That's what CNN thinks Obamacare should bring us. (Click here for story).
The story's opening sentence set the tone: "Contraceptives, sterilization and reproductive education should be covered by health insurance plans with no cost to patients under the health reform law, a new report recommends."
Funny, I thought these wacky liberals wanted the government out of their bedrooms? I mean, if the government can rob Peter to pay for Paul’s vasectomy or Paula’s IUD, shouldn’t Peter have some say in what Paul and Paula should or shouldn’t be doing? Let me put it another way. My tax dollars go to subsidize school lunch programs. Do I want the schools to make bad nutritional choices or to be so overly-nutrionally-minded that the kids opt out of lunch altogether because lunch tastes terrible? Do I want food that my tax dollars paid for to be thrown away? These little school lunch scenarios aren’t made up; they happen all over the country. In some school districts kids were not allowed to bring their own lunches and snacks from home because the school officials didn’t think that they were good enough for the children. (In reality the school lunch programs were subsidized by the tax payers and the schools made tons of money for their teachers unions... but that's a different story).
Applying the same sort of scenarios to contraception, sterilization and reproductive education I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to ask that if the government is going to provide these services “free” to the consumer, then how long will it be before men and women are forced to use a particular product (as we’ve seen with our new light bulbs), or to be sterilized to save the planet from over-population and global warmin? Given that liberals work according to the process of incrementalization, isn’t this just one more step toward that and tax-payer funded abortions? And how much more will the tax payer have to fork over to cover the costs of these services for illegal aliens, just as they do with school lunch programs? Either most people are mistaken about those wacky liberals, or the “stay out of my bedroom/I have a constitutional right to privacy” mantra isn’t really about privacy and personal choice at all; it’s about people engaging in every vice they choose and keeping the consequences private while getting everyone else to pay for their bad decisions; you know, Socialism.
In a tone that can only be called cheerleading, CNN tells its audience that the Institute of Medicine has made these recommendations to the secretary of Health and Human Services. "Historic" is the way HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described the report, adding that "we will release the Department's recommendations of what additional preventive services for women should be covered without cost sharing very soon."
Sebelius, not us tax payers, gets to decide what we are going to cover because by passing “Obamacare,” the Democrats have given her that authority. Under Obamacare, health care has been nationalized. Among the roughly 700 references in the law to "the Secretary shall" is one mandating that the secretary shall decide which health care plans are acceptable in America and which are not. If a plan does not comply with HHS mandates, companies and individuals who purchase their products will have to pay a fine. In other words, under Obamacare, the secretary of HHS decides who gets covered for what.
The secretary is now considering whether all health plans in America will have to cover birth control, annual HIV tests, well-woman care visits, annual counseling on sexually transmitted diseases, breastfeeding support and counseling including rental of breast pumps, and screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic abuse. These services should be covered "without any co-pays or deductibles," the report by the Institute of Medicine urges. In other words, these products and services should be "free" for all women, not just for the poor, and without regard to the moral code of the individual tax payer.
I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, and chances are neither did you. Any time the government uses the word “free” you just know it’s going to end up costing many times more than it used to. As the great P.J. O'Rourke put it many years ago, "If you think health care is expensive now, just wait till it's free."
