Lately Democrats have been rushing to the defense of Planned Parenthood. Some are recycling the old claim that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms to those who couldn’t otherwise afford them–which is not true. Harry Reid said that Planned Parenthood “is the health care backbone for American women during their lives. In fact, it’s the only health care that a significant number of women get. About 30 percent of women, that’s their health care.” Which is also not true. But his attempts to mislead the public on this matter got me thinking. It’s not just that Democrats say that Planned Parenthood, which actually focuses mostly on birth control, abortion, and STDs, is a general provider of health care. It’s that whenever they talk about “women’s health care” they only talk about abortion and birth control and occasionally other problems related to the reproductive system. If I got my information from Harry Reid, I’d never know that women have any body part other than the crotch.
My wife has a fair number of health issues. She takes Armour Thyroid after having her thyroid removed three years ago. She takes Lipitor for cholesterol, Diuril for blood pressure, two different antidepressants for psychiatric reasons, and other medicines as needed. She also takes “the pill” to prevent pregnancy; this is the only medication she takes that isn’t for curing or preventing disease.
Under the regulations created by the Obama Administration, her health insurance company is required by law to pay the full cost of her birth control pills. They are not required to pay the full cost of the medicines she takes for medical reasons, nor the full cost of most of her doctor visits and other medical procedures. She has to pay part of the cost of those things, and pay she does, reaching her out-of-pocket maximum in each of the past three years. It makes no sense to me that her health insurance is required to fully cover what’s not vital to her health, but isn’t required to fully cover what is vital to her health. (There are, of course, some women who take birth control to treat medical conditions; even so, it’s hard to grok why birth control would be considered more important than life-saving medicines.)
This obsession with birth control manifests in other ways as well. Witness the absurd panics about how a small number of employers choosing not to cover certain types of birth control for religious reasons were supposedly trying to deny women access to birth control. Of course, when employers don’t fully cover Armour Thyroid or Lipitor, no one says that they’re trying to deny women access to Armour Thyroid or Lipitor. Obviously the claim that anyone is being denied access to birth control is false; even if an employer’s insurance doesn’t cover birth control, any female employee can buy different insurance, or buy birth control directly, or get it for free from countless places. Numerous places offer birth control for free, but no one that I know of offers Armour Thyroid or Lipitor for free. The government itself has found that all women in the country have had access to birth control for decades.