OK...now this is just funny. The church doesn't pay for the coverage (their sticking point) but they otherwise pay the premium and the coverage is included "for free"...And they went for this? Brilliant. Love it. It's like an Onion piece. Whoever sold this with a straight face is a genius.
I doubt that ends up being the deal. That article also has the false statement of that isn't true, so I am sure revised details will be out later.
Check and mate... Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception By Amanda Marcotte| Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, at 1:04 PM ET After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there's very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they're eligible. That's the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception. My guess is that they'll take their knocks and go home, but a lot of the damage has already been done. Romney was provoked repeatedly to go on the record saying negative things about contraception. Sure, it was in the frame of concern about religious liberty, but as this incident fades into memory, what most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department. I expect to see some ads in the fall showing Romney saying hostile things about contraception and health care reform, with the message that free birth control is going away if he's elected. It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along.
wasn't even money....they pay the same -- it's just not itemized on the bill. The spin about it being cheaper for the insurance co is probably just spin. Otherwise they'd have offered this to all from the get go. But no matter. Same effect. If I'm selling a product and the customer wants a feature for free I can do that -- just adjust the price elsewhere. This was too easy.
Sounds like 6 in one hand and a half dozen in the other to me. In either scenario, they're *forcing* these institutions to carry insurance that pays for BC. Whether the employees have to 'opt-in' to BC or not is irrelevant.
That's religion for you. But hey, they have a right to be stupid. Or at least they should, in this case. I'm still not down with telling insurance companies what they must and must not do regarding BC. Wasting all this time and energy to force feed medicine down their throats is just as stupid as not wanting BC because your magic book tells you it's bad.
Not really, he totally missed the point of the study and again quoted contraception coverage is cheaper for the insurance company. That is factually incorrect. While this solution is the dumbest most nonsensical thing I have ever heard of, I hope everyone just forgets about it and moves on. We are talking about something that makes virtually no real world difference but politically divides us. I guess in that sense a compromise that also makes no difference but it politically neutral is the solution.
Are you certain it wouldn't be less expensive to provide contraception vs. the extra abortion and childbirth expenses?
It's spin. It's irrelevant. There was no compromise here. The intent was to have health care coverage which included bc at no additional cost or copay for the employee. And that's what this does. Fully. The only political bit is they allowed the church to concede while saving a little face. And if they can let the church 'sell it' with claims of cost neutrality -- that's fine. The insurance company's cost projections were never the administration's issue. So if this goes through as outlined, it absolutely was a full surrender by the church and a complete win by those pushing for this coverage.
For the insurance company it is. The argument is that for the employer deciding which coverage to offer should consider adding this coverage because the additional cost is offset by money saved in productivity from women having babies and then missing work because they then have babies and children. I only brought it up because now a total of three articles had it wrong. Also the compromise is Obama got the coverage while being almost politically neutral. I guess he decided the politics didn't go his way on this one.
You just said it costs more for the insurance company. But vs. what? I'm confused as to what you were referencing it against.
That's how it strikes me. The Catholic bishops saw that their own parishioners did not support their position, so they agreed to a compromise that could give them plausible deniability.
