Examine what
the world coming to when our president and government is mandating oral
contraceptives to be part of the preventative medicine in health care plans. There are better means of making other drugs
or treatment free of charge than preventing future pregnancies.
Pregnancy
is not an ill ridden disease and sex is not a deadly medical emergency. Our minds wonder why the president and the
government express concern over the importance to support free birth control
pills to insulin or medical equipment.
They are just giving the green light to have tons of sex and no
baby. The citizens of the United States
should not have to fund their promiscuous lives.
What
needs to happen with our health care is helping those who need high blood pressure
medication, insulin for their diabetics’ needs or chemotherapy for cancer
patients. These are the things that
count because people can actually die without those types of medications and
are costly. A cancer patient will be
more grateful for a free chemotherapy session to kill the cancer cells that
consume their body. I seriously doubt
some young adult will die because she did not have sex or did not receive her
dose of birth control pills. President
Obama and the government seem concern that Horny Helen does not run out of
birth control pills before she hits a fraternity house for a night of boozing
and sex. If that is their main concern,
then the ill citizens of our county are in deep water.
9 comments:
Blog Stage 6 Assignment
Commentary & Response to “Politics: Not Worth My Vote – Against the Odds: Oral Contraceptives”
For our stage 6 blog, I have chosen to critique this article written by my peer. This entry will be entered in 3 parts, as my response is lengthy. My background includes an Associate’s Degree in Emergency Medical Services Technology and 13 years of practicing prehospital emergency medicine. My interpretation of the article is the author’s opinion is the basic premise that President Obama and his staff are wasting resources and focus on the wrong problems. The author makes a few anecdotal and hollow comments about how there are greater problems with far larger social mores than contraception and pregnancy.
Unfortunately, I must begin this critique with some more elementary problems rather than the content. There are some marked, basic grammatical errors throughout the document. It starts with the very first word of the very first line. While I can look beyond the grammar and look more for the meaning, these issues do make the document tough to read and take credibility from the argument.
“Examine what the world coming to when our president and government is mandating oral contraceptives to be part of the preventative medicine in health care plans.”
As I said, the first word of the first sentence should be “Imagine”, not examine. But, let us imagine what the world must be coming to when our government has to mandate oral contraceptives in health care plans and family planning. There must be some inherent failure of a capitalist economy. I have written about this before. See my blog entry here. Moreover, much of this governmental intervention stemmed from pressure from a very large, very wealthy, and very influential lobbyist – the Catholic church. President Obama’s mandate stated that insurance companies must pay for preventative services, not the Church itself. This makes one wonder what dog the Church even has in the fight, other than fundamental beliefs.
Consider this: Obama received 79% of the Latino Catholic vote and 44% of the Caucasian Catholic vote. So, if the majority of the majority of the Catholic Church voted for someone who was trying to institute mandates contradictory to the Church’s tenets, what does THAT say about what the world is coming to… Moving along…
“There are better means of making other drugs or treatment free of charge than preventing future pregnancies.”
This sentence doesn’t really make much sense to begin with either. To be more specific, the above sentence doesn’t make sense - at all. I tried, really hard, to see the forest from the trees but I just could not understand what the author was trying to say.
“Pregnancy is not an ill ridden disease”
I agree fundamentally that pregnancy is not a disease but it is a significant medical condition that requires the care and oversight of a specialized physician. It also comes with complications that include a 25% spontaneous miscarriage rate for pregnancies under 12 weeks, hemorrhage, and eclampsia, all of which are a threat to the mother’s life.
“and sex is not a deadly medical emergency”
HIV and hepatitis are sexually contracted diseases that up to the last 10 years, were fatal. So actually, they are a deadly medical condition. Emergency, no. But, hypertension, hyperglycemia, dialysis, and thyroid conditions are not truly emergent in and of themselves.
Part 2 -
“Our minds wonder why the president and the government express concern over the importance to support free birth control pills to insulin or medical equipment.”
No, my mind doesn’t wonder anything like the author stated. The government is not “expressing concern” of the importance of birth control pills over insulin and medical equipment. These are, in the most simple of terms, two separate arguments. The author may have made a more valid point by saying “the government is placing an excessive amount of concern regarding contraception; however, I feel there are far greater issues that deserve attention, such as insulin and necessary medical equipment”. Addressing the topic of insulin, medical devices, and other necessary drugs or interventions: Medicare and Medicaid both have extensive budgetary inclusions for thousands of medical conditions and medications. I have yet to meet any indigent patients who cannot receive their medications, except in the rare occasions where patients stated they could not meet their $5 deductible. Case in point: I had an 84 year old gentleman on medicare whose lymphoma chemo drug, Gleevic, cost $400/pill. That is $300,000/year. The man had to pay a $10/month copay. I have met thousands of patients over the years who are on Medicare and Medicaid and receive benefits for their conditions. His story is not unique. I can convey another person’s story whose dialysis and medications cost $610/day. He had to pay nothing because he was on Medicare. Before an attack is made on the cost of his treatment, remember this was a disabled, and i mean truly disabled man in his 30’s who could not work. The point is that most of the other interventions the author speaks of are inarguable far more expensive than oral contraceptives. My experience is that there is an exceedingly slim number of people who cannot receive what they need. Maybe they do not participate in the newest and greatest clinical chemo trials, but Medicare does not pay for clinical trials. It does pay for FDA-approved regimens.
Back to the topic regarding governmental involvement, let us remember the spirit behind the presidential mandate: the best way to prevent unplanned pregnancy is using contraception, ergo greatly reducing the chances of the mother having to even make the decision of having an abortion, which is a whole other topic.
Consider the usual women who consider having abortions. It is usually young women or women who were not planning on having children. It is logical that anyone actually planning on having children would not entertain the idea of aborting a fetus. Going back to the usual candidates, these women are unprepared to have children. Giving them an option to avoid making the decision of abortion just makes good sense, regardless of your personal beliefs. That is the entire flaw in the Catholic Church’s argument.
The reality is that people are going to do what they want. Women are going to have unprotected sex. There is also an exceedingly high correlation of pregnant women and lower socioeconomic class. We should not set them up for failure, and a really difficult decision, by not providing contraception. To remove contraception as an option, regardless of how it is paid for, is socially irresponsible.
Regarding who pays for the contraception, I will state this: if we assume tax dollars will pay for contraception, I am all for it. Why? Because the upfront cost of paying for contraception will greatly offset the long-term cost of raising a whole human on welfare. Granted, this assumes that once on welfare, always on welfare. However, that assumption is more of a generally accepted norm than a theory. Consider the long term cost to the tax payers of paying for 1, 2, 5, or even 8 kids per mother. If you think this doesn’t happen, you are exceedingly naive. I had a patient 2 days ago who was 39 years old, single mother, with 8 children. The entire family was on Medicaid, Food Stamps, and living in government housing.
Part 3 - You and I pay for that. Do you still think handing out birth control like candy, even at the tax payer’s expense is a bad idea? Nevermind the cost, consider the future of those children. Do you think those children have a stable, structured environment that is loving and nurturing? I am hard pressed to give you evidentiary proof, but I can tell you that I also called CPS (Child Protective Services) because of the squalid living conditions.
The last point I will make is this: consider if the woman is impoverished and a welfare recipient. How good of a chance do they have of improving their life through employment, education, public service, community service, or volunteerism if they are hindered by having unnecessary or unwanted children?
“They are just giving the green light to have tons of sex and no baby.”
This statement is rather silly but actually does make a point. The government is not sending any message saying “have all the sex you want”. But, if it were to, having contraception available to people would be a far smarter tactic than not, again regarding unwanted pregnancies.
“The citizens of the United States should not have to fund their promiscuous lives.”
I agree with the statement, but we already fund lots of promiscuity. I cite crooked politicians who abuse tax dollars, corporate tax loopholes and the outsourcing of jobs, and wildly out-of-control defense spending with zero oversight or accountability. That is far more pornographic than people having a good ol’ roll in the hay.
“What needs to happen with our health care is helping those who need high blood pressure medication, insulin for their diabetics’ needs or chemotherapy for cancer patients.”
I already addressed this issue earlier. This actually happens. A lot.
“These are the things that count because people can actually die without those types of medications and are costly. A cancer patient will be more grateful for a free chemotherapy session to kill the cancer cells that consume their body”
Women can also die from lack of preventative medical care as I already addressed. The comment about cancer patients is speculative at best, but a logical and agreeable sentiment.
“I seriously doubt some young adult will die because she did not have sex or did not receive her dose of birth control pills.”
Again, people are going to have sex regardless.
Sorry, 4 parts -
“President Obama and the government seem concern that Horny Helen does not run out of birth control pills before she hits a fraternity house for a night of boozing and sex. If that is their main concern, then the ill citizens of our county are in deep water.”
This final passage is hollow and speculative. If in fact we have to concern ourselves with Horny Helen’s romp at the frat house, pills and booze just increase the risk of accidental pregnancy, and ironically, the fun factor. However, if she is having unprotected sex, we also need to consider the real possibility of STDs. 1 in 4 college students have Herpes Simplex 2. If Horny Helen contracts that, she then needs to worry about receiving medication to suppress the viral contagion and sexual prophylactics to prevent spreading the disease. Lastly, we then have to worry about her contracting the HSV2 to her unborn child if delivered vaginally. Then we have a whole new set of problems.
Regarding the last sentence, our country is already in trouble. Oral contraceptives are a grain of sand on the shores of our country’s problems. We have far greater concerns. Perhaps if we educated our children on sexual awareness, health (both physical and sexual), and prevention (again, for both types of health) we can help direct their futures for a brighter, long-term future for our whole country. We need to reform our campaign finance laws. We need to decrease our national debt. We need to do a lot of things. What we don’t need to do is continue to facilitate babies having babies, the poor having more and more children, and we don’t need to arbitrarily involve ourselves in corporate decisions. However, this decision comes with a heavy price that affects a large demographic - women having sex.
I feel that Obama’s mandate was good and necessary. Thank you for reading.
Dear author - I hope you didn’t take this personally. I was awful rough on your piece but my assignment was to critique a peer’s work.
Part 1.
After reading this entry written by Hit or Miss, who proudly declares that politics are not worth her vote, I came to two conclusions:
1. She prefers truthiness to the truth. Who needs information based on extensive research when you can make baseless statements that feel true?
2. Her lack of interest or involvement in politics is a blessing in disguise because I personally hope that she continues to avoid casting ballots until she educates herself on these issues.
1. truthiness (noun)
• 1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
• 2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)
The entry focused specifically on the inclusion of oral contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act. What the author failed to mention, most likely due to a lack of research, is that the Affordable Care Act actually put in place a mandate that requires that insurers provide access to all contraceptive medications, devices, and procedures approved by the Food and Drug Administration without cost-sharing. I believe that this distinction should be made because reversing the contraceptive mandate would not only eliminate access to oral contraceptives, but to all FDA approved contraceptive methods.
The author apparently believes that the mandate was solely intended to prevent pregnancies in young alcoholic women attending college and to encourage them to engage in carnal relations without hesitation. No evidence was provided to support her claim that the Obama administration sought to do either, just as no evidence was provided to prove that only college girls with insatiable appetites for alcohol and intercourse would use contraceptives.
After spending valuable nanoseconds considering the issue, the author decided that the government should not only stop encouraging the drunken trollops roaming the college campuses across the country and start concentrating on eliminating cost-sharing related to medications and treatments for chronic or fatal illnesses. While I am in no way attempting to devalue the chronically or terminally ill, I cannot see a legitimate connection to the Affordable Care Act for a few reasons.
The Affordable Care Act altered our health care system dramatically, especially by dissolving cost-sharing for preventive care. The law includes preventive care for chronic illnesses like cancer and diabetes, but the author believes that reactive care should have been included under these mandates. Loss of health insurance coverage and refusal to provide health insurance were also addressed by the Affordable Care Act through mandates regarding chronic illnesses. Additionally, there are federally funded public health programs, such as Medicaid, that require patients to pay little to no co-pays or deductibles for reactive care.
The idea of eliminating cost-sharing for reactive care services is not, in my honest opinion, something that should or could be addressed by the Affordable Care Act. While many people claim that they would support such a mandate, most would oppose it once they learned about the costs associated with caring for millions of people with chronic or terminal illnesses. The Affordable Care Act was intended to decrease the cost of medical care by preventing many of these high cost illnesses and eliminating cost-sharing for reactive care would only serve to increase the cost of medical care.
Part 2.
Personally, I support universal health care because I believe every person should have steady access to medical care. If millions of people oppose the contraceptive mandate, which actually saves tax dollars, how many people would oppose a mandate eliminating cost-sharing for the chronically or terminally ill once they become aware of the increased cost associated with such conditions? If the system were altered to eliminate cost-sharing for both preventive and reactive care I imagine that universal health care would simplify the overly complicated system presently in place. I digress, however, as the issue at hand is specifically about the contraceptive mandate, not about how cost-sharing for reactive care should be eliminated.
According to a five year study performed by Princeton University, 49 percent of the pregnancies that occur annually are unintended. In 2001, 3 million unintended pregnancies cost taxpayers $5 billion. In contrast, contraceptive use saves approximately $19 billion annually in direct medical costs.
An article that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine many aspects of the public cost of unintended pregnancies. In 2008, a single birth insured by Medicaid cost taxpayers approximately $12,600 and covered prenatal care, delivery, postpartum care, and the first year of infant care. In contrast, contraceptives for a single person cost roughly $260 in the same year. In 2008, a $1.9 billion investment was made to fund family planning care which resulted in Medicaid saving $7 billion by reducing unplanned pregnancies.
In 2002, the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan eliminated cost-sharing for highly effective intrauterine devices, injectable contraceptives, and implants. The elimination of cost-sharing led to a 137 percent increase in the use of these specific contraceptives and prevented approximately 1800 pregnancies. The investment in public planning services has proven beneficial as these programs have saved taxpayers $3.74 for every dollar spent. More than 9 million women made use of publicly funded family planning services in 2006. An estimated 1.94 million unintended pregnancies and over 800,000 abortions were avoided in a single year.
Eliminating the contraceptive mandate would only serve to maintain or increase the cost to taxpayers. Instead of reversing the mandate, which saves billions of tax dollars annually, perhaps the author should instead consider how the contraceptive mandate could be used to fund the elimination of cost-sharing for reactive care. Perhaps I am mistaken, but this seems like a more logistically sound solution.
The author also states that contraceptives should not be included in the Affordable Care Act because the only condition prevented is impregnation. According to the National Women's Law Center, most women in the United States of reproductive age make use of contraceptives and many of them do so to ensure that planned pregnancies prevent health concerns arising for either the mother or the child. The conditions avoided by the mother include gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, and placental problems. The conditions avoided by the child include low birth weight and pre-term birth. It should also be noted that the interval between pregnancies is pertinent and having children too close together or too far apart can increase the risk of developing a number of complications.
On a more personal note, I would like to address the author's assumption that only an irresponsible and promiscuous woman would use contraceptives and that they do so with the sole intention of preventing pregnancy because that would obviously interfere with one's ability attend college parties, consume abnormal amounts of alcohol, and frequently fornicate. I originally chose to respond to the author's entry on contraceptives and those that would use them because she not only managed to offend me, but managed to offend my husband as well.
Part 3.
This is written directly to the author:
I was prescribed oral contraceptives by my reproductive endocrinologist in May in an attempt to reduce the risk I have of developing endometrial cancer and heart disease. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome seven years ago, but was unaware of the danger I put myself in by not managing the more severe symptoms I suffer from. I have been married for almost three years and my husband encouraged me to manage my condition instead of merely living with it, especially because we hope to have children in the future. We are waiting because my husband just entered the Armed Forces and I would prefer to complete school prior to a medically aided conception.
I do not use oral contraceptives because I don't want to become pregnant, I use oral contraceptives because I hope to be blessed with a child one day. I do not spend my nights at parties or fornicating, I spend my nights researching for assignments like these because my educational aspirations are apparently higher than yours. The last time I left the house was to have two surgeries because the oral contraceptives indicated that I may have already developed endometrial cancer and biopsies were needed to determine whether or not that was the case.
Perhaps you should bother to educate yourself in the future to avoid spewing baseless nonsense written at a sixth grade level.
Also, please stop listening to Rush Limbaugh; he's a terrible man with terrible ideas.
hA! you said "trollop"...
29itThe argument is unclear in the blog entry by “Hit or Miss” titled “Against the Odds-Oral Contraceptives.” She attempts to make an argument about the controversial Obamacare contraceptive mandate, but provides the audience with no evidence to back her claims and clearly didn’t do any research on contraception use.
She believes that the “president and the government express concern over the importance to support free birth control pills to insulin or medical equipment,” which would be a valid argument if not followed by “The citizens of the United States should not have to fund their promiscuous lives.” I can only assume that she’s referring to women and not the president and the government.
It’s hard for me to comprehend that a 21st century woman with a family, like Hit or Miss, believes that only promiscuous women use birth control. Liberate your mind Hit or Miss!! Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh and do some research on women’s issues before offering your negligent opinion.
Women use contraceptives for a variety of reasons including endometriosis, excessive bleeding, ovarian cysts, acne and the most common reason, family planning. The latter is important to prevent pregnancies that occur too late or too early and to prevent a woman from having children too close together which can adversely affect the mother’s health and increase the risk of birthing a baby prematurely and with a low birth weight.
According to Guttmacher Institute, more than 99% of women aged 15-44 who have had sexual intercourse have used a contraceptive method. Their research also shows that more married than never been married, use contraceptives (79% vs. 39%) and 93% of married women, at risk of unintended pregnancies, use contraceptives.
In her conclusion, Hit or Miss offers a solution. She believes that our health care system needs to provide people with diabetes, hypertension and cancer medications and not be so concerned that “Horny Helen does not run out of birth control pills before she hits a fraternity house for a night of boozing and sex.” Again, I’m dumbfounded.
Hit or Miss is grammatically deficient throughout her blog entry, as well as, in her knowledge on the subject of contraception. I understand she was trying to argue that many life-saving drugs are not being mandated currently, while a contraceptive no co-pay is. In my opinion, she didn’t relay this idea as well as she could have. Nearly every American woman, regardless of age, religion, marital status or race, who has had sex, has used birth control. Whether a woman is promiscuous or not, she should have access to affordable health care including contraceptives. The spotlight should be more focused on the hypocrisy and inequality in how society views sexual activity and health of men and women.
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