Good morning.
- If you look past irrelevant political polemics … the puzzle is interesting.
- Russia and China.
- A satirical tale.
- Your government and its expenditures.
- Black or not was likely less relevant than the common shared Semitic heritage.
- Of science and message.
- Why Biden is (still) a bad choice for Iraq oversight. Although it becomes more and more clear that Biden is just plain a bad choice for basically everything.
- Obama’s NIH choice and ID.
- Watching Obmacare’s hope/change morph into same-old/same-old but just bigger and more repellent.
- Drones are interesting because they are less expensive … and some consequences.
- Veils.
- The motive behind capitalism.
- A map of death and despair.
- Russalka … a short film (and I might note also a Dvorak opera).
- A likely subtext of why the left is so enamoured of public healthcare options (but not one they want on the front burner).
- Left and right … blogging and linking.
- A libertarian fisks the President.
- On miracles and creation … for myself I think an awful lot of real miracles are very prosaic.
A likely subtext of why the left is so enamoured of public healthcare options (but not one they want on the front burner).
Considering abortion typically costs less than $300 it hardly is necessary to enact universal health care. Consider again that childbirth is probably not possible to ‘buy’ for less than $3000, universal coverage would probably on net subsidize more childbirth and less abortion.
BTW, most private health insurance covers abortion (it being a very cheap procedure)….
Boonton,
and it being illegal not to do so, which makes the measure of whether they do or not irrelevant. And more to the point, you’re doing it too. See this is exactly the point I was making about “who pays for it”. Private insurance is “me paying for healthcare.” You make the point about “private insurance covers abortions” which is morally the same as saying “private citizens pay for their abortions”. So what? You ask “who makes these illusions separating private healthcare from private funding”. Well, the answer is … you do. See, not so uncommon as you suspected.
Cite please, show me the laws that make it impossible for private insurance NOT to cover abortion.
Boonton,
Ah, my mistake. I misread a post this morning. I was it was speaking about how “it would likely shortly become” it illegal for private insurance not to cover abortion but misread it as “it is now illegal” for them not to do so. Four states make it illegal for insurance to cover abortions. I found no data either way whether any require it, but my suspicion was that was not unlikely due to restrictions on pharmacies in that vein.
But I think the salient point here is that you are doing the same thing that I was complaining regarding the other side of the hilzoy/rationing complaint. That is you are not identifying (or remembering) that private insurance is you paying for healthcare. You’re separating it and that is, as I was arguing, not beneficial to a fair debate.
You have the best blog name ever.
Two points I think you’re missing Mark:
1. Abortions are cheap, whether or not Fed funds provide them is more or less irrelevant. Incentive-wise, the covering of childbirth, which is not cheap, is much more potent. While I don’t pretend that they are anywhere near a majority or even a large minority, many more abortions are due to people not having coverage for child birth than child births due to people not having coverage for abortion.
2. Funding is fungible in this case. When you’re purchasing private health care with your own money I agree it’s something you’re spending your money on. When that purchase is aided by various tax credits, vouchers, deductions etc. it’s not quite ‘your money’. The demand that ‘no Federal dollars’ for abortion ends up becoming a lot less about abortion in the real world and a lot more about Talmudic games with accounting rules.
You might be curious to know that several proposals were voted down regarding this issue. Essentially they were demands that any private plans people might purchase with assistance (vouchers, credits, deductions) be required to NOT cover abortion. One congressman who voted against these bills quiped that perhaps women should be required to walk to abortion clinics least they drive on roads built taxpayer funds.
BTW, one argument used to vote down those proposals was that they would essentially force people to change their current private insurance right now since private insurance does benefit from various credits, deductions etc.