tron grumbles about healthcare.


so i really want to be excited that i'm not being kicked off of my insurance in four months and that my pre existing conditions won't affect my ability to be insured. but i can't be excited. because women got thrown under the bus to negotiate with the conservatives that ended up voting against it anyway. and to appease those conservative democrats who needed a back door reason to break party lines. you can talk about moral objections to abortion all day long but that's not what this was about. this was conservatives specifically choosing a highly divisive, "morally" grounded opposition which they knew they could not be disputed and could easily be exploited to slow down the progress of "obama"care. and they were right, it did. it even got our most "women friendly president" to sign an executive order conceding that women's rights just aren't the same as real people's rights.

"Under the Act, longstanding Federal laws to protect conscience (such as the Church Amendment, 42 U.S.C. §300a-7, and the Weldon Amendment, Pub. L. No. 111-8, §508(d)(1) (2009)) remain intact and new protections prohibit discrimination against health care facilities and health care providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions"- this reads like we're turning public health services into evangelical crisis pregnancy centers. no requirement to refer for abortions? really? ok so i'm willing to entertain the thought that perhaps this is truly intended to protect taxpayers from having their money used to provide for a service they morally oppose. so where was my conscience protection when it came to funding the war in iraq, which i morally opposed? i also don't want my tax dollars being used to help insurance companies cover viagra. or capital punishment and marriage tax breaks that exclude homosexuals, for that matter. where the fuck are my conscience protections?

"The Act specifically prohibits the use of tax credits and cost-sharing reduction payments to pay for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) in the health insurance exchanges that will be operational in 2014"- this might be acceptable if we had a legal system that didn't act like rape victims are either liars or "asking" for it. this might work if it was even somewhat common for rape trials to result in a conviction. considering that so many people seem to value the "life" of a mass of cells over the rights and decisions of adult women- it also seems unlikely that a women's life will be deemed endangered if the alternative means forcing her to pay out of pocket for an abortion.

"The Act also imposes strict payment and accounting requirements to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services in exchange plans (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) and requires state health insurance commissioners to ensure that exchange plan funds are segregated by insurance companies in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles"- that is, poor women receiving public aid, those women who already face access issues to reproductive health, will be the ones hurt most by this. poor women will continue to be forced to have children they don't want/can't afford. they will then be called welfare queens and villianized by the same system for being a drain on public resources, all of which could be avoided by allowing low income women to use public funding for abortion.