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TUESDAY AUGUST 28 2007 4:00 PM

Or At Least It Ought to Be

Submitted by Bitch_PhD

Edited by Bitch_PhD

Tags: child health insurance program, chip, health insurance, bush administration, reproductive rights

What's the connection between Bush's assholish attempt to deny health insurance to children and reproductive rights?

Glad you asked.

The Congressional Budget Office found that increasing Medicaid access to contraception would save money--thereby offsetting Bush's oh-so-compassionate concerns about whether the richest nation in the world can afford to pay for sick kids to see the doctor.
SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) covers children up to the age of 18--which is obviously going to include teenage girls.
Nonetheless, SCHIP only covers Abortion services . . . to save the life of the mother, or to terminate a pregnancy resulting from an act of rape or incest.
According to the assholes at the Heritage Foundation,
State officials in Michigan, concerned that the law required SCHIP to fund contraception and sterilization services,amended Michigan's Title XXI State Plan to remove coverage for those services.

And finally, apparently [LIST]Hillary Clinton is not only saying that we need to make sure that reproductive health be part of any planned health care reform, but--for those of you who've forgotten or never realized--the very existence of the SCHIP came out of the work she did after her "failed" attempt at health care reform during her husband's first administration. (And yes, that's her taking credit for it--but don't worry, right wing nutjobs as well as lefties who support other Democratic candidates back this up.)

And now the latest news about poverty rates now includes information that further puts the lie to Bush's bullshit about not wanting to expand SCHIP to cover those above the poverty line.

The nation's poverty rate declined for the first time this decade, but the number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record high of 47 million in 2006, according to Census figures released today.

Children fared even worse. Last year 11.7 percent of youngsters under 18 years had no health insurance, up from 10.9 percent in 2005. The percentage of uninsured children has increased two years in a row after declining for at least five years, according to the Census data.

How is that possible?

"Despite SCHIP's earlier success in decreasing the number of uninsured children, their numbers have risen for the second straight year because of a decline in employer-based coverage."

So people are working harder, earning less

(The increase in this year's median household income appeared to be largely due to a jump in the number of people in each household taking on full-time jobs, rather than a rise in wages. In fact, earnings of both men and women declined by just over 1 percent.

The drop in the poverty rate from 12.6 percent in 2005 to 12.3 percent in 2006, meanwhile, was almost entirely driven by a decrease in poverty for those over 65),

and fewer jobs are offering health coverage.

HIllarycare--or fuck, any kind of national program, whether a single-payer system or nationalized hospitals--is starting to look pretty goddamn good, don't you think?

Bitch_PhD still isn't sure who she supports in the primary, but is pretty sure that Hillary's the best choice soley from a reproductive rights perspective.

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Comments

reprobate

New Orleans, LA

December 2002

AUG 28, 2007 08:20 PM

raist333 said:
xazapdmytinu said:

"Also, it takes one bad choice to become a teen mother, whereas it takes continuous disregard for your own health to require a liver or lung transplant."

...But why am I required to pay for EITHER choice if I didn't make it?

Because you live in this thing called society. Everyone pools their resources for mutual benefit and economy of scale. That's the way it works. You're not paying for anyone's lung transplant, you are paying for a tiny fraction of everyone's medical problems, and in no cogent way does this imply a right to dictate behavior. Conversely, the lack of right to dictate behavior doesn't impute a right not to pay. The government does lots of things with "my" money that I don't like, along with everyone else.

Twelve

Bay City, MI

April 2007

AUG 28, 2007 08:22 PM

Morgan said:
I will bet you a dollar that at some point, someone will respond to this by saying that "if she didn't want to get pregnant, she shouldn't have had sex!".

And then my head will explode.

Well, to be fair, that's true.

But I'll go with the Camille Paglia argument here and say that while that may be the ideal, a much better policy is to consider the truth; teens and others are going to have sex and get pregnant, and it needs to be dealt with, not swept under the rug.

Anyway:

State officials in Michigan, concerned that the law required SCHIP to fund contraception and sterilization services,amended Michigan's Title XXI State Plan to remove coverage for those services.

I'm glad that my state hates gays and people who like to have sex.

Sex ed is so fucking inadequate here it's painful. Just the other day I had to direct a friend of mine to Planned Parenthood because no one had ever seen fit to notify her of its existence.

Morgan

SUICIDEGIRL

Illinois, USA

AUG 28, 2007 08:25 PM

reprobate said:

Words cannot express how happy I am every time you enter into a thread that has been causing me frustration.

Seriously.

DevilsReject

Cleveland, OH

February 2007

AUG 28, 2007 08:34 PM

TwelveTone said:

Morgan said:
I will bet you a dollar that at some point, someone will respond to this by saying that "if she didn't want to get pregnant, she shouldn't have had sex!".

And then my head will explode.

i agree with you that it shouldn't be swept under the rug. Inadequacies in state services has a lot to do with it. I am a single father. I have full custody of my daughter. Once a year i get a call from Child Services, from a different snooty agent each time, and they say "You haven't paid child support in <insert daughter's age at the time here>, you have to make amends or you will be arrested"

Every year i go through this. They bother me, because they can find me, but i know people that haven't paid child support in years, have no intention to, and never get jail time or anything.

What i am getting at. Is the woman usually bears the weight of unplanned parenthood, while the man just kind of says "it wasn't me" and walks away. Men need to step up to the plate, even if the relationship with the pregnant woman isn't ever going to happen. Personal responsibility would resolve a lot of the issues with teenage pregnancy.

A vagina cannot just squirt a baby out on it's own, it takes a penis in the equation somewhere to make that happen. The human attached to that penis should be held just as responsible as the vagina.