That's exactly right, and that's the kind of thing insurance is for. To cover things that are too expensive for people to pay for on their own (because nobody in knows advance who will need them and who won't).

It doesn't cover things that might cost $20 a month that you just don't feel like paying for yourself. Your auto insurance doesn't cover grease and oil changes, does it (and unlike contraception, those are not optional)? If she were talking about prosthetic limbs and the like, I wouldn't have any problem with it. The factors that make me see her as greedy are a) going to Washington with her hand out for such a low-ticket request, and b) the fact that she's going to be rolling in dough in a few years.

Contraception is not really optional. Remember the Institute of Medicine recommends as part of women's health. Not just straight medical reasons, but also for avoiding unwanted pregnancies, needless abortions, more money spent on social assistance to help poor folks raise kids they should have waited to have, etc. To deny contraception benefits is similar to denying benefits for high blood pressure meds--the cost down the road of untreated conditions is more than the cost of dealing with it now.


She went to Washington to bring attention to the fact that some places aren't providing what the Institute of Medicine has recommended for women's health. And if these benefits are eventually covered, she won't be the beneficiary because she will no longer be at that institution.

She's speaking on behalf of the women who attend not just now, but in the future, and speaking on behalf of all women who are blocked from recommended medical coverage. I don't see that as greed at all as she's not likely to see benefits anyway.

Again, I should point out that the tabled amendment could remove birth control pills from insurance even if they're needed for direct medical reasons (endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome) which is another good reason for her to voice her concerns.

Incidentally, are you saying that person A isn't entitled to the same benefits as person B even though they work for the same company because person A makes more money than person B? The company I'm at now covers birth control pills, and many of the people there are pulling in six figures so you could argue they shouldn't be collecting those benefits compared to, say, the receptionist.

Not a clue.


Probably because it is not deemed an essential service/cost. Everything else is,including birth control pills.


I have the benefits I do because someone in the past came in and demanded them. I recognize my debt to the people who fought for good coverage of employees and more broadly, fought for good health care coverage for Canadians.

Right now Canadians are 'demanding' that dental benefits be included in our health care system. Pretty expensive to fix teeth, put on needed crowns, get braces, keep up on dental hygiene, and there is a very strong correlation between poor dental health and heart disease (suspected mechanism is the accumulation of gum disease bacteria getting into the blood stream and causing inflammation in the heart; or causing plaques).

Economic experts have calculated that providing coverage for dental health for all Canadians is quite a bit cheaper than providing care benefits for people who have had strokes or heart attacks as a result of poor dental hygiene. For a few million dollars spent now, you can save billions in the future.

Summing up:
Contraception will save society money in the long run.
Ms. Fluke won't be around the university long enough to benefit if contraception is eventually covered (assuming it takes the usual length of time bring in new ideas).
Ms. Fluke is speaking on behalf of women everywhere.
Contraception is recommended by the experts for women's health, and to deny them that based on out-dated notions seems callous.
Ms. Fluke also doesn't want whatever is there now to be removed by the new amendment.

Just got a phone call. Have to do a lunch meeting. Needed more time to fix this post up, make is succinct and readable. Sorry.

There's definitely some truth in this. There are medical uses for birth control pills that have absolutely nothing to do with controlling birth. But the Catholic hospitals tend not to cover them anyway, just because they're called 'Birth Control Pills'. We shouldn't get lost in semantics. I assume that what Catholics are objecting to is a certain sort of activity, not a certain word.

Not everyone needs them for the kind of things you're talking about though, so for some people at least, they're optional.


Again, I'm not saying I'd do it myself. I wouldn't. I'm just wary of tossing aside the whole conscientious objecter aspect. Especially to do it so cavalierly, as if to say "First Amendment be darned, this is what I think, and so you're going to do it."



That is a point in her favor.



Not for that reason, no (some people may buy more expensive plans, though). Her status make her claims of hardship ring a bit hollow, although the fact that she's not speaking only on her own behalf mitigates some of that.


That's pretty much the same argument as "means testing" Social Security, isn't it? That's a different subject, but isn't the same rationale used there? "We know you paid in, and we took your money on the understanding that we were holding it for you, but we've decided you don't need it, so we're keeping it."

I sort of agree with the rationale of only dishing it out to people who need it, but dislike changing the rules of the game in mid-stream. For people who were told they were getting it back, they should get it back. But for future people, I don't have a problem if we say "everybody pays in, but whether you get it back depends on whether you need it." In that sense, it's like insurance. As long as that's what people agreed to originally.


I have the benefits I do because someone in the past came in and demanded them. I recognize my debt to the people who fought for good coverage of employees and more broadly, fought for good health care coverage for Canadians.



Okay, but again, I'm not against it. But I do think in cases where it's optional, it's also cheap and the kind of thing people should pay for themselves, the same way grease and oil changes aren't covered by insurance. Do you even have to pay for it at all, or can't you get it free at Planned Parenthood?


A point in her favor.


Mmmm, that one's kind of nebulous. She clearly doesn't speak for women who disagree with her. But it's true she's not speaking primarily for own personal benefit. That argument alone is making me reconsider whether she belongs in this thread. The thread is specifically devoted to greed. Whether that has to mean personal benefit or not hasn't quite been defined. Let's take a totally hypothetical case. Businessman bilks his company of huge bucks, not for himself, but to give to a family member for their benefit. But he won't see a dime of it. Would you call that greed? He does want unearned benefits. But not for himself. But for someone close to him. I'm not sure, I'm going to have to think about this.


If we had any Catholic posters here, I'd be glad to argue them on that point. My points are only about a) the whole conscientious objector concept, and b) whether or not people should pay for their own low-ticket, optional items.


Totally legit.

Leaving aside Rush and Ms. Fluke, this seems like a much more interesting take on the contraception debate from a "face of greed" perspective:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...=home_multiline

That's a good point. Exchange "birth control" for "statins" (reduces bad cholesterol) but leave everything else the same (testifying, etc) none of this would have made news. I don't know if we can really blame the Catholics for this one since the biggest push-back is coming from the ultra far (wingnut?) religious right; and most of them are just going on what the Fox echo chamber has told them and haven't actually listened to or read the statements.


I'm a bit puzzled--it seems we have experience with different systems. We don't get anything back in terms of money paid in. If we don't use any of the benefits, we don't receive a refund. We do have a cap on benefits. E.g. you can't buy several pairs of designer prescription glasses a year (and you have to use an optometrist who is "on the list").

In some companies (or universities when I was a student) you could opt out of the insurance clause if you could show you already had coverage. I tried to opt out of the university insurance but could not. That insurance policy was an introduction to fresh-faced students on how the world is going to rip you off (the university bookstore is the other introduction to being ripped off) by giving them a policy full of items 99.9% of them would never use (masectomy stuff, incontinence equipment, dentures), and had nothing for dental or eye care.

On a totally different note--at that last minute lunch meeting I was told there might be a chance of work in the Yukon this summer, and would I be interested. I tried not to grin too hard.

That's strange, isn't it? As I mentioned above, our insurance does contain costs and every time I have been insured in the past, costs are contained (sometimes annoyingly so). I wonder why a similar system isn't in place in the states (because it is annoying, sometimes idiotic and somewhat arbitrary at times perhaps)?

There's no doubt pharma companies win with this one. They win, many consumers win too. So is contraception cronyism a bad thing here? (I really don't know yet...too much info to digest and consider). How would that differ from the fossil fuel and Koch industry cronyism where they've pretty much bought the Republican Party (our Conservative Party too) who try to pass bills that are industry-friendly (remove EPA, remove monitoring requirements, remove pollution control requirements, remove certain molecules from the list of pollutants, shut down research done by pesky scientists, etc)?

Much to ponder like ships and shoes and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, and whether winged pigs should be given contraceptives....

I'm not necessarily opposed to the changes requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives. I think a lot of what you said makes sense to me, and I don't know nearly enough to make an argument about whether the potential economic tradeoffs are severe enough to consider it a bad idea.

Either way though, that particular tradeoff is almost certainly in the negative direction from the perspective of "bending the cost curve" of healthcare, which was definitely one of the goals of the ACA, and it does seem like a real problem, not so much because I care about the profit margins of drug companies, but rather just because of the growth rate in health care costs. I think it points to a larger general issue with health care pricing and what "insurance" actually means and stuff like that.

It's an interesting topic both socially and economically

My last post is poorly edited, by the way. There are things you wrote in the middle that look like I wrote them.

In the US, Social Security was originally seen as a kind of government run IRA. Even today, a lot of people think there's an account with their name on it. The idea was we'll collect this money and give it back to you at retirement. Means testing means treating it more like insurance (everybody pays in and the money goes where it's needed. If it should happen to be you, then you win. Or is it lose?)

Big Pharma is probably very guilty here too, and I'm not going to quibble if someone else nominates them. But I imagined this thread as being about people that it was possible to actually post a picture of and see their face before we examined their story. So, if I don't nominate a faceless entity like Big Pharmaceuticals, it's not necessarily because I think they're not greedy. It's only that they don't fit the pattern I'm looking for, which is "People that we can actually look at, assign a name and face to, (i.e. accept them as individuals) but still call them greedy" (because it's so much harder to do that with "real people" than with faceless amorphous blobs).

haha I didn't really consider the actual topic of the thread. I just read the latest comments. It's OK thought because I have it on good authority that corporations are people