It would be hard to dream up a clearer example of an entitlement mentality than this e-card on the Obama campaign website:
Dear Mom,
Mitt Romney says he would repeal the Affordable Care Act. So here’s a quick question: Can I borrow $18,000 to help pay for my birth control?
Thanks!
The e-card is supposed to point out that it’s ridiculous to ask your mother for $18,000 to pay for birth control. True, but that begs the question: wouldn’t it be even more ridiculous to ask a perfect stranger to pay for your birth control? Because that is essentially what Obama’s “free birth control” law does. Pills cost money to make — the materials, the research, the labor, complying with government regulations. It costs money to package and export to pharmacies. It costs money to advertise. It costs money to fight against class-action lawsuits. It costs money for pharmacists to fill the prescription. It costs money for the doctors to write the prescription.
Previously, there was a co-pay that helped defray the costs. Now that the co-pay is being abolished by law, who ends up shouldering the cost? The insurance companies? Of course not. It gets passed back to the consumers through higher insurance premiums.
But let’s assume the people cheering on Obama’s “free” birth control law probably won’t think that far into it. What about a more obvious problem: how on earth does birth control cost $18,000? Is that over a lifetime?
The Obama administration has touted its birth control law by saying it will effect 47 million women. We are told by the Obama campaign e-card that birth control costs $18,000 for each of these women.
That would mean $846 billion is being passed along to somebody. For the sake of comparison, the global pharmaceutical market is a $300 billion industry. So, either we have a serious problem here, or the Obama campaign needs to recheck their numbers.
There are two flaws with this post. First, subsidizing birth control actually saves money, because it prevents unwanted pregnancies, which cost far more than birth control. There may be something objectionable to having the government endorse non-procreative sex, but cost is not it. Second, the awkwardness of asking a parent to pay for birth control is not that it is asking them for money per se, it is that by asking, there is an implicit statement that you are sexually active. While it would be awkward to ask someone on the street for birth control, there is no equivalent awkwardness in society anonymously subsidizing it. That said, this ad is really foolish and deliberately misleading. No one will even ask for a lifetime supply of birth control from their parents
But how much does contraception cost to begin with? Typically not enough to make subsidizing it a compelling argument.
Saves who money? n nThe only way I save money is: na) I am paying for unwanted pregnancies (through taxes one presumes) nb) I am paying for birth control (again, through taxes vis-a-vis obamacare) nc) My taxes for a) go down by an amount greater than they go up for b) for a net savings. n nAre you saying by supporting birth control in obamacare my taxes will go down? I don't buy it. So maybe somebody is saving money, but it sure isn't the taxpayer.
There's a major flaw with your argument. You're assuming that either someone else pays for a woman's birth control or she's forced to become pregnant. That's incredibly illogical. There's another flaw with the Obama argument, which is that birth control pills do not prevent STDs. If you use the preventive health argument, the only form of birth control that ought to be subsidized is condoms. Which would be silly given that they're readily available in any drug or grocery store and are cheap.
I will take it one step further — the underlying assumption is that women inherently need birth control, that they will be sexually active regardless of if they personally want to be or not. n nI find this inherently disturbing on multiple levels, not the least being the growing body of evidence that the so-called "hookup culture" is not good for women's mental health. (Every parent ought to read Miriam Grossman's _Unprotected_.) STDs are pandemic on college campii (and I assume the large society as well) and outside some of us conservative curmudgeons, no one is even mentioning this. n nMany of these STDs can *not* be cured, only controlled through indefinite drug therapy, with drugs which are in some cases fairly expensive — expensive enough to advertise on TV. And unlike birth control, I haven't heard anything about these drugs being "free" to women (or men). If we really were worried about health and not feminist politics, we would make the anti-STD drugs free and not the birth control pills. n nBut I go back to my initial question — who is forcing women to be sexually active when they don't want to be? Do not, should not women have a choice in the matter? And if they do, does that not inherently make B/C an optional medical expense as opposed to a mandatory one like blood pressure control? So why is the former "free" and the latter not?
To argue that free birth control prevents unwanted pregnancies (and there is the 1% failure rate) is to argue that legalizing prostitution would prevent rapes from occurring. The logic is identical and that is why this whole thing falls onto its face. n nIt would be one thing to eliminate all copays for all medications — stupid, but one thing. It is something entirely else to only do this for birth control pills and not for anything else. n nWhy are birth control pills — relatively new medications compared to drugs that date from the late 19th Century — so much cheaper and so much more varied, giving women a multitude of choices and he option to pick one that they think best for them? COMPETITION. n nWhy competition — because they WEREN'T covered by insurance. So too with hair transplant, pet surgery and other things where the customer was paying directly — competition works. n nBut remember what Obama said about "Red and Blue pills" — that you can only have the cheap one, not the more expensive one. So even if the Obama-approved "free" birth control pill makes you violently ill and you wind up with NO B/C pill in your stomach most mornings, and hence no protection from unwanted pregnancy, won't it be wonderful that you don't have to pay for something that isn't going to do you any good anyway? Oh and forget about being able to pay extra for the red pill — they won't let you.
Or here's an idea – why not decide that making the US the only price unregulated drug market in the world is not an entirely good idea so that said drugs are available for something less than the cost of a small car?
Or how about making EVERYTHING available "over the counter" — abolishing all prescription requirements outright and just making people sign that they know what they are buying? n nOnly a competitive market can be unregulated.
Contraception does not cost a dime, not to speak of $18,000 a woman. Abstinence costs nothing. Sandra Fluke has not yet discovered this and deserves to be called what Rush Limbaugh called her. nAnd what of the notion that government (i.e. the taxpayer) should pay all costs of everything anyone wants or needs – like food? shelter? clothing?
Why should I be forced to pay for another woman's birth control? I can rationalize paying for a low-income (married) woman, but for someone like Sandra Fluke, a single woman, who can well afford to pay for her own birth control, it's beyond outrageous to expect me to pay for her promiscuity!
” The Obama administration has touted its birth control law by saying it will effect 47 million women. “r nr nWhere does this number 47 come from, those collecting foodstamps?