Unfortunately, controversy over the Obama administrations recent “contraception mandate” has virtually consumed the presidential primary over the past several weeks. This is the mandate that states that virtually all employers, including Catholic and other religious institutions, would be forced to pay for free preventive services, including sterilization, contraceptives and drugs that cause abortion, and that all insurers would have to cover these services without additional cost to the patient.
It’s not that the topic is unworthy of discussion and outrage, but conservatives have quickly allowed the arguments to go precisely where liberals directed them – to a perceived Republican assault on contraception itself, and a frenzied uproar about attacks on “religious freedoms”. As a woman, a physician and a Catholic, I find this both disingenuous and absurd.
It’s not that the topic is unworthy of discussion and outrage, but conservatives have quickly allowed the arguments to go precisely where liberals directed them – to a perceived Republican assault on contraception itself, and a frenzied uproar about attacks on “religious freedoms”. As a woman, a physician and a Catholic, I find this both disingenuous and absurd.
There is nothing about contraception that is a pressing “women’s health issue”. Pregnancy is not a disease. And without detailing the obvious, there are adequate ways to prevent it with absolute certainty. Furthermore, multiple big-box pharmacies sell contraception for less than $10/month, rendering this hardly a “healthcare crisis” demanding the kind of national outrage that many Democrats and at least one outspoken Georgetown law student have suggested.
And try as they might, Democrats would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of conservative Christians whose stance is that access to contraception, in and of itself, should be limited or banned – Theirs is simply an issue of who should be expected to provide and pay for that contraception.
The outrage over the contraception mandate is well justified – But the focus should be on the real issues at hand: Firstly, that it is part of the government’s bigger plan to control healthcare costs by engineering healthcare guidelines and implementing social programs that meet that goal, independent of the overall impact on health and wellness; and secondly, that it represents yet another egregious intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of private companies and private citizens, and reflects a highly concerning level of control over our private lives, extending far beyond an affront to religious freedom.
Consider first the Democrats’ contention that contraception is a “women’s health issue”. Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, told the House in mid-March that contraception is "a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children."
This argument is particularly interesting given that at the same time Democrats are claiming that contraception is a “critical women’s health issue”, and are attempting to paint Republicans as cold and heartless in that regard, the Obama administration’s Preventive Services Task Force has come out with new recommendations that women should not start regular breast cancer screening until age 50 rather than the previous recommendation of age 40. The new guidelines came out in November 2009, from the group that has significant influence over doctors, insurance companies and policy makers. The Task Force’s new recommendations also state that women between ages 50 and 74 should only have mammograms every other year, rather than every year. And it recommends that doctors stop advising women to do breast self exams.
The Task Force’s stated reasoning behind these new guidelines is that that only one person was saved for 1,900 screened – A conclusion that has been heavily contested by a number of groups, including the American Cancer Society. The panel felt the cost of all these screening mammograms and the potential for false positives outweighed the impact of early detection.
For years both self-examination and mammograms have been essential parts of regular preventative breast care for women. According to the American Cancer Society "death rates from breast cancer have been declining since about 1990, with larger decreases in women younger than 50." A combination of early detection and improved treatment regimens are cited as the primary reason for improved survival rates.
U.S. government-run insurance plans and companies will now likely use these new federal Task Force guidelines to eliminate coverage for yearly mammograms. In addition, the Task Force has released new guidelines on cervical cancer screenings suggesting that women should wait until their 20’s to have their first pap smears and that they should be re-screened less often. After years of educating women and the public to participate in early detection screening, the Obama administration has just done an about-face when it comes to breast and cervical cancer. Many on the right have correctly concluded that the changes in guidelines are nothing more than rationing intended to save healthcare dollars.
When asked who will pay for the new HHS contraception mandate, Secretary Sebelius finally showed her hand: She replied that a reduction births will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new requirements. “The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is “down not up.” In other words, it’s important that we provide contraceptives because pregnancy is more expensive to the federal government than the cost to prevent pregnancy.
This all begs the critical question: “Who is really the strong proponent of women’s health, and who is simply trying to cut healthcare costs with rationing of services and social engineering maneuvers?” Just imagine how much money we will save when we stop diagnosing breast and cervical cancers when they’re still early enough to treat!
Now look at point number two -- The over-reaching impact of the mandate on our personal liberties: While many are focusing on the contraception mandate as a violation of religious freedom -- which is real -- and the associated affront to our constitutional, First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty, the bigger issue is being obfuscated: when the government takes over control of our health-care system, it takes control over our most private, personal decisions. It also assumes control of everything that private companies and organizations – religious or otherwise -- can do. Business models, plan designs, revenue streams, and customer relationships are totally at the whim of the government. This is about ultimate control of very aspect of society: religious, social and economic.
One of the first critical steps to implementing the single-payer government healthcare system that President Obama and so many on the left promote, is to force consistency in coverage and homogeneity in plan design; in other words, to force removal of all customization and personalization.
In a free market, insurers are able to customize plans and tailor coverage to meet the needs of employers and individual buyers vs. the government dictating a one-size-fits-all plan. Amongst other things, free-market competition and the ability to provide a better product drives innovation and keeps costs down.
If the government can now dictate that employers and insurance companies have to provide contraception for the prevention of pregnancy, what’s its next mandate: Car seats for infants? Bicycle helmets? Football pads? Perhaps sun screen? In this way, the contraception mandate defines the proverbial “slippery slope” in the take over of healthcare, and ultimately in controlling society.
At what point does the relationship between the insurer and the insured, the employer and the employed, the doctor and the patient, lose all semblance of humanity and become a prescribed set of governmental rules and mandates aimed at driving the populace to the lowest common denominator?
In one fell swoop, the United States will go from the country that has the best cancer and trauma survival rates, and has made more discoveries and advances in healthcare than any other nation on the planet, to the one that is crippled with mandates and onerous regulations that effectively stifle innovation and progress, and one where critical screenings and services are rationed based on actuarial calculations rather than medical science.
Democrats have effectively skewed the optics of the contraception argument to appear that it is about the value of protecting women’s health and whether or not religious freedom should supersede the sanctity of sexual freedom. If we can see beyond the affront to Catholic social thought, the discussion is really about government mandates aimed at rationing healthcare dollars, controlling costs, and applying an artificial coda of social “equality”. It reflects a continued march down the path to increased intrusion and control by the federal government into the private lives of its citizens.
If we believe that the Constitution’s protection of our lives and liberty is valid, then the Supreme Court must declare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, and ultimately stop the limitless control of the government over our lives, such that we can return our country to the path to liberty and prosperity.
