing institutions to deny coverage for this item they are effectively denying that medicine to those who might want it. These institutions cannot possibly speak for the moral values of every one of their employees.
Religion should never be used to justify / stifle science or medical advancements. If you don't want The Pill covered then fine, just don't buy it, personally i like knowing that when I sleep with my girl friend she is protected. Religion hurts the world, it blocks logic and demands stupidity, personally I think we should block religion from being practice.
Nonetheless, men have to pay for it.
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...shut down your business. Seriously, if these convictions are truly heartfelt, then the rational thing to do is to sell/get out of the business. (I'm thinking about the Hobby Lobby case here, more than anything else.)
I personally know a Quaker or two who intentionally keep their earnings below the taxable level, so they won't have to pay federal income taxes - and therefore indirectly support war. This causes them a great deal of personal hardship, but... hey, havin' principles isn't always easy.
Simply not true. Get out of that rock you have been under for decades.
Replace "church" with "religion" and you just described every defective mind in the world.
Oh and since we want to complain about the government running roughshod over you by forcing you to pay for contraceptives against your will, why does your side already force myself and others to pay for fertility treatments for people on welfare? Tenncare does in fact pay for those who recieve it to get fertility treatments and pop out new welfare babies on the taxpayer's dime. In what world does that make fiscal sense? I have a hard time even finding the moral positive to it. In some screwed up way, it is right in the eyes of the Lord for that 16 year old girl that already has a meth habit to pop that child out and cause multiple lives to suffer instead of allowing her to have an abortion or even a free fucking rubber. And you already force me to pay for that! America is quid pro quo. We've been giving you the quo's so we want our fucking quids! Suck it up!
Did you know? Catholic teaching states condoms are immoral, as they prevent fertilization. The more you know!
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
You are deliberately confusing birth control with sex hormones. Hormones are quite cheap, absent government interference, drug company overpricing (allowed by government interference) and retail markup (caused by government interference.) Figure a penny a day in a free market.
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Regular checkups can detect disease before it becomes serious. The health AND economic benefits are very high and you don't want people to hesitate, which is why you cover the costs. Saves money and suffering.
In the old days, your corporate HR department could pick and choose what procedures and medications your policy would cover, at least in theory, but only if you worked for a really big company. Small companies got whatever the standard package was. And of course, that meant viagra, but not the pill, for the most part, which is the whole point of mandating coverage for contraceptive hormones.
It is very typical for reactionaries to argue about a "good old days" that never existed, and this is a classic example. What has changed is not that you have no choice, but that what is on offer is somewhat less unfair toward women than it used to be. Unless the Supremes decide otherwise, of course.
It actually works that way because at the core it's the same issue: the insurance wants to reduce claim costs by enforcing/incentiving behaviour which prevents the claim to happen at all or reduce its magnitude. The difference is in the way it's done: you might get a discount on the premium e.g. if you do extra checks or maintenance or keep a low mileage, or get your claim paid only if you have proof that you did the due maintenance correctly.
Car insurance is less expensive simply because the insured risks are much cheaper than in health insurance.
Looking from the outside, your separation of church and state in the U.S. is a joke. The fact that issues like abortion and contraception are issues of state/federal policy and not individual conscience is only the most obvious indicator of this. Then there's the disproportional political clout of the bible belt in your politics. Yes, while technically the U.S. is a secular state with freedom of religion, the electoral system links the church and state in non-explicit ways. Practically speaking, the U.S. is a Christian nation which tolerates (very impressively in most cases) the practice and observance of other religions, but for the most part it's laws are drafted from a Christian moral background, and generally benefit Christians above others.
In general religions can be organised according to their permissiveness, and Christianity is fairly permissive. But when it comes to politics, we don't like to talk about permisiveness. We prefer to call it liberty. Some religions believe in some incrediblby harsh punishements for minor social/religious infractions. But no, in a modern democracy, where some people (i.e. 'Us Christains') don't believe those infractions are infractions at all, or merit such punishments, we call it 'liberty' and say people can't be punished that way. I agree with this, personally. Up a level, some religions don't allow the eating of pork. But some people like pork and eat it (i.e. 'Us Christians' again), so we can't ban prok products outright becasue that would infringe on my liberty. You are free not to eat pork products, but you can't stop me from having them. That's called 'liberty' buddy! Some religions don't like people having casual sex (generally women are judged more harshly in this than men, but I'll ignore that for the moment). But some people do like fucking around, so we can't interfere with their practices ... well actually, fine! we can't BAN it, but we can make it difficult, i.e. interfere with their actions, for those people to have access to the medical care that supports their choices. Because that's 'liberty' buddy, I'm free to do as much as I (a modern Christian) want to do, but anything I don't like... well that's different.
I am saying nobody has to provide insurance coverage. Insurance is cowardly, and therefor immoral. Forcing me to buy or provide insurance is forcing me to be immoral. As such, it is an abomination beyond common immorality, it is evil.
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And so is prostate cancer. Not many women get that. What was your point again?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
That whole "Mormons owned Pepsi" thing is an urban legend that isn't true, just as an FYI.
You just said it perfectly. "Consumer choice" is a propaganda phrase, which means "letting corporations run roughshod over you." That's one way that propaganda works—you use a catchphrase that is palatable but untrue to refer to the unpalatable truth, and everybody who believes you supports the thing that is against their interests, because they believed you. It's brilliant when it works, as it has with you.
Your "gay man" example is absurd, by the way—there are in fact health issues that disproportionately affect gay men, and I suspect most of them would prefer to pay into the common kitty rather than being forced into a "gay men only" class. Another classic propaganda tactic—set two people with largely common interests against each other by finding a small subset of their interests which aren't in common, and presenting those differences as the primary issue, rather than as the minor side issue they really are. This tactic has been hugely successful in keeping working people at each others' throats over stupid issues like, I don't know, contraception, for example.
Sorry, posted reply to wrong post.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
By forcing "believers" to provide something they oppose, Congress is "prohibiting the free exercise" of their religion.
Baloney. We prohibit lots of looney things that people claim as part of their religion. They can believe whatever they want but as soon as it infringes on someone elses beliefs or needs (like by denying them medicine based on someone else's morals) then their freedom of religion should end. Your right to religious freedom ends where it meets mine.
Contraception is something that allows you to manage the unexpected.
> In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover.
In other words, there are no standards and no concept of consumer protection. Corporations are just free to run roughshod over you. This could be your fundie employer or your crass insurance company that has an obvious conflict of interest.
You have no clue about Guilded Age you seem to long for so much.
Every state has a regulator for insurance products. If there are problems and you want to address them, that should happen as close to the people as possible, not in a one-size-fits all central bureaucracy that believes it can control all. And of course, back in the guilded age I lived thru but am clueless about, the INDIVIDUAL had the ultimate power: one could ditch the fundie employer and/or the crass insurance company. Not so easy now. Some markets (and I use that word loosely) have but a single insurer.
Obamacare is ultimately going to prove unworkable, as evidenced by the ad hoc and chaotic delays, changes, and demands that the Obama administration is making almost on a daily basis. The only question is how much suffering and expense is it going to take before that's acknowledged, and what's going to replace it.
If you work for a Jehovah's witness employer they may demand that blood transfusions be covered. If you work for a Christian Science believer they may demand only broken bones be covered by health insurance.
If you work for a secular employer, they may suddenly "discover religion" in order to lower their health care costs.
well then make some kind of extended workers comp system / give OSHA more rights to fine for unsafe stuff. Why should taxpayers be on hook for some who get's hurt on the job due to unsafe deadlines / lack of proper safety gear.
aca Cadillac tax does have an high risk out of the tax.
this is about religious organizations with employees with the same religious values.
No, it's about money and control. Furthermore the point of insurance is to create a risk pool that everyone participates in, i.e. everyone pays. I have to pay for things all the time that I don't agree with and so do you. Personally I resent having to contribute to a health insurance pool for people who sponge off society (i.e. nuns) while contributing limited discernible value back to it but I do it anyway and mostly keep my mouth shut.
here's a pro-tip, don't work for a religious organization if you don't hold their beliefs.
Here's another pro-tip. Sometimes you have to take employment where you can get it.
you can get the pill for about 20 bucks a month, When I was younger and my girlfriend and I became sexually active, I drive her to go get them, it was no big deal. Sorry, but something like that is in no way needed to be paid for by insurance, If you cant afford 20 bucks a month for the pill, or use free condoms that you can get damn near anywhere, maybe you shouldnt be having sex to begin with.
I want someone to explain to me why its ok that I should pay for other peoples sex drugs? To be fair I dont believe you should be able to get viagra on insurance either
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No one is saying that believers are "above the law". What we are saying is that the ACA is not above the law.. The law I'm speaking of is this one:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
I think you misunderstand, the ACA is the law - passed by congress and approved by the President. It does not conflict with the first amendment. Please re-read:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
By forcing "believers" to provide something they oppose, Congress is "prohibiting the free exercise" of their religion.
The problem is that they merely oppose the use of birth control - it does not prevent them from their beliefs (unless you can cite the line in your religious text containing the words "birth control", then we'll talk). IF birth control were to be offered under the plan but never used by anyone, would it be any different than a plan that didn't offer birth control? The cost would be the same since the offer was never ever used.
The same law that allows "believers" to practice their religion is the same law that prevents government from forcing you to be a believer.
What if an employer has a religion which believes in "faith healing" only. By requiring them to provide any health insurance would be wrong in your view. At this juncture, you have forced your employees to be without health insurance. This forces the employees into the same "faith healing" - effectively forcing your employees into that religious belief.
For some strange reason, the ACA did not fix this problem.
Actually it mostly did fix it, albeit imperfectly. Now if I lose my employment I can still get health insurance coverage of reasonable quality for a reasonable price and I cannot be denied coverage just because I got sick previously. While I won't argue that the system is ideal (far from it), it is a MUCH better situation.
We need to decouple health care and employers by eliminating the tax break that employers get.
Actually it's not a tax break that employers get. It's a tax break that employees get. The monies that your employer pays for health insurance are a direct benefit to you but they're not taxed as regular income. Additionally, any contribution that you must make towards the premium comes from pre-tax dollars. Go out and buy an individual policy and you'll be compelled to pay for it with post-tax dollars, meaning it effectively costs more than group coverage even if the policies are the same price on paper.
Personally, I would go the other way, make individual policies tax deductible rather than taxing group policies. This seems more fair to me -- why should people pay taxes on something as essential as healthcare -- and it's actually politically possible. Yanking away the tax benefit of group policies would add thousands of dollars to the taxable income of countless millions of Americans, with predictable consequences at the ballot box for any politician that tried to make it happen.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They don't trust their own people because large organizations, all large organizations, are run by control freaks. Would you include the govt. as one of those large organizations? Kinda worrisome when you realize govt. tends to have a monopoly on force.
Government is the very prototype from which the rest learn the methods of control. Force is but one way to control and manipulate. For example, a favorite tactic the US federal government uses to manipulate the states requires no direct force at all. They tax the citizens of a state and then offer to give them their own money back if and only if they behave as desired. Few states can meet their budgets without this money and no state can simply print money the way the feds can. It makes them most malleable.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So now my plan is gone, I'd have to pay more than four times the amount for a bronze plans that does all sorts stuff I won't use to subsides others. Sorry no fucking thank you.
You seem to be hugely mistaken about how insurance works. We ALL pay into a pool and share the risk so that we individually won't be crushed by the financial burden of an illness. Insurance (even catastrophic coverage) cannot work unless everyone pays for stuff they probably wont need.
I have voluntarily gone uninsured because, the penalties are cheaper and I can always buy a plan for the first time after I have a condition.
You cannot buy a plan after the fact because they do not kick in immediately. Most plans even through the health exchanges take at least 2 weeks (usually more) to take effect and cannot be purchased at any time. In all likelihood you will incur a huge amount of medical bills in the event of an accident or serious illness prior to receiving coverage.
Of course now a catastrophic event might bankrupt me leaving everyone else to pay the costs; something I would have previously felt bad about but now, I see it as hey society tried to pick my pocket first; so screw'em.
You aren't screwing anyone but yourself by being cheap. But enjoy your bankruptcy. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun.
Repost? Stupid mobile site... In this case, the law was blocks because going through the process of opting out of contraceptive coverage for a group of nuns was against their religion. The nuns essentially claimed they could not comply with the government's view of due process. This due process seems well within recognized limits to the church-state separation. I doubt it will be upheld. If the argument is that your religion compels you to not do paperwork, you're probably being ridiculous. And all these Sebilius cases represent a pretty terribad slippery slope. The next logical exception for religious institutions could be for their health coverage to not cover pregnant single mothers, because the church views pregnant single mothers as amoral. The whole thing sounds like a heap of administrative weight that will just drive health costs up for everyone. Individual members of a church pay sales tax, which can be theoretically funneled into state contraceptive programs. Religious institutions that pay taxes may have their taxes put to similar use. Since SCOTUS has already decided the Individual Mandate is a tax, the compulsory terms of health insurance should/could be regarded in the same way. If this is allowed to stand, as a cultural Christian with a fierce hatred of the way health insurance was administered prior to the ACA (and who is currently not impressed with the progress of implementing the ACA), I hope that there is an opt-out fee that is equal to or greater than the fee for contraceptive coverage.
Yep. The problem with pre-ppaca health care was that the tax environment encouraged the situation where it made sense that you would get your health coverage from your employer.
post-ppaca, the tax environment still encourages you to get your health coverage from your employer, with the added caveat that even if you are self-employed or otherwise choose to get it on your own, you still can't choose your coverage a la carte, under the assumption that you are not competent to make that decision for yourself, like a child or dementia sufferer.
We're turning health coverage into a utility instead of a healthy, competitive marketplace. Utility prices don't adjust to the market the same way that competitive markets do, as billionaire Warren Buffet can attest (he loves investing in utilities. Also, he is a big supporter of ppaca...).
The consumer doesn't see savings as processes improve efficiency, because the utility has no incentive to bother even researching efficiency - it charges the prices it is allowed to charge and puts its effort into meeting regulatory standards and lobbying for price increases. Sometimes cleverly combining the two.
If you don't like the fact that employers have so much power in your health care, you probably shouldn't be supporting a system that doubles down on that paradigm.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover. It's the central conceit of Obamacare that Big Fed knows best and is going to make sure you get it, pounded down your gullet if necessary."
The ACA mandates minimum standards. Yes, in the old days you could 'pick' a health insurance policy that you paid $90 a month for which only paid $50 of any procedure you needed. Now "Big Fed" is insisting you actually get some basic coverage. There's still absolutely nothing stopping you 'picking and choosing' what procedures and medications your insurance will cover once the (rather rudimentary) minimums have been covered.
So you're saying that sex leads to kids 100% of the time?
Also, are you saying that people who take heart medication because they have a heart condition shouldn't be covered? Who are you to decide what should and shouldn't be covered?
No something being sold as insurance SHOULD NOT COVER either of those things
You're right, which is why the USA, like all other wealthy nations (and a few poor ones) should have health coverage for all her people, not 'insurance.'
BTW, forcing me to pay for your cancer meds when I do not have cancer and never will get cancer is not ethical.
Very good. That's what personalized insurance, not blanket insurance mandated by the gov, is about.
"Christ-fags are everything which is wrong with America."
I'm a very solid atheist, which you can verify for yourself by checking my posting history. You're an ass and more of a bigot than the Christians I know.
THIS.
We should have single payer health coverage. We all deserve to share the benifits of modern medicine just as we all share the benifits of the safety of modern road construction.
We are supposed to be a fucking society after all. Why, then, is anything labeled socialist automatically dismissed or attacked outright?
The pill isn't just used for contraceptive reasons, but also for hormone regulation, particularly for women with exceptionally painful menstrual cramping. That Christians would rather exacerbate these people' suffering simply because the pill has other uses doesn't sound very Christian.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.
I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.
All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.
Muslims believe that during the month of Ramadan people should not even drink water between sunrise and sunset. . So Muslim employers should be able to petition OSHA to allow them to remove water coolers during day time during the month of Ramadan.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Birth control pills are cheap compared to the cost of deliver, pre and post-natal care. It is quite possible for the insurance companies to charge more to withhold pills.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or you could assume that your money is going to fund heart transplants and cancer treatment. Money is fungible after all.
No, if car insurance worked like health insurance, it would cover mechanical problems, like engine blow ups, tire failures, transmission slippage, suspension wear. In that case it makes sense for the insurer to pay for oil changes, new tires, etc as it is less expensive than paying for a new engine, accident caused by blow-out, and the like. Car insurance as we know it is more similar to Accidental Death and Dismemberment coverage. If you die or lose limbs, like in an accident, they pay. Much cheaper, not even close to health insurance.
LRN 2 SWM
Sotomayer is Catholic, and this suit was brought by Catholic organizations.
Americans have got to be the stupidest people on the planet. Everyone screams about abortion but at the same do every thing thy can to make it harder for people to access contraception something that has been shown in study after study as reducing not only abortions but also health and social services costs.. Then again almost 50% of them think the Bible is a science text book so I guess that explains it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Health insurance works more like the extended warranty I bought on my car. To add 4 years and and an extra 40000 miles to my cars warranty, it cost me $2,000. Car insurance of the normal type is about 800 per year for my car.
I am not sure I would call the extended warranty ridiculously expensive.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
And the payments would be progressive (more paid by the rich, less or nothing paid by the poor).
Well, thats all well and good, however, in the US the rich don't pay taxes. So more paid by whats left of the middle class, the poor go to prison.
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Hippie Logger Jock
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A) This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events. Contraception is none of those, being completely knowable, 100% predictable, and inexpensive.
I think part of the problem is that two related things are being conflated. They often meld, and it's difficult telling where one begins and the other ends.
Those two things are "health insurance" and "health care."
You truly don't understand, do you. If all the customers of the idiotic insurer are good Christians, they will not get any contraceptives. Ergo, nobody would get contraceptives, the idiot insurer would not have to reimburse, and the premium of the idiot insurer goes down, and nobody actually pays for the service. Apparently the customers of the idiot insurer are not as strong in the faith as the idiot insurer, and he wants the government to give him a stick to beat the flock into their version of moral behavior.
I've heard it explained thusly: if car insurance worked like health insurance, then every time you put gas in your tank, got an oil change, bought tires, etc., you would file a claim.
Well, just one more difference: when you fill up your tank you'd get a bill for $50/gallon which the station would try to get you to pay up front. If you object strongly they'll give in and bill your insurance first. Your insurance would pay $4.50/gallon and ask you to pay $0.50/gallon, and would write off the other $45/gallon as being overpriced. If you didn't have insurance the gas station would tell you that they'd cut you a break and only charge you $25/gallon and you'd thank them for the favor you think they're doing you.
Lack of contraception leads to more babies, leads to additional health costs. It's a cost-cutting measure.
Contrary to common belief, Insurance is *not* healthcare. It's a way of distributing risk. For example, your car insurance will not cover oil changes, or regular maintenance. H*ck, even extended warranties will not cover those. This is because the cost structure is very well known (so and so much every 6 months).
Thus -- ignoring what these churches ask -- the only reason for including contraception would be reducing future risk. I.e.: the cost of these pills are well known, and the insurance would normally prefer not to cover them, as they do not cover aspirin, or baby diapers. However by including cheap contraception pill they mitigate a more costly future risk (a "cheap" delivery will cost 10K+ these days, and God forbid if there is anything wrong probably in the 100ks). So for insurance it makes sense to include these pills (still no aspirin).
However the church -- or whatever organization that does not want to provide these, just needs to have a separate pool of insurants, so that the cost of delivering a baby is only distributed among them. (I'm assuming they would also like to have more babies in general, but this might not necessarily be true for all religions).
I never said they cant or shouldnt, Im referring to the fine I have to pay by not getting insurance
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
There are horrible costs to the individual, the country and the planet for anyone to have children they don't want are not able to support. Contraception should be offered for free and by default to everyone reaching the age of about 14. If we fail at voluntary measures and financial support, we are looking at misery, sick planet and China-style forced single child policies in a decade or two.
Couldn't agree more. Frontline had a really good show on some of the healthcare issues in the US and some innovative things being done to try to improve care. Prevention was a big one. They had one case where a poor person had resulted in Medicaid spending something like $60k/yr in ER treatments for acute asthma, but the problem went away completely when a volunteer organization spent $6k fixing his drywall so that the whole house wasn't filled with dust. That is a problem that probably even European countries wouldn't handle well, though obviously they're light-years ahead of the US on the prevention front.
No one is saying the religious institutions don't have to provide insurance coverage. They are saying that they should not have to pay for services that violate their religion.
A religion is whatever its adherents want it to be. There are plenty of religions that don't believe in vaccination or other forms of treatment that didn't exist 200 years ago. Does that mean that a small business owned by such a person doesn't have to provide those either? HPV vaccine has made headlines in recent years as one which might encourage/assume promiscuous behavior, but virtually every major medical association recommends that young women get it.
If it worked like the UK National Health Service, all those things would be free at the point of delivery.
Note that prescriptions and dentistry are not free in the UK (though they are subsidised).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Ahahahaha! You are the funny man, aren't you? Tell me, was the filibuster a 'loophole' when the Dems used it mercilessly during the Reagan administration? When you put a 90+ year old man out there to talk about his life growing up in West Virginia (conveniently leaving out details of his time in the KKK), until his senility overcame him?
No, it was placed there to prevent the tyranny of the majority. We put up with it then, and in times past. God help you Democrats if the Republicans win the House and Senate. Don't think using the 'nuclear option' isn't going to come back and bite you in the ass - big time.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The average healthcare consumer buying in the private market place had lots of choice pre-ACA. The problem pre-ACA was that insurance was frequently tied to employers because of tax law; that's what reform should have fixed.
The corporations aren't bitching at all; Obama handed them huge, guaranteed profits on a silver platter. And morons like you think this is some kind of big anti-corporate victory and are actually defending this crap.
The UK single payer system is no more efficient or cheaper than other European health insurance systems, many of which operate completely differently. Therefore, your assertion that the UK system magically results in cost control relative to private or other insurance systems is bullshit.
And that's a good thing because...?
It never ceases to amaze me that religious people - Christians - seem to be so almost universally against contraception. Is it really better to be born into a lifetime of guaranteed, hopeless poverty and suffering, than simply not being brought into existence at all? I wonder what those 'blessed' with that existence would say, if the faith-mongers would care enough listen? Religion is not necessarily evil, but when your personal opinion gets to be called 'faith' and becomes more important that real life and real people, then it is hard to think of any other word for it.
The UK single payer system is no more efficient or cheaper than other European health insurance systems, many of which operate completely differently. Therefore, your assertion that the UK system magically results in cost control relative to private or other insurance systems is bullshit.
However, pretty much *all* those systems are single-payer, and radically cheaper to run than the American system, so what we can determine is that the American system as is is astonishingly inefficient. I would have thought when you look at a foreign system that's much more efficient, you'd want to know why and find out why yours is so expensive, rather than just dismissing it.
And that's a good thing because...?
Oh... you're one of *those*.
This anecdote doesn't match my experience of the NHS or the figures. Screening is common here, as are vaccinations. Life expectancy is longer in the UK than the US. People visit the doctor more in the UK than the US. This is directly counter to your manager's anecdotal hypothesis.
The primary goal of the NHS isn't to keep its costs down, it's not a business! The goal is to improve public health, and that's how the decisions are taken. Anyway, giving someone a vaccination to prevent illness, or catching a cancer early is a much cheaper than treating at an advanced stage.
This is a local issue, not a federal one. Schools are paid for by local and state taxes
Tell this to no child left behind and the loads of other laws that give federal money to schools....
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You used to be able to get private insurance considerably cheaper than now with the ACA, so the situation has become much worse.
Demonstrably untrue for most people, especially once you take the tax credits into account as long as you are comparing similar plans. If you are comparing a high deductible catastrophic coverage plan to a more conventional plan then your comparison is bogus. I'm relatively young and healthy and I've had to purchase individual insurance in the past when I consulted on my own. I could not get rates that even came close to what one could get through group rates. I had to purchase catastrophic coverage with a $5000 deductible because that was the only economical option.
I run a company with less than 50 employees and we sent all our employees to the exchanges, myself included, because the cost was a big improvement. I've spent a LOT of time looking at health insurance in the last six months. Almost every one of our employees has been able to get equivalent or better coverage for equivalent or less money. Even better while the employee's out of pocket hasn't gone up the company no longer has to kick in anything so the total cost of the insurance is about half of what it was previously once you take the full cost (company share plus employee share) into account.
Of course, what you can do now is simply not bother to get coverage until you get sick
You are dangerously misinformed. You cannot just wait until you are sick to get coverage. Coverage does NOT kick in immediately. There is at minimum a 2 to 6 week wait during open enrollment and outside of open enrollment you cannot sign up at all unless you meet some strict criteria. The law is NOT written in a way that allows you to sign up after you get sick. Insurance companies aren't so stupid as to allow people to sign up once they are sick and the ACA was written with this in mind. The economic term for this is adverse selection. If people could just sign up only when sick, insurance could not work because only sick people would sign up. Economically it only works if you have a pool of healthy and sick people.
Seriously, if you really believe this you are playing with fire. You CANNOT sign up after the fact. If you are in an accident you will take an enormous financial hit.
So what does contraception have to do with this?
Paying for contraception is a LOT cheaper than paying for prenatal or pediatric care. Having contraceptive coverage will save you and everyone else in the insurance pool money in the long run.
I doubt it would help people who can't be bothered to buy and use cheap contraceptives, for example.
What you consider to be "cheap" contraceptives are still beyond the means of many people if they had to pay the full price themselves. Good luck affording contraceptives on Walmart wages when you have to pay for rent, transportation and food.
Are you serious? There's a lot of expensive health problems that can be put off for two weeks.
It's only 2-6 weeks during open enrollment which ends in March. After that you have to wait until the next open enrollment period which can be 9 months away. You CANNOT sign up after the fact in most cases. Insurance cannot work if everyone could sign up after the fact. (The economics term for this is adverse selection and insurance companies are WELL aware of it.) Furthermore most of the most likely expensive health problems are unexpected ones like hospital stays. Get in a car accident (no your auto insurance will not cover you for medical expenses) and you could easily rack up many tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs literally overnight. Have a fast moving sickness or a heart attack and you'll owe a LOT of money very quickly. Are you seriously going to argue that you can put off a visit to the ER for weeks if not months? If so then you are a either deluded or a fool.
And in the rare situation where it does, then go with bankruptcy and move on.
That my naive young friend is economic insanity. You clearly do not understand the consequences of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy does NOT wipe your leger clear. You still owe most of the money. At best you'll be able to negotiate a payment plan and maybe reduce a bit here and there. You cannot get a loan of any kind for less than absurd rates if you can get one at all. Want to buy a car or a house? Tough luck. Credit card? Hah! Want a cell phone? Going to be pre-paid. Want a job? Lots of employers look at credit history and will pass you buy if you have a bankruptcy. You seriously are playing with fire if you really think declaring bankruptcy is anything but a terrible option.
And the payments would be progressive (more paid by the rich, less or nothing paid by the poor).
Well, thats all well and good, however, in the US the rich don't pay taxes. So more paid by whats left of the middle class, the poor go to prison.
That's just not true. You can argue that the rich don't pay _enough_ in taxes, but they certainly pay taxes, and the bulk of taxes. "The progressivity of the federal tax system means that high-income taxpayers bear a high share of taxes. In 2012, the top quintile of the income distribution received 52.5 percent of income and paid 68.3 percent of federal taxes." http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/currentdistribution.cfm
Simplest solution is to pay people more for doing a high risk job, then they can afford the more expensive insurance needed for their job.
Don't people with high risk jobs get paid more anyway?
There are no such things as apolitical discussions. Even if the topic was apolitical (and the only way it could be if it was utterly meaningless to anyone) before, the second you have a discussion politics enter the picture in the form of power games and status. Catholic church's contraceptives ban is an excellent example of just that.
For that matter, if religious institutions can claim being persecuted just because they're required to follow the same laws as everyone else, that does have some implications to science too.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It's curious to me that about the only thing "off the table" in the healthcare debate is actuarial science...the fundamental rating mechanism. I remind the reader that faulty assessments of the forward effects of complex predictive models (think credit default swaps and other derivitives) were instrumental in the recent mortgage crisis. The insurance industry has been playing a series of these shell games with projections (actuarials without lipstick) since its inception...leveraging effectively guaranteed returns (does that sound reasonable?) to drive up costs to build balance sheet empires (too powerful to regulate?). Does any of this sound familiar? We should be paying more attention to potentially flawed underlying assumptions we receive from rent seekers.
True. But prescriptions are not just subsidised, they are effectively capped. Each item is the same low price of £7.85. And if you envisage having to get a lot of prescriptions there is an annual subscription for about £100. This is effectively nothing compared to what Americans are paying.
And even those low charges are not paid by children, senior citizens, people on welfare, and people in hospital.
All of which I'm sure you know, but I'm just stating it for those that don't know the uk system.
Look at tower climbers or some other things where they uses contractors / subcontractors and safety takes a back seat. It's not just higher pay we also need more on the workers comp system / OSHA side of stuff in the high risk areas or more unions.
I dunno about yours, but where I lived in SoCal all the power crews were contractors, and I talked to 'em a few times when they had newbies on the crew. The n00bs weren't allowed to do anything without extreme supervision, because of liability and insurance concerns.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
they shouldn't be allowed to refuse to pay for blood transfusions either...
The Christian Brothers, who run this "not for profit" are desperate for the income it brings them. Their church no longer permits them to work at their profession of teaching because they were so enthusiastically involved in the pedophilia scandals, and cannot be trusted near children. They lost most of their wealth in law suits because of the abysmal performance of their leadership in addressing the claims of the abused. Now most of them are growing old and fat in an idle retirement, and the few who can still earn money are working very hard trying to support them. I could almost feel sorry for them, but no, because they were the very worst of the abusers: even running a child slave labor camp at Bundoon in Western Australia that kept orphan kids in a hard labor camp prison where many of the boys were also sexual slaves. http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-can-still-hear-the-kids-screams-20110611-1fyap.html So now they want to impose their abhorrent sexual ethics on those who they have to employ to do the work that they should be doing. If ever there was a case for retrospective abortion, it would be for these guys.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
The price of all those things would be in the cost of the premiums, plus a good mark-up because of the overhead all of this would cause and the insurance company making sure they got their cut. In the end, the cost would be a lot more than if you just bought the gasoline and oil out-of-pocket. Though it might be hidden to the average person if the premiums were paid for (at least partially) by your employer or by the government.
So you want single payer too? I'm okay with that.
Sure, if you submit to a very high tax burden. You don't get any bills because they already have all your money.
This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. Below it is a 'tech' story that's nearly six hours old that has under 40.
I don't think that's relevant. There is nothing, NOTHING wrong with a more focused site rather than a generalist.
What we're looking at is the website equivalent of Network Decay
, where a site which used to serve a specific purpose tries to get a larger audience by posting topics that have little or nothing to do with the original site's mission. Eventually, the websites all become the same, the original audience becomes disgruntled, and you get complaints like the sort you're responding to.
Bullshit. Most European health care systems are not single payer. The shitty British system is the exception, not the rule. And countries like Germany that have studied the issue have rejected single payer as a poor alternative to their current systems. In addition, it is far from clear that even the British system is sustainable.
European health care systems aren't "radically cheaper to run"; they spend a bit more than half of what Americans spend per capita (and, of course, Europeans are generally poorer than Americans as well). Those savings are the result of strong government price controls, with the usual consequences: long waiting times, difficulty recruiting physicians, etc. Those kinds of price controls would be unacceptable to Americans and are politically impossible to put in place. Single payer wouldn't magically make them happen. It takes the kind of sheep-like population that the UK has to accept them.
Yes, I am. Got a problem with that?
Is that what the religious hierarchy is afraid off? That some of their members might request the pill. Perhaps they'd rather nuns who get pregnant throw the offspring down wells like they've always done.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
However, pretty much *all* those systems are single-payer,
Bullshit.
Admittedly, having looked closer, that statement was bullshit.
European health care systems aren't "radically cheaper to run"; they spend a bit more than half of what Americans spend per capita
I'd say almost half the price is a huge difference. But it's worse than that. In the UK we pay half but get a system that covers the entire population. You pay twice, and end up with something that *doesn't* cover the big swathe that don't have healthcare. You're paying more, and then still getting less.
What's more is that it isn't either/or. It's *both*. You can get private healthcare in the UK, but we *also* have a system that covers everybody.
It takes the kind of sheep-like population that the UK has to accept them.
Oh fuck you you obviously know nothing about this country. It also sounds like you've been fed propaganda about the state of the NHS.
You have a healthcare system that doesn't cover your population. It is so expensive that a proportion simply cannot afford it. That to me seems like a bad position to be in.
Being forced to pay excessive rates for bullshit coverage most pepole don't need is exactly what makes the current system much more expensive than what we had before.
EVERYONE deserves to be able to get healthcare without going bankrupt. If that costs a little more in the end, then so be it. This is a moral issue and a civilized society takes care of their people. Do you think it is ethical to have 40 million people without health insurance in the wealthiest country on earth? You think there is no cost to having 40 million people with no health insurance? Do you think it is ethical to have someone lose all affordable access to health insurance just because they lost their job?
That said, since this whole thing just got started I'm curious what evidence from the future you have that this is more expensive than before. Or are you just bitching because *your* insurance went up? Fact is that we don't know yet whether this will be more expensive or not. Might be, but if it means that everyone has reasonable access to health insurance then that is a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make. Buy a few less bombers for the military if you need to find some extra cash to pay for it.
Well, it's largely proportional to per-capita GDP, so suppose people in the UK are also "very very poor", right?
The US already has a huge single payer system, covering the elderly, children, and the poor. That's in addition to a number of states offering various forms of universal coverage. So the idea that there are large numbers of involuntarily uninsured is bullshit.
Personally, I think it's perfectly fine for states to try to offer universal coverage. It isn't the job of the Federal government.
I think more importantly, you obviously know nothing about this country (like most Europeans), and you have been fed propaganda about life in the US, the same kind of bullshit about supposed cut-throat capitalism that Europeans have been fed for more than a century. Stop displaying your ignorance and actually learn something about the world outside your borders.
Is there any other area of life in which someone who made this claim wouldn't be laughed out of court and put on psychotropic medications? But because it's such a *popular* mass delusion we have to tolerate this idiocy. All the way to the Supreme Court.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
and while you're feeling smug about spending 10 seconds going to snopes.com in your browser, you should have gone to your library and checked out this:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mormon-Corporate-Empire-Eye-Opening/dp/0807004073
paying for things you don't want is a central premise of Democracy. playing one of their favorite tropes back on them, if they don't like it, they can leave.
yes, it makes sense. it saves considerable money in the long run. if it offends your sensibilities, don't use it.
should men without vaginae have to pay for it?
I'm referring to the inflated medical bills I have to pay because you show up in the ER without insurance.
You've got it all wrong (both about me and about the facts at stake, as far as I can tell). I actually took about 30 minutes researching it before making that one-line post, and another 30-45 minutes just now, since it was a fact that I had heard reported several times before and was interested in investigating whether it was actually true. And rather than feeling smug, I was actually a bit deflated, since I had first heard the fact from my mother, and I take no pleasure in discovering that she was wrong about something. Moreover, I relish trivia of that sort, so I was hoping for it to be true. As for Snopes, I ended up settling for a link to it since it's a widely recognized site that most people here trust and it said pretty much everything I would have on the topic, but every other source I checked either agreed or was silent on the topic. I've found no corroborating evidence at all.
Regarding your link, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't see how that disproves anything. Most of us in this thread are likely aware that the Church of LDS engages in various business ventures and that they wield more wealth than many people give them credit for. I never disputed that. What I am disputing is the claim that they owned Pepsi outright at some point, and if you've read the book and have information regarding that topic, I'd love to hear it, since the reviews and product summary don't seem to say anything about it. The $8B being mentioned in the product summary on Amazon is a mere 1/16th of what they'd need to buy Pepsi at today's market cap, and I can't find any evidence that Pepsi's market cap was low enough to be within their purchasing power at the time that the book was published in 1988 (all of the historical data that far back seems to be behind a paywall), let alone that they did purchase it, which you'd think surely would have been repeated as a factoid by a reputable source. The best I can dig up at this point is that the Mormon church may have owned/currently owns stock in the company, but they never had a controlling interest.
So, again, if you've read the book and it addresses the topic, I'd love to hear about, since we both know that I'm not likely to order the book and set aside the time to read it. Even so, as I said, this is the sort of piece of trivia that I want to be true, since it's quirky and interesting, so I really would love to hear any details you could offer if you've read the book.
Contraceptives are a lifestyle choice, they do not treat disease. Women being fertile are not sick. Does the "panel of experts" include drug industry representatives?
I have no idea how your comment relates to my post. Did you mean to respond to someone else?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If it worked like my health insurance company they'd deny the claim by saying the gas station was not in-network, i'd have to mail-order my fuel instead of getting it at a local gas station and that having an empty fuel tank is a pre-existing condition.
Nobody can tell you ahead of time what the price is, and what your out-of-pocket cost will be.
This.
Those who continue to preach about the unfaulting hand of the free market will tell you to shop and take your money elsewhere but in my experience most providers refuse to quote you a price and even if they can't give you a price without knowing is wrong they'll refuse to give a price on a basic exam. To make matters worse your insurance company will only have a few doctors in network limiting your choice on where to take your money.
I find that most doctors will refuse to give you a price because they'll charge different people different prices for the same service depending on their insurance company and how much they can get away with billing the insurance company who in turn dumps the entire bill on you.
One example is that a friend of mine and I have the same doctor but my friend doesn't have insurance so the doctor charges him $60 for an office visit but I have insurance so he charges me $180 and my insurance company will only cover a small percentage of it so I have to pay the difference plus the co-pay.
I should have been more detailed. Corporations that are owned and operated by self-declared "conservatives" started bitching to rile up the religious base's hatred of Obama.
The proper transition was away from profit-centric healthcare to single-payer.
Who the fuck cares? Conservatives rejected ACA. ACA is exclusively the responsibility of Obama.
Well, if you think that, you only have Obama and the Democrats to blame for not making it happen. After all, single payer couldn't have received more opposition from Republicans than ACA, so the choice between ACA and single payer was entirely up to Obama and the Democrats.
Personally, I think single payer would be a lot better than ACA, because with ACA, Obama simply chose to give a gigantic tax payer handout to insurance companies and drug companies. But that's what the corporate crony in chief in the White House loves to do: hand billions of tax payer dollars to corporations, unions, and other politically influential groups.
Of course they did, they couldn't allow anything Obama to pass.
I'm sure the Republicans would have happily fought bitterly against that as well. The "death panels" lie comes to mind.
So you agree that no matter what Obama and the Democrats did, they would have been opposed by the Republicans, regardless.
And you suggest Mitt would have been different? No, the only difference would have been who would have gotten the money. Oh and there would probably have been more deleterious tax cuts.
Probably. Who cares? We aren't talking about whether Republicans are better than Democrats, we are talking about who is responsible for the mess called the ACA, and that's 100% Obama and the Democrats.
Obama and the Democrats have turned out to be incompetent and corrupt, and that's something we should keep in mind come 2014 and 2016. Democrats do not deserve geek or liberal votes automatically anymore. People like Feinstein and Reid should be kicked out of Congress. And Obama should be remembered as the corrupt loser he has turned out to be, and hopefully people won't fall for that kind of utter incompetence and deception again in future presidential candidates.