Think Humanely

Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced that he would vote ‘Yea’ for the excrement-filled piece of legislation laughingly referred to as health care reform. Kucinich, who has advocated for universal health care, has the following press release on his website:

Congressman Kucinich, along with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), introduced HR 676, Medicare for All, a bill to provide high-quality health care to every American. This bill would provide all Americans the health care they need, from any doctor they choose, at a universal, high standard of quality. Americans would not be burdened with co-payments, premiums or deductibles. Rather, they would be guaranteed access to medically necessary health care, including inpatient and outpatient care, dental care, vision care, pharmaceuticals, and other treatments that a patient’s doctor would deem necessary.

Medicare for All would cost the same amount of money that is now spent on health care costs. Funds would be provided by savings from a vast reduction of paperwork, existing government spending on healthcare, savings from rational bulk procurement of medications, a tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, a small tax on stock and bond transfers, and a phased-in payroll tax that is less than what employers currently pay on average for less complete employee health coverage.

Compare the above bill, which is excellent and actually accomplishes what those who support the current Senate bill claim to support, with the utterly corrupt and impotent legislation that is likely to now be passed both in the House and the Senate. The current version of bill most likely to pass has no single-payer system. It has no public option. It has nothing to control costs. It has nothing to keep greedy insurance companies from charging customers mafia-like rates for coverage. Worst of all, especially given that insurance companies have no check on their price-gouging, is that the government is forcing every single American to buy from one of these private insurance companies or else face the bureaucratic wrath of the IRS. Here is what I wrote about the mandate vis-à-vis no public option:

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

“The industry, Potter says, is driven by ‘two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

“Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

“The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

“Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.”

Kucinich, in a press release in November of 2009, had the following comments about the then-version of the “reform” bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

And the bill which Kucinich rightfully lashes above is one that actually had a public option. This is what makes his turn to support the current legislation so very disappointing. It would be one thing if we knew that the Senate would largely fix all the gross deficiencies in the bill via reconciliation, which would include adding in a public option. But we don’t know this. And we have no reason to even find such a scenario probable. Instead, we’ll likely see only minor tweaks – if any – made, and thus Americans will once again be forced to take it on all fours.

So why did Kucinich do this? He has obviously spent most of the current session thinking that this and similar bills are pretty horrible. He has obviously thought that there are significantly better alternatives, alternatives that will actually benefit the American people whereas this one largely will not. I obviously cannot know what goes on in this man’s mind; I do know, however, that he has been the subject of some rather vociferous attacks by members of the left.

Markos Moulitsas said that Kucinich had blood on his hands and would face a primary challenge if he continued to oppose this government subsidiary of private insurance companies at the expense of poor Americans. This hack then proceeds, petulantly, to claim that Kucinich has never accomplished anything in his career, that he’s a ‘Utopian,’ and that he doesn’t represent his constituents. The last is an especially odd claim given that Kucinich has been re-elected, term after term, since 1996. Moulitsas: you, sir, are a fucking asshole.

Alex Koppleman recently wrote the absurdly titled piece, “The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich,” in which he parrots many of Moulitsas’ so-called points without providing any ioda of skepticism or critical opposition to the ranting of what appears to be a man who has let the popularity of his circle-jerk of a website go to his head. Two individuals, whatever intelligence they might exert on other public policy issues, here display the mental acumen of people who have been deprived of oxygen for one minute too long.

Again, I don’t know what role, if any, such public admonition played in Kucinich’s reversal. But I almost have to hope that it did; the alternative is that he somehow convinced himself that this bill is actually worth becoming law. If this is true, then there is one less voice fighting for the ‘Utopia’ that Americans deserve.

In a related note, Sen. Harry Reid’s wife and daughter were in a serious car accident recently. His wife broke her nose, neck and back. She was rushed to a hospital and operated on, during the course of which she had a titanium plate inserted into her neck. She is expected to make a full recovery. How fortunate for her that her husband not only makes $174,000 for less than a year’s worth of work, but also receives federally-provided insurance.

The senate has now finished rubbing their greasy, McTeague-like fingers all over their health care bill, having made it progressively worse with every single Congressional meeting and change. Let’s remember: the House version was already considered a weak, watered-down version of true reform that didn’t go nearly far enough in helping individual Americans. In fact, it seemed to be more supportive of the very insurance companies that the bill was supposedly designed to protect Americans from in the first place. This version now looks like the Civil Rights Act compared to what the Senate has managed to shit out.

The senate version has no public option, which in and of itself was a down-syndrome version of a universal or single-payer system. Nick Skala, who worked for Physicians for a National Health Program, had this to say about the public option:

The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system…It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.

Now you can expand coverage by just raising taxes and paying insurers to cover people but that’s not a sustainable system…But it won’t cover every body and it will fall apart quickly due to rising cost as we’ve seen in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Minnesota — state after state after state and it hasn’t worked.

Now the definition of insanity is to repeat what has gone on in the past and expect a different result. Yet that’s what we’re doing with the public option. And as a representative of physicians in that capacity, and certainly the relationship I have with nurses and patients, I feel it’s my duty to be honest about the best policy research, the best literature, and the best experience that we have and that all indicates that the public option is going to fail.

Also see this chart comparing a single-payer system with that of the public option. It is important to note that a single-payer system would actually save an estimated $400 billion a year.

So our elected representatives first refused to adopt a single-payer system that has been proven effective by various western industrialized nations, all of whom are generally ranked higher in terms of medical care than the United States. At least the public option, despite all of its serious faults, at least provided Americans with a choice beyond the corrupt, malignant private insurers. People could finally get care and treatment at a relatively affordable cost without being subject to the whims of corporations that value profit over its customers. But that, too, is now gone.

Despite the fact that the Senate stripped their bill of such an option for the American people, they have continued to insist on a mandate. This literally baffles me. I’m a misanthrope. A cynic. I expect incompetence and corruption from our elected officials. I expect dishonesty and theft. Despite this, despite my low, in-the-gutter covered with toxic runoff expectations, I am still shocked by the unbelievable, blatantly corrupt and unethical nature of this mandate. Let’s be clear: the government is going to force every American to buy private insurance or face significant fines and possible confiscation of funds by the IRS. Some people will qualify for some government assistance, but ultimately, a gun is being put to your head and you’re being told to open your wallet and hand over your hard-earned income to the same assholes who provide such an expensive, shitty service that you either can’t already afford it or don’t want to. Democrat Anthony Weiner, echoing propaganda common among his colleagues and uncritical supporters of this legislation, tries to mask the mandate as a responsible obligation that every American should fulfill and has compared it to car insurance.

Weiner is either deluding himself to make the bill more palatable, suffering from a rather serious intellectual deficiency, or outright lying to the public. This comparison to car insurance is a classic false analogy, finding one or two similarities between the two and therefore concluding that they are entirely alike or comparable. Weiner assumes that the driving of a car is comparable to being able to receive medical treatment. No one argues that driving a car is a universal or moral right, let alone an imperative. Being able to do so is obviously helpful, but you’re not going to die or watch someone you love die as a result of not having one or having one that is of inferior quality.

Also, what is the reason for driver’s insurance? It is so that if you carelessly or recklessly cause damage to someone else’s property (or damage is done to yours), no one has to go bankrupt in order to pay for repairs. More importantly is the fact that paying for car insurance doesn’t lead to bankruptcy at all. There is a vast price difference between car and health insurance. The average cost of car insurance is $795 in 2007, an actual decrease of 2. 6%. The cost of health insurance in 2009, however, is $4,824 for an individual and $13,375 for a family, an increase of 5% from the previous year. In this same report from USAToday, John Fritz notes, “Since 1999, health insurance premiums for families rose 131%, the report found, far more than the general rate of inflation, which increased 28% over the same period. Overall, health care in the United States is expected to cost $2.6 trillion this year, or 17% of the nation’s economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.”

If you can’t afford car insurance, you still have options. You can possibly drive someone else’s car or rely on public transportation. Comparable options do not exist for health care.

In most of the western industrialized world, health care is considered a right, not a luxury. Such a belief isn’t even a recent development. Dr. King said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Hippocrates argued that, “A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings.” And Buddha: “Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering – an image of death.” No one bats an eye at not being given or provided a car. But it is grossly inhumane to deny someone medical attention, or at least the means to attain it. People die from one, inconvenienced by the other. Medical insurance isn’t about protecting other people from a mistake on your part, but about protecting yourself against the inevitable deterioration of our bodies, from accidents outside our control, from environmental poisons and toxins, from anguish and suffering itself.

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

Americans aren’t the ones that the United States Senate are protecting and trying to help. Private insurance companies, however, are. After all, healthcare companies have spent $ 635 million dollars on lobbying Congress in just the past two years alone while the average American is still spending his or her money on frivolous things, such as food and shelter.

Chris Hedges recently wrote a piece entitled, “Liberals are Useless.” I certainly have issues with Hedges and believe that he is prone to some pretty irrational thinking (see, for example, this debate with Sam Harris), but this article describes the deterioration of the so-called Left very well. Below are some excerpts from his article :

They [liberals] talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them.
. . .
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry.

This is a relatively well-reasoned argument, yes? Hedges makes a series of claims (e.g., liberals support anti-working class agendas and capitulate to Wall Street) and supports them with specific evidence. Apparently such intellectually honest argumentation has riled the feathers of one notable blogger, Blue Texan over at Firedoglake. In a classic example of a red herring, Blue Texan ignores all of the substantive points that Hedges makes and instead singles out and argues against a small point that has little to nothing to do with Hedges overall argument. Near the beginning of Hedge’s article, he writes that he voted for Nader and would have considered voting for Cynthia McKinney, two individuals whose progressive bona fides are far more established and legitimate than Obama’s. In response, Blue Texan writes

The notion that voting for Ralph Nader or an even more ridiculous figure like Cynthia McKinney is an effective strategy to move the country in a more progressive direction was thoroughly discredited by the 2000 election. The idea that Gore and Bush were pretty much the same was a common meme in lefty circles, and it turned out to be deeply misguided, to say the least.
Does Hedges really believe the country would look no different today if the Supreme Court hadn’t appointed Bush in 2000? Because I think he’s wrong.

Similarly, does anyone think John McCain would have overturned the Bush policy on stem cells, acknowledged the seriousness of climate change, spent a huge amount of political capital trying to reform health care, reversed Bush’s policies on labor, on the environment, or endangered species? Does anyone think John McCain would’ve nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court or signed the stimulus bill?

This is not to suggest that Obama’s unwillingness to confront the Pentagon and Wall Street haven’t been a disappointment. They have.

Just don’t tell me that a vote for Nader in ‘08, which was a vote for Palin, was the way to get a more progressive country.

Where does one begin? I’ll largely ignore the fact that the writer apparently thinks that Nader and McKinney are “ridiculous figures” – despite offering no rational for the ad hominem – and focus instead on the straw man he sets up when he writes, “Does Hedges really believe the country would look no different today if the Supreme Court hadn’t appointed Bush in 2000?” Does Hedges ever make that claim? No. Hedges is arguing that liberals preach one thing, but support something that is diametrically opposed to their supposed values. The fact that Obama isn’t as bad as McCain or that Gore wouldn’t have been as bad as Bush has no bearing on what Hedges wrote. Yes, it is likely that the country is better served with Obama as President rather than McCain. It is also likely that the country would be better served if a genuine liberal was President rather than Obama.

Now let’s look at some of the “accomplishments” that Blue Texan ascribes to Obama, as if these examples also disprove Hedges’ thesis.

‘Obama has acknowledged the seriousness of climate change.’ Wow! He doesn’t claim that the vast majority of the world’s scientists are wrong. That’s so amazing!. . . What has Obama done about it? Nothing significant.

‘Obama has spent political capital trying to reform health care.’ Right, because neither Nader nor McKinney would have tried this. And let’s not forget that the so-called reform that has been crafted under Obama’s leadership and the Democratic control of Congress is largely a corrupt, watered down bill that doesn’t do nearly enough to help the citizens of this country. Is it better than nothing? Yes. But it’s also a cash-cow for private insurance companies at the expense of Americans. It makes it arguably impossible for women to receive abortions. See my posts here , here , and here for more information on why this “reform” is nothing to be proud of.

Blue Texan points to Obama reversing some of Bush’s policies on the environment, labor, and endangered species. These are all fair points; however, it still isn’t clear how this refutes anything that Hedges writes. Is the barometer for what is and is not progressive and liberal simply not being as horrible as one of the worst presidents in the history of this country? If so, then I think that Blue Texan just proved Hedges right.

In fact, Blue Texan appears to represent the very condition that Glenn Greenwald wrote about earlier today. In his “My Friend the President” post, Greenwald argues that

What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics.

Liberalism, and by this I mean the liberalism that is represented by the Democratic party, President Obama, and a wide range of pundits and writers, deserves Hedges scorn, disillusionment, and much more. Deriding those who shun Democrats in favor of voting for someone, who both in speech and in action, more accurately reflects his political values, Hedges is doing what any good citizen should: honestly expressing his vote. If enough “liberals” were to do this, it’s reasonable to assume that genuine progressives would find themselves in power, and the Democratic establishment would realize that they can no longer get away with being Republican-lite. But I guess this is just “ridiculous” and we should all be grateful that slightly less shitty politicians are in power. Yay democracy.

I previously wrote about the equally gynophobic and misogynistc Stupak-Pitts Amendment here and here. Today came news of an analysis of the amendment by the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services. A brief overview, quoted word for word from the George Washington news release, can be found below. For the entire analysis, click here.

An analysis conducted by the GW School of Public Health and Health Services’ Department of Health Policy, concludes that the Amendment would produce industry-wide effects, leading to the elimination of health plan coverage for nearly all medically indicated abortions. Although the Amendment appears to address only plans that receive federal exchange subsidies, even health plans sold to private, large employers that purchase outside the exchange ultimately are likely to be affected, the analysis concludes. These findings are based on an assessment of the extent to which the health benefits services industry adjusts its products over time to conform to the regulatory environment in which it operates.

“Under national health reform, millions of women, including women who are covered by small employers (as employees or spouses or dependents of employees) as well as those who are currently uninsured, will receive their coverage through health insurance exchanges. By barring the sale of subsidized products that cover medically indicated abortions as part of a broader package of benefits, the Amendment can be expected to cause the industry to re-design its offerings in order to avoid violating the legal restrictions on abortion applicable to exchange products that receive subsidies,” said Professor Sara Rosenbaum, JD, lead author and Chair of the Department of Health Policy. “The Amendment also can be expected to chill efforts to develop supplemental coverage for medically indicated abortions, because it appears to prohibit the joint administration of both a basic and supplemental product,” Rosenbaum noted.

The analysis also concludes that, based on past experiences with claim administration decisions involving treatment exclusions, insurers can be expected to interpret the exclusion broadly, excluding coverage of not only most medically indicated abortion procedures but also treatments for serious illnesses, injuries, and medical conditions that include an abortion undertaken for health reasons.

Yesterday I wrote about the callous Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the health care reform bill that was passed by the Democratically controlled House of Representatives. Here is a video from the Center for Reproductive Rights that helps underscore some of the incoherent tragedy of the legislation:

Let us not forget some of the other procedures, conditions, and medications that will and will not be covered by the bill. Birth control pills? Not included. So not only will it be made dramatically more difficult for women to find funding for an abortion, the easiest, most efficient, and safest method for preventing a situation that could possibly lead to an abortion – birth control – will not be covered either. The people over at DoubleX note that “Women who use it have lower rates of infant and child mortality, more time to nurse their children, and a smaller likelihood of high-risk pregnancies and anemia.” It’s as if all these men in Congress have some Machiavellian plan to increase the number of unwanted, diseased newborns.

This would certainly explain why one of the medications that this horrible bill does cover is Viagra. Fuck you, ladies! – figuratively and literally. You may not be able to protect yourself from unwanted pregnancies or do anything about one, but any and all males can still ensure that they’re hard enough to inseminate you. All the unsatisfied wives of Stupak, Pitts, and their equally filthy ilk are sure to rejoice at this news, as are the remaining 160 million women in this country.