In the wake of the outrageous Hobby Lobby decision, Democratic politicians in the Senate are pushing a bill to require all for-profit employers to provide contraception coverage as mandated by the Affordable Care Act. My senator, Patty Murray, says rather grandly: “Your health care decisions are not your boss’s business. Since the Supreme Court decided it will not protect women’s access to health care, I will.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the bill is “high on his agenda.”
Well, this sounds just dandy. Of course, there is no guarantee that a companion bill will fare well in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. But the Democrats get to posture as the friends of women’s health care on the issue of birth control. Let’s not forget Kathryn Sebelius, former head of the Dept. of Health and Human Services and her obstruction—in the face of scientific evidence—of access for young women to Plan B emergency contraception. Where was Patty Murray then? It took a lawsuit by a small feminist organization to bring Plan B into drugstores, and it took protests to make this medicine available to women of all ages.
Meanwhile, we should also not forget that we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place—with Hobby Lobby objecting to the birth control mandate of the ACA—if we had been able to get REAL health care reform in the first place. If single payer or some other form of universal, not-for-profit health care reform had been instituted, there would not have been an issue with some employers objecting to providing particular kinds of health care. All health care services would have been provided to all people. Before the health care reform process started, polls showed that the majority of people in the U.S. wanted a single payer system—but President Obama stated pointblank that single payer was not on the table.
So what we got was capitalist health care reform, which contains some positives—like the birth control mandate, like parents being able to keep adult children on their insurance until age 26, like coverage of many preventative and screening procedures—but also falls far short of the promise contained in its name. People are paying monthly premiums and then paying again—often paying 100 percent of costs—every time they go to the doctor.
