Insurance is part of a person’s wages, so they are paying for their insurance( although it may seem indirectly).
I have no idea what this means, I wish people wouldn’t do that.
I could see why there would be an argument against not having a co-pay and having contraception be like any other medication in terms of co-pays. I can see why church employees shouldn’t expect their employer to violate the tenets of the church, as illogical as they might be. If you want to get paid by St. Mary’s church, then you shouldn’t expect birth control as part of the deal. However, if you’re working at St. Mary’s Hospital, then you shouldn’t be expected to be bound by the theology of your employer and the Church has no business butting into your sex life. The Catholic Church refused to declare victory when they had a chance and now they’re the ones being completely unreasonable.
The point has been made that society is much better off with fewer unwanted pregnancies and contraception is as cost-effective to society as flu shots are. Even if required to hand contraception out for free, the insurance companies are money ahead. One prevented pregnancy would pay for a whole lot of pills.
I’m glad to see the Republicans crusading against sex, which is what this boils down to. They want to make sure that if you have sex, then you ‘pay the price’. Let me know how that works out for you in November.
My apologies. “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”
As I understand it, the decision was made that birth control should be considered part of preventative medicine and covered without co-pay. There’s a ton of that stuff (government list). Funny how we never hear any complaining about, say, tetanus vaccinations.
“What do you call a woman that wants the government to pay her to insert dirty nails into her vagina?” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I hate when people use words or acronyms I don’t understand. If only there were some online tool that could tell me what they mean! They could call it “goggles” or something, like a thing you’d use to look at another thing.
My insurance costs me about $150.00 a month. That does not include the portion my employer pays. Even if I get BCP’s for ‘free’ from the pharmacy, (meaning without a co-pay), they are still not actually ‘free’ since I am paying for insurance coverage.
I disagree. If an acronym, like NASA, is understood by all then it can and should be used freely. But if it’s something you have to look up to understand, then it really isn’t a useful time-saver, is it? IYDAYMBAFA
The Affordable Care Act requires that everybody in America have health coverage, but in most cases the government itself isn’t providing it. Therefore, it’s important for the bill to define what constitutes “heath coverage”, or an employer could provide a handful of coupons for fifty cents off Tylenol and call it a health plan.
So the bill defines several things that have to be included in the plan without any additional cost, like vaccinations and certain screening tests. Contraception is on that list, because it makes sense from a public health standpoint and from a fiscal standpoint.
As I understand it, the problem is not that the contraceptives have to be provided without additional cost; it’s that they have to be provided at all. Even if the plan charged a copay it would still be subsidizing the meds, so the “free” thing is an even bigger red herring than you’d think.
I say that if we’re going to have this ridiculous system where employers provide health coverage, and churches want to be big enough operations to be qualifying employers, then they have to suck it up and deal with it. If a church decides it doesn’t believe in the minimum wage, it still has to pay it.
This seems to have come about since Sandra Fluke’s testimony before Congress.
- In February, Fluke testifies about access to and cost of birth control - transcript of the testimony here - incidentally, she does not mention people so poor they would be covered by government (although her testimony is misconstrued that way):
Even a cursory glance indicates she’s actually talking about law students, who may not get paid a lot, but are not really the “very poor” (there’s a difference between socioeconomic status and income for a good reason.) I suspect many of her critics have never read her testimony and/or are OK with lying about what she said.
- Insurance is not “free” - in the case of a student such as Sandra Fluke, she is a client/customer of the university and is paying the university in a deal which provides health insurance, and in the case of an employee, the employee is paying for health insurance with their time and effort.
- For many people, including myself, there is a belief that if employers provide health insurance as compensation, anything that happens subsequently should be between the patient, doctor, and insurance company. Employers should not try to manage the medical care the patient receives. As an aside, I think it’s silly that employment is tied to health care, but that’s the system we’ve inherited from prior generations.
- For the extremely poor, I’m OK with the government paying for birth control. Seems to me that (1) It’s better than paying for children who might be unwanted and (2) It’s a waste of time and energy for the government to try to figure out if the poor are using birth control for contraception or for polycystic ovarian syndrome or endometriosis. (3) The woman’s motivation is none of the government’s business anyway, while the public health impacts are the government’s legitimate business.
Thanks, everyone, for fighting my ignorance. Some interesting posts.
And is there no end to Wiki’s bounteous goodness?: No such thing as a free lunch - Wikipedia
From some discussion on this topic in Norway I get the impression contraceptives in the US are currently priced high because they’re usually covered by health insurance. Is this correct?
Just in case any Americans were wondering, in England prescribed contraceptives are free to everyone - not even subject to the £7.40 prescription charge applicable to other drugs. Presumably this is for the reason given by others - it is a lot cheaper than dealing with unwanted pregnancy.
Yes, but who decides if it “is understood by all”? I’d have thought TANSTAAFL was fairly well know, especially on this Board. Also, using it as a word it sums up a whole philosophical idea that would disapear if it were spelled out.
It’s subjective, I guess. If we’re going to use all these arcane acronyms, why not have an exhaustive sticky on each forum for a glossary?
We have tons of non-Americans and non-English speakers on this board who have no idea what NASA means. How can you so rudely waste their time when it would only take you a few seconds to spell out “National Aeronautics and Space Administration”?
Actually you don’t even need a prescription for free condoms.
You want the SDMB admins to maintain a a dictionary of words you don’t know because you’re too lazy to look it up on Google? That’s an astonishing sense of entitlement you have there.
No, I think the poster has the responsibility to make his post understood. Throw in a puzzling acronym and it just slows the process down. Imagine it’s your first visit to the site, would you want to come back if people communicate in code?
Because people are not going to refrain from having sex because they don’t want a baby and can’t afford contraceptives. We tried that, it didn’t work. If they have sex without contraceptives, unwanted babies are going to be the result. We as a society aren’t willing to let the unwanted kids starve, and we’re not too hot on paying for abortions, either. So we get a choice between paying for contraceptives or paying for unwanted kids. The only choice where we pay for neither results in starving kids, and we’re not willing to do that.
If it’s a choice between paying for someone else’s contraceptives or someone else’s unwanted kid, one of those things is a lot cheaper than the other.