Remember When Obama changed our Nation

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But isn’t that true of America’s system especially compared to our first world neighbors (give or take the word cruel but maybe people think it is cruel, having to pay to receive health care, some of which if not most is necessary life-sustaining or have a decent measure of quality of life)? Yes, we have emergency rooms but aren’t those merely for stabilization which wouldn’t really help someone with an ongoing condition like a chronic disease or someone in need of primary care?
 
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PetraG said:
I don’t know if we appreciate how remarkable these transitions are in the history of politics
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If we were like less stable countries we’d just about finish rebuilding from the civil war of 2000.
 
When I used the word “cruelly”, it was in response to the poster to said about “depriving people of access to healthcare”, and from the context, it seemed he meant abortifacients.

This is a sensitive subject for me—I don’t work in OBGYN, but I do work in LTC/hospice, and the creeping acceptance and legalization of euthanasia directly affects me. There may come a day when my economic security is at risk by being asked to participate in physician assisted suicide, which I will have to refuse to do.

Also, there is, among some HCPs, a resistance to the idea that anybody should have conscience protection. They say “if you won’t do whatever is required of you in your job, get out of healthcare.”

So language and word choices are important. Language can be used to play on emotions and manipulate public opinion. We’ve seen it over and over. And that’s why I call it out.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
That’s an interesting word, “depriving”. It hints at cruelly withholding something a person is entitled to and needs.
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I think there are a number of layers to this.

First, you have women who are prescribed hormonal contraceptives as treatment for a medical condition. I read about a woman who suffered from PCOS who was facing not being able to take the medication that she needed as absolutely necessary treatment for this condition because it was classified as a contraceptive. Clearly that is wrong by any reasonable person’s standards.

Secondly, you have women and men who use various kinds of contraceptives as contraceptives. That is an entirely legal activity which causes no harm to anybody. I would consider it to be an individual choice, a matter of entirely personal and private morality. So I would consider it to be wrong for a person to be deprived of the right to use a contraceptive of their choice because their employer has decided to impose their own moral opinions on their employees.

Thirdly, you have abortion. Here I am more in sympathy with your position. If somebody is opposed to abortion it is because they believe that the unborn child is a real human being and that terminating that person’s life, even before birth, is a species of murder. This therefore is no longer a matter of personal and private morality, but of harm. I can appreciate that the right of a person not to be complicit in something which they believe to be of form of harm may override another person’s entitlement to access a particular service. On the other hand, the United States is not governed by the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is a secular democracy with a written Constitution interpreted by the judiciary. It therefore seems inescapable that if the state should concur that employers cannot be forced to fund abortions, the state would be under an obligation to fund the service itself.
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
There may come a day when my economic security is at risk by being asked to participate in physician assisted suicide, which I will have to refuse to do.

Also, there is, among some HCPs, a resistance to the idea that anybody should have conscience protection. They say “if you won’t do whatever is required of you in your job, get out of healthcare.”
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I would agree that people should be entitled to opt out of certain functions of their job where those functions are not a fundamental aspect of the job. For example, in the UK some registrars sought to be allowed to opt out of performing civil partnerships and civil marriages for same-sex couples. This claim was rightly rejected on the grounds that performing civil partnership and civil marriage ceremonies is one of the main functions of a registrar. On the other hand, even where voluntary euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide is legal, it is by no means one of the main functions of people involved in the care of patients.
 
Londoner said:
So I would consider it to be wrong for a person to be deprived of the right to use a contraceptive of their choice because their employer has decided to impose their own moral opinions on their employees
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When health insurance first became a thing, it was generally accepted that it was to pay for necessary things, like blood pressure meds, not voluntary things like birth control (and yes, engaging in birth control is a voluntary act).
You want it? Pay for it yourself. Don’t go reaching into the pockets of people who don’t agree with it.
If you’re grown up enough to have sex, you’re grown up enough to figure it all out.
 
I can appreciate that you clearly have very conservative views on contraception and that you feel quite indignant about people having their contraception subsidized by health insurance. However, I think one has to recognise that for many women—indeed, for most sexually active women who are not strictly observant Catholics—access to reliable birth control is an integral part of their healthcare. Being able to have sex without getting pregnant has clear benefits for a woman’s physical and mental health, for her family life, and for society as a whole. Physicians prescribing various methods of contraception are also able to use this as an opportunity to address other issues such as a woman’s overall health, STIs, and assessing risk of sexual coercion.

The Church will say that the way to do this is to have sex only within marriage and to use natural family planning. We have to recognise, however, that most women are not Catholics and that even most Catholic women use contraception. If you remove freely available contraception from those women you put them at increased risk of unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, recourse to abortion or, alternatively, complications arising from continuing with the pregnancy, having children they are not adequately prepared to care for, and having a less fulfilling relationship with a partner. All of this impacts on the woman herself, her partner, any existing children, and a wider society that has to absorb financial and social costs that greatly outweigh the comparatively insignificant cost of providing contraception.

In Britain the National Health Service has been providing free contraception since 1961. In fact, that is just when it began prescribing birth control pills. It’s possible that other methods, such as the diaphragm, may have been available even earlier than that. Indeed, contraceptives are even exempt from the NHS prescription charge that applies to most other medicines and products. I can only imagine that this is because the government calculates that the cost of providing free contraception is less than the cost of providing more abortions, caring for more women who want to continue with unplanned pregnancies, facilitating more adoptions, paying benefits to more families, and treating more STIs (in the case of free condoms), as well as meeting the cost of dissatisfaction and relationship breakdown where couples are forced into a sexless relationship.

At the end of the day, we have to deal with the world as we actually find it. People aren’t going to stop having sex and they aren’t going to trust natural family planning. Providing them with birth control free at the point of access is therefore probably the best course.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
But you haven’t explained why it’s my job to subsidize somebody else’s sex life.
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For starters, I think you’re still making the mistake of thinking that you’re subsidizing somebody else’s sex life, rather than somebody else’s healthcare. I guess if you believe that nobody should ever use artificial birth control you’ll never be convinced that it can be a valid part of healthcare.

Secondly, I don’t know exactly how your own health insurance scheme works, but I think all systems that involve an element of sharing the burden of cost, whether as part of an insurance scheme, or as part of a nationalised service, work in fundamentally the same way. Everybody contributes to the scheme according to the level of contribution demanded of them and everybody benefits from the scheme according to their needs. It may be that an attorney who makes very large contributions draws upon the system only to benefit from contraceptives at very low cost to other contributors, while a teacher who makes much smaller contributions may require cancer treatment at very high cost.

Finally, you have to consider that what you call subsidising somebody else’s sex life may actually be saving you, and other contributors, a lot of money. Just consider the much greater cost of subsidising that person’s abortion or subsiding her pregnancy or subsiding healthcare for her child. Oral contraception for example, probably costs about $100 per year, while an abortion may cost $1,000 and following a pregnancy through to full term is probably well over $10,000.
 
Londoner said:
For starters, I think you’re still making the mistake of thinking that you’re subsidizing somebody else’s sex life, rather than somebody else’s healthcare.
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Explain how this thinking is mistaken.
Nobody is entitled to have sex. It’s a freely chosen act. If they choose to have sex, and they choose to use birth control, I am required to subsidize it, then yes, I am paying for somebody to have sex.

Maybe it’s a cultural difference.
I just can’t dream of expecting others to pay for me to engage in a voluntary act.
I make my own choices and pay my own way, which is one of the hallmarks of maturity.
 
I can only imagine that it is a significant difference of culture between the USA and the rest of the developed world. Perhaps you agree with Mrs Thatcher, who said, ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ I happen to believe that there is such a thing as society, and a healthcare system in which we all share the cost of each other’s healthcare, whether that is through a nationalised system or an insurance system, is a feature of living as part of a society. Some people will contribute more and others will contribute less. Some people will need more and others will need less. The amount that you contribute and the amount that you need will also vary throughout the course of your life.

Having sex is usually a voluntary or freely chosen act. But people do a lot of things that are voluntary or freely chosen acts. People smoke, drink, take drugs, eat too much fat, sugar, and salt, don’t take enough exercise, take part in risky sports, and drive potentially dangerous vehicles. Your insurance contributions subsidise these things too. If somebody chooses to play football and requires treatment for a broken bone that probably costs as much as one person’s contraception for a lifetime.

You make your own choices and you pay your own way, but so do all the other people who pay into an insurance system. You seem to be suggesting that the people you are subsidising are freeloaders who pay in nothing. Presumably if you are subsidising them through a health insurance system it is a system into which they are also paying.

It seems like you are highlighting people having sex as something somehow different to all the other things that are normal parts of people’s lives. Sex is a safe, healthy, and normal part of life. I wouldn’t view subsidising contraception as being morally any different to subsidising treatment for accidents sustained playing sports or driving a vehicle.
 
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