Sunday, January 27, 2013

Outrageous

 One of the front page headlines in the New York Times is about the crush of lawsuits against the new healthcare law that requires contraception be made available by the policies.  The religious nuts and far right wing says it violates their beliefs.  So, if you work for a church or a business owned by a fundamentalist you might be shoved aside.

A remarkably good headline story in the Albuquerque Journal today is how 70% of child births in New Mexico are paid for by medicaid.  Just listen to what anti tax right wingers say about this.  If you know any of them ask them to read the New York Times story.  I wonder if they might see any connection.  Strangely, the Journal didn't even mention contraception in its story.  No comments from family planners.  Just from the head of the chamber of commerce.  Weird.

My wife Bobbi says if contraception isn't allowed as coverage for women then no public monies should be allowed for erectile dysfunction drugs.  It too is a pill having to do with fertility and it is covered under the health care law.

And then on the other end of the equation we find that 24% of medicaid expenditures are spent on just 8% of medicaid recipients who are in nursing home care.  A whole industry has grown up around keeping people alive that have zero quality of life.  These companies exist on tax dollars earned by keeping folks alive no matter how much they suffer.

2 comments:

Vicki said...

I had the same reaction as you when I read the front page article about 70% of NM births paid for by Medicare. No mention of contraception in the article. With the Catholic Church and the political right wing up in arms about either tax-payer medical care and/or provisions to allow for contraception or abortion in medical insurance, doesn't anyone see the connection? Young people will continue to have pre-marital sex and unless we provide contraception information and supplies and/or abortion, we'll just keep paying hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for those births becuse this state has a lot of poor people who could use some help with preventing pregnancies!

Michelle Meaders said...

They encourage us to bash unmarried teenagers, but what percent are they? How many of these births are to hard-working families that earn under the cutoff for a family of 4, $3554 a month or $42648 a year, or $20.50 an hour? (Or two workers making an average of $10.25 an hour.) You couldn't tell from the article.

How much of that income is eaten up by childcare? The childcare subsidies have been cut back, as has public education. And only 40% of workers nationally have paid sick leave, which makes it hard to access preventive care.

The Gov. and Chamber keep encouraging low-paying private sector employers who don't have to offer benefits or pay much in taxes; she calls it being "competitive". The taxpayers end up subsidizing these workers, especially for Wal-Mart. Public-sector employers usually have better benefits.

The article also doesn't mention that Medicaid payments are a 3-to-1 match: the state gets $3 from the Feds for every dollar it spends. A good deal for the state! Or that the Medicaid expansion will be paid for 100% by the Feds.