ACA + Abortion

I heard the dumbest thing on NPR this morning.

A bunch of religious conservatives are making a fuss because SOME plans under the Affordable Care Act cover elective abortions, and others do not -- but it isn't clearly spelled out which is which. They want to be able to choose a plan that DOES NOT cover pregnancy termination.

How dumb is that? If you don't want an abortion, DON'T GET ONE. You don't have to be in a plan that prohibits it!

Why, all of a sudden, are you expecting religious (or other) conservatives to make sense? Did you get yourself some of that BC Bud? Do you have any extra?

I'm just amused at the hideyholes conservatives are running into, looking for ANY ammunition against a major new social program which is likely to become as widely popular as Social Security and Medicare.

I'm afraid that I'm not as optimistic as you are.

Remember that the Republicans are going to do everything they can to sabotage the program. In some states, it probably won't work worth a damn because of the manner in which the Republican executives fuck with Medicaid, and because they will allow the insurance companies too much leeway in setting prices.

The insurance companies will, no doubt, use every bookkeeping trick they can to raise rates and blame it on the ACA. For example, my cleaning lady's husband told me this morning that his AT&T retirees' insurance plan bumped up the rates significantly, and the ACA has no effect on the rate structure or membership of that plan.

We already see large companies cutting insurance coverage.

• UPS will no longer cover employees' spouses if those spouses are employed and can get insurance from their employers. It is estimated that this rule will affect about 15,000 UPS employees, raising their families' cost for insurance, while saving UPS a bunch of bucks. UPS has said that the move was because of costs of the ACA.
  

• WalMart said that all employees hired since February are part-time employees, therefore it is not required to provide medical insurance for them.
  

While I think the best way this problem could have been handled was to simply extend Medicare to everyone, I do think that the current plan could be a great improvement. Unfortunately, the lack of a nation-side set of standards and the absence of strict nation-wide requirements for the insurance companies leave the plan vulnerable to political tomfuckery (I like that word better than tomfoolery).

Well let's look at this.

UPS and Konecranes and Premier Health and others are dropping coverage for spouses WHEN THE SPOUSES ARE ELIGIBLE to receive healthcare under their own employers' plans, which maybe they couldn't get before because of pre-existing conditions or employers not offering insurance.  Now they're required to cover them.  If the spouse IS NOT ELIGIBLE (for instance, not employed) for another plan they'll still be covered under their spouse's plan.  This just seems like common sense to me -- if everybody is eligible under their employer's plan it makes sense to keep the plan as close to the source as possible.  It probably *is* very expensive for UPS to cover spouses with pre-existing conditions.

Regarding Walmart and part-time employees, not sure where you got this information.  The headlines I see are that 35,000 part time workers are being promoted to full-time now that healthcare costs are affordable.

NoCoPilot wrote:

UPS and Konecranes and Premier Health and others are dropping coverage for spouses WHEN THE SPOUSES ARE ELIGIBLE to receive healthcare under their own employers' plans, which maybe they couldn't get before because of pre-existing conditions or employers not offering insurance.  Now they're required to cover them.  If the spouse IS NOT ELIGIBLE (for instance, not employed) for another plan they'll still be covered under their spouse's plan.  This just seems like common sense to me -- if everybody is eligible under their employer's plan it makes sense to keep the plan as close to the source as possible.  It probably *is* very expensive for UPS to cover spouses with pre-existing conditions.

What you are leaving out is that it can cost a family more for the same coverage under this method. About twenty years ago, the company I worked for was self-insured. I got medical, dental, and vision insurance for the family for $75 per month (it was the cheapest and the best insurance I had in all my working years). If my wife had been required to be covered under her employer, it would have cost the her $250 per month. The cost of my insurance wouldn't have changed. We would have paid 4.3 times as much for the same amount of insurance.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Regarding Walmart and part-time employees, not sure where you got this information.  The headlines I see are that 35,000 part time workers are being promoted to full-time now that healthcare costs are affordable.

I got that information a couple of months ago when WalMart announced it. Apparently, it didn't work out too well for them, as mentioned in the Forbes article.

Forbes wrote:

For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers (those who must reapply for a job every 180 days) to staff their stores while cutting full-time employees’ hours down to part-time status in order to avoid providing workers with healthcare benefits.
The result?
Empty shelves, ridiculously long check-out lines, helpless customers wandering through the electronics section and general disorganization at Wal-Mart store locations.

Note also, that WalMart is staffing up for the holiday shopping season.

_Howard wrote:

About twenty years ago,

Things have changed.

Under the new ACA your wife's insurance under her employer's plan should cost the exact same amount she would cost under your plan. That's the beauty of standardized plans.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Under the new ACA your wife's insurance under her employer's plan should cost the exact same amount she would cost under your plan.  That's the beauty of standardized plans.

No, it would not. The cost of the plans is still up to the insurance companies. The plan doesn't have any effect on policies that meet the minimums set up under the ACA.

It is typically much cheaper to add a spouse to an employee's insurance plan than it is for the spouse to get a separate plan under his or her employer. Not all employers offer the same plans, nor do they charge the same percentage of the cost to the employee. My wife and I compared plan costs and benefits every year to see what the best deal was. It always came out significantly in favor of both of us being on the same plan. Hell, right now, I have Medicare Part A (hospitalization), but I have not signed up for Part B (outpatient care) or Part D (prescriptions) because it's cheaper to keep me on my wife's employer's insurance plan.

I would like somebody to please explain to me why conservatives oppose abortion rights.

It can't be because of "the sanctity of life."  They're also in favor of capital punishment, wars, stripping healthcare from poor people, and open season on Black men.

It can't be on religious grounds.  The current conservative movement is the most unChristian philosophy out there.

It can't be because of the cost.  That's minimal, especially compared to the costs of outlawing it.

Is it an incremental way to strip autonomy from womenfolk?  Is it a patriarchal thing?  Is it like 1870s, after passage of the 13th Amendment, when powerful forces sought to reverse abolition not by relegislating it, but by imposing the same restrictions that were in place before the slaves were freed?

NoCoPilot wrote:

Is it an incremental way to strip autonomy from womenfolk?  Is it a patriarchal thing?  Is it like 1870s, after passage of the 13th Amendment, when powerful forces sought to reverse abolition not by relegislating it, but by imposing the same restrictions that were in place before the slaves were freed?

Yep. That's it.

I was pondering today how the Harris/Ocasio-Cortez administration might codify women's freedom of choice.

A constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 majority in both the House and the Senate.  That's a tough hill.

The Equal Rights Amendment is already nearly passed.  Pushing that over the long-overdue top would give a legal framework for legislation or jurisprudence to extend it to bodily integrity.

Barring that, legislation might be the only route.  With a record number of women in Congress 2021-2025, it's certainly possible.

Wikipedia wrote:

The abortion rate has continuously fallen from a peak in 1980 of 30 per 1,000 women of childbearing age (15–44), to 12 per 1,000 by 2016.

In 2016, 66% of abortions were performed at 8 weeks or less gestation, and 91% of abortions were performed at 13 weeks or less gestation.