Posts tagged with 'birth control'
Daily Pulse: The Public Option is Alive and Kicking
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Reports of the death of the public option were greatly exaggerated. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, liberals are once again optimistic that health care reform will include a publicly-run insurance option to compete with private insurance companies. The main excuse to drop the public option was that Republicans wouldn’t go for it. As Benen explains, now that a bipartisan bill is out of reach, Democrats can move further to the left. Progressive Democrats have convincingly argued that the public option would save money, which undermines the Blue Dogs’ opposition for the sake of fiscal conservatism.
The Senate Finance Committee will tackle the public option tomorrow. Meanwhile, the House Democratic caucus is wrestling over what kind of public option to support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly rejected a so-called “trigger” which would activate a public option only if private insurers failed to control costs. “A trigger is an excuse for not doing anything,” she said. By contrast, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid supports a trigger. The views of the Speaker and the Majority Leader are important because they will lead negotiations to merge the House and Senate versions of the bill, creating the final text that both houses will vote on.
Meanwhile, in international news, scholars at the London School of Economics released new research last week showing that reproductive choice is the most powerful tool in the fight against climate change. The news broke as nearly a hundred heads of state gathered in New York for the UN Summit on Climate Change. As Amanda Marcotte notes in RH Reality Check, the report’s recommendations are sure to spark controversy from both the right and the left:
It’s easy enough to assume that the Obama administration and the Sierra Club are shying away from the issue because reproductive rights are such an explosive topic, and even touching it brings a hail of crazy from the anti-sex nuts down on your head. … But I can honestly say that I don’t think it’s the fear of the Anti-Sex Mafia that causes this sort of allergy. It’s the history of the fear of overpopulation being used as an excuse to coerce childbirth choices, and the fact that as soon as the potential for coercion is introduced, you suddenly attract a sea of racists who love to pontificate about eugenics all day, and would love to be able to influence policy to reduce the number of non-white people in relation to the number of white people.
At Feministing, Ann Friedman argues that the rubric of population control is irrevocably tainted by its historical links to eugenics and other forms of racism. She argues that international development should focus on empowering women for their own sake, not because we hope that they will have fewer babies.
I agree that the phrase “population control” is a misleading frame. You could just as easily call it “helping women have as many children as they want.” The key is that virtually all women want fewer children than they will bear if nature takes its course. And the more opportunities women have for education, paid work, and healthy children, the fewer kids they tend to want. The phrase “population control” should be scrapped, but the effort to put women in charge of their own fertility must continue, for the good of humanity and the planet.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Reconciliation and Discrimination on the Healthcare Front
Last Thursday, the House and Senate passed budgets for fiscal year 2010. The House version includes critical language that could open the door for healthcare reform in 2009–and not a moment too soon. Unemployment is skyrocketing, increasing numbers of Americans are going without health insurance, and Democrats are looking to pass a healthcare reform bill fast.
In the American Prospect, Ezra Klein explains three ways that budget reconciliation could be used to fast-track healthcare reform by bypassing a filibuster, allowing reform to pass with a simple majority vote. The three options are: regular reconciliation, delayed-onset, and do-over. Klein thinks there’s a real chance that the delayed-onset or do-over reconciliation options could work. Delayed-onset reconciliation would kick in only if the Democrats and the Republicans haven’t passed a healthcare bill by a certain date. Do-over reconciliation would be based on a gentleman’s agreement between the chairs of the House and the Senate budget committees to pass budget amendments if the two parties can’t agree on a healthcare reform package within a certain amount of time.
Evidence continues to mount that minorities are especially burdened by our dysfunctional healthcare system. Public News Service reports that lack of health insurance is becoming an epidemic in Michigan, that 28% of Ohioans under the age of 65 were uninsured between 2007 and 2008, and that minorities are still aren’t getting fair access in Massachusetts, despite attempts at reform. New America Media points to yet another alarming study from the University of Chicago on race and health disparities in Illinois:
In other news, personal responsibility takes a back seat to the war on drugs in Virginia. At Feministing.com, Miriam Perez discusses the case of a Virginia teenager who was suspended from school because she was seen taking her birth control pill during lunch hour. Never mind that her doctor had prescribed it and her mother already knew all about it.
It’s disappointing news on the 55th anniversary of the birth control pill. I guess they missed the memo about the benefits of preventative reproductive healthcare. If you need more proof that prevention pays, check out the latest study, covered in RH Reality Check by Emilie Ailts.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones asks whether Obama’s FDA will be a watchdog or a lapdog when it comes to regulating Big Pharma. Under Bush the FDA became little more than a marketing arm of the drug and medical device industry. Ridgeway wonders whether the regulator agency will regain its authority and dignity in the new administration.
Finally, some news from the intersection of healthcare and human rights. Adam Serwer of TAPPED and Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly react to the news that doctors oversaw the torture of prisoners at CIA black sites. “Torture isn’t acceptable, no matter who’s inflicting the pain or coming up with legal rationalizations for it. But there’s something uniquely offensive about medical professionals who were directly involved with the torture of detainees at CIA secret prisons,” Benen writes.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Flipping the Byrd on Healthcare Reform
This week, the healthcare reform debate churned on behind the scenes as the economic crisis and treasury secretary Geithner’s latest bank rescue plan dominated the news cycle. Meanwhile Democrats weighed various strategies to advance healthcare reform even without a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. Drug policy made headlines this week. Attorney General Eric Holder expanded upon the administration’s new found tolerance towards states that permit medical marijuana. The morning after pill will soon be available over-the-counter, thanks to a ruling by a New York Federal judge.
“Could an obscure Senate rule free Barack Obama from the filibuster and enable health-care reform?” asks Ezra Klein in the American Prospect. Democrats are eager to maintain momentum for their ambitious healthcare reform agenda, but the potential of a filibuster could derail the plan. It all comes down to numbers: If a healthcare reform bill were introduced in the Senate, the Democrats would not have the 60 votes they need to block a Republican filibuster.
However, as Klein explains, it’s possible to pass a healthcare bill with a simple majority in the Senate:
Imagine you want to run health reform through the reconciliation process. Here’s how it works: Congress includes reconciliation instructions in the budget. Those instructions direct certain committees — say, the Finance Committee and the Health, Energy, Labor, and Pensions Committee — to produce health-reform legislation hitting certain spending targets by a certain deadline. Once finished, the legislation is tossed back to the Budget Committee, which staples it together into an omnibus bill and sends it to the floor of the Senate for 20 hours of debate followed by an up-or-down vote.
There’s always a catch. In this case, Klein explains, the catch is a provision known as the Byrd Rule, which states that only provisions directly related to spending or deficit reduction can be inserted during budget reconciliation. Everyone seems to agree that healthcare reform will have a profound impact, for good or ill, on the nation’s bottom line–but would healthcare legislation “count” under the Byrd test? Klein says that nobody knows because the final decision would rest with the inscrutable Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin . George W. Bush used the reconciliation process to pass everything from oil drilling to trade policy, but there’s simply no way to know whether the parliamentarian would indulge the Democrats on healthcare. Klein writes, “It’s the legislative equivalent of deciding a bill on penalty kicks.”
Even so, the Republicans aren’t taking any chances. The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen recently chided Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) for saying that using the reconciliation process to pass healthcare reform would be a step towards “mob rule”.
Public interest lawyer Roy Ulrich argues in AlterNet that we may not see healthcare reform until we see campaign finance reform. Ulrich notes that most liberals, President Obama included, want healthcare reform to included a publicly-financed health insurance option. However, even some of the Democrats in the Senate are hostile to that idea, notably Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who has received more than $413,000 over the past four years from drug companies and health insurance carriers.
Drug policy continues to make headlines this week. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly follows up on Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that he will no longer raid medical marijuana facilities in California, where the drug is legal with a doctor’s prescription: Holder stated that on his watch, federal authorities would only target traffickers posing as legitimate dispensaries, bona fide purveyors of medical marijuana.
Benen notes that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is giving an unpredictable justification for his entirely predictable outrage: “This Attorney General is not doing healthcare reform any good,” said Grassley. “The first rule of medicine — ‘do no harm’ — is being violated by the Attorney General with this decision.”
Yes, that’s the same Chuck Grassley who cheers on Rush Limbaugh for telling lies about comparative efficacy research (CER) and healthcare reform. I’m not making this up. Chris Hayes of the Nation has the details. Limbaugh, Fox News and other right wing media outlets have been deliberately circulating misinformation about the president’s comparative effectiveness research program. In reality, CER is a tool for doctors to make better treatment deisions. Limbaugh and his cronies are claiming that it has something to do with healthcare rationing and Grassley is cheering them on.
Despite some deescalation on the medical marijuana front, President Obama has shown a troubling willingness to further militarize other aspects of the drug war, Democracy Now reports.
And finally, a big step forward for birth control, thanks to a federal judge in New York. Thanks to the judge’s ruling, Plan B, also known as the morning after pill, will be available over-the-counter to women over the age of 17 within the next 30 days, Dana Goldstein notes in the American Prospect. The judge found the FDA erred in restricting access to Plan B during the Bush era.
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire blogger
The Obama administration may be about to pull the plug on the health czar. The position has gone unfilled since Obama’s appointee-apparent, former Sen. Tom Daschle, withdrew his name from consideration for both czar and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early February. Several serious candidates are emerging in the unofficial race to lead HHS, but there’s no corresponding shortlist for health czar.
The czar and his Office of Health Reform were initially touted as proof that Obama was really serious about shepherding a health reform package through Congress. But the Obama team may ultimately decide that the Office of Health Reform is an obstacle instead of an asset without Daschle and ditch it altogether.
As Erza Klein explains in the American Prospect, the position was created especially for Daschle and any other candidate might be worse than nothing as far as passing a healthcare reform package goes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees, and says that nixing the health czar doesn’t necessarily indicate that the Obama administration is any less committed to healthcare reform.
The purpose of the health czar was to create a single emissary to represent President Obama’s healthcare agenda to Congress. When the Clintons tried to reform healthcare in 1993, they discovered that various powerful administration officials were claiming to speak for the president.
The health czar was supposed to prevent future confusion as the president’s spokesperson. Many senior healthcare officials are already close to Obama and a similar situation could arise. Daschle would have been a credible health czar because he’s closer to the president than any of them, and a former congressional heavyweight to boot. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a front-runner for HHS secretary and she has a very good relationship with Obama. But Gov. Sebelius is a Washington outsider who has never served in the U.S. Congress, which might make her a less compelling candidate for czar.
Ezra Klein, linked above, argues that if nobody can fill Daschle’s shoes, appointing a less compelling czar might just add to the din of executive branch officials vying for the attention of key Congressional leaders.
Maybe it’s a good idea to send as many Obama health officials to Congress as possible. If nothing else, they might cut into time the reps are currently spending with health insurance industry lobbyists, as Talking Points Memo reports.
Speaking of contenders for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Howard Dean recently published an article on AlterNet defending Obama’s comparative effectiveness research (CER) agenda against right wing critics like Rush Limbaugh. Dean draws on his experience as a doctor and a healthcare policy-maker to argue that CER is a way to put more scientific evidence in the hands of doctors, so they can choose the very best treatment for the money. Right wingers don’t like the idea. They’re literally afraid that if science determines that a treatment is bogus, the government will stop paying for it. Right wingers calls this “rationing.” Taxpayers might call it evidence-based policy. Last we checked, Medicare and Medicaid were not faith-based programs.
As Dean points out, the CER to be funded by the new economic stimulus bill is officially for doctors, not legislators. “Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research,” Dean wrote. Realistically, though, that’s kind of a hollow assurance. Once the research is done, there’s no way to stop legislators from using publicly available research findings to make healthcare decisions.
In another corner of the healthcare reform-o-sphere, Katrina vanden Heuvel says that time is right to reform New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in The Nation. These laws have been on the books 35 years. The laws essentially force judges to send drug possessors to jail based on the weight of the drugs they were caught with, whether the judge thinks imprisonment would be a good idea or not. New York’s budget crisis might be a blessing in disguise for drug reform, vanden Heuvel argues, because policy-makers are sick of paying to keep drug offenders locked up whether they need it or not.
And finally, some good news from RH Reality Check. Many people just wouldn’t feel right stepping out without a spritz of perfume, a blast of breath-freshener, or regrettably, a head-to-toe shellacking with Axe Body Spray. As Joe Veix reports for RH, another spray-on product may one day be added to the essential equipment list: contraceptive. An Australian company is currently testing a hormone spritz for women. The product is applied to the forearm. Like the contraceptive patch, the spray is designed to deliver hormones through the skin. Researchers hope that through-the-skin delivery can produce the same results as pills, but with lower doses of hormones and fewer side effects.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit
href=”http://healthcare.newsladder.net/” title=”Healthcare.NewsLadder.net” id=”so75″>Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, <a href=”http://economy.newsladder.net/”>Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Funding Birth Control? It’s the Economy, Stupid
The $825 billion economic stimulus package is finally taking shape as House committees finalize their contributions to the bill. The good news is that healthcare spending will be a major part of the stimulus: $87 billion has been set aside to help states pay for Medicaid alone.
But one health-related provision was sacrificed to political expediency on Tuesday in an attempt to wrangle Republican support for the stimulus package: Medicaid expansion for birth control.
Medicaid is already the single largest source of public funding for family planning nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The stimulus provision would have made it easier for states to cover family planning for low-income women who currently make slightly too much to qualify for regular Medicaid.
House Minority Leader John Boehner made political hay out of the provision, claiming that Dems were sneaking in millions for birth control for reasons that had nothing to do with stimulating the economy. He’s dead wrong, as Cory Richards points out at RH Reality Check: Healthcare spending is a tried and true method of economic stimulus and the current bill sets aside billions of dollars for that purpose.
The idea that birth control coverage is less important than any other kind of healthcare spending is absurd. Reproductive rights activists pushed hard for the provision because they believe it would give more women access to family planning.
By law, when states cover birth control through Medicaid, the federal government covers 90% of the cost. The birth control expansion would simply have simply made it easier for states to relax the eligibility criteria to cover more women. Providing more services, to more people, with more money supplied by the federal government is textbook economic stimulus.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama begged House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman to strike the birth control proviso. The expansion didn’t have a chance. By late afternoon, TPMDC was reporting that birth control was gone from the House bill and that the Senate Dems had signaled that it wasn’t coming back in their stimulus bill
Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality pegs the political dynamic as a farce in four acts: Democrats use their majorities to advance some popular policy, Republicans freak out, Democrats capitulate, elite pundits congratulate Democrats for shooting themselves in the foot with such grace and aplomb. In the American Prospect, Nick Beaudrot notes that Obama is unlikely to win any Republican votes by striking birth control from the stimulus.
Elsewhere, writers were wrestling with other health-related issues. Simon Maxwell Apter in the Nation argues that the time has come to recognize PTSD as a legitimate combat injury and award Purple Hearts accordingly. But Debra Dickerson of Mother Jones counters that the Purple Heart should be reserved for combat-related injuries. Dickerson’s rejoinder seems to beg the question: If someone gets PTSD from serving in a combat zone, is it a combat injury? And if so, why doesn’t this sacrifice merit a Purple Heart?
In the Nation Sarah Arnold argues that New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws are ripe for reform. Arnold argues that a perfect storm for drug reform might be brewing in the Empire State: Democratic governor, Democratic control of both statehouses, and a financial crisis that makes locking up drug offenders prohibitively expensive.
In the American Prospect, public health scholar Harold Pollack examines our society’s worst drug problem: alcoholism. He argues that our society focuses too much attention on treating alcoholism once it sets in and not enough on crafting public policies, such as legal drinking ages and liquor tax rates, to help prevent problem drinking.
The birth control stimulus skirmish marks a new twist in Obama’s relationship with women’s groups and reproductive rights activists. Last week, the new president elated women’s health groups by freezing Bush’s last-minute anti-abortion rules and reversing the Global Gag Order. Yesterday, many of these contingencies were shocked when he made a public show of killing the birth control provision. The costs and benefits of this particular tradeoff are sure to fuel much discussion in the Media Consortium and beyond.
The Weekly Pulse: Good News and Bad News
There has been good news and bad news in healthcare this week. On the plus side, momentum continues to build for healthcare reform on both a national and state-by-state level. Unfortunately, those sneaky rules changes at the Department of Health and Human Services appear to be a done deal.
Let’s start with the bad new first to get it out of the way. It’s a done deal, folks. RH Reality continues its coverage of the eleventh hour rules changes at the Department of Health and Human Services which will give federal employees the unprecedented right to refuse to give out birth control based on their demonstrably false religious belief that hormonal contraception is abortion. Despite massive public outcry, the rules have reached the final stage before they officially take effect.
The ever-optimistic Amanda Marcotte sees these tactics as the final stage in the anti-abortion movement’s battle to control women’s bodies.
Unable to enact large-scale bans of contraception and abortion, anti-choicers have declared a form of trench warfare against the women of America for possession of the uteruses of America. In real trench warfare, you “win” a “battle” by gaining a few feet of territory. In the trench warfare of reproductive rights, anti-choicers consider a few women inconvenienced, humiliated, or even forced to become pregnant or give birth against their will a victory worth savoring.
The good news is that either President Obama or Congress can repeal these rules.
Let’s refocus on the positive movement for serious healthcare reform. In a sign that Democrats are serious about the issue, Sen. Ted Kennedy has left the Judiciary Committee to focus on this issue. Kennedy has been fighting for universal healthcare since he was first elected in 1962 and describes the current political moment as the “opportunity of a lifetime” to win this battle. John Nichols notes in The Nation that Kennedy’s strong voice for civil liberties will be acutely missed on the Judiciary Committee.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein of The American Prospect dispels a misconception about Tom Daschle’s proposed health bank, an agency that would review treatment options and decide which were cost-effective targets for government insurance coverage. Some critics fear that the Federal Health Board would somehow interfere with consumer choice by throwing the massive buying power of the federal government behind some treatments and not others, thereby affecting the relative costs of treatments for everyone. Ezra notes that only 26% of the population is on public insurance and that even if Daschle’s plan passes in its strongest form, anyone who didn’t like the options available from public insurance could buy supplemental private coverage.
In a separate post, Ezra argues that increased federal government spending on state-administered programs like Medicaid and S-CHIP could be an important part of an economic stimulus package. In a recession, more people need their healthcare benefits because wages go down and jobs are lost, but fewer jobs and lower wages mean less tax revenue for the states. States can’t deficit spend like the federal government. So, without federal help, states are forced to either cut back health coverage or take money away from economically stimulating projects like infrastructure. An infusion of federal dollars could help people in need and help states avoid cutting beneficial spending.
However, Florida’s expanded Medicaid pilot project is being criticized by a group called Florida Community Health Action Information Network, who claim that the program has not lived up to its promise in part because patients are having trouble accessing the care and providers are dropping out of the program.
A group called Health Care for All Pennsylvania vows that their state will take the lead in achieving healthcare for all. They argue that single-payer healthcare is a “simple concept – health care would be provided privately at hospitals and clinics, but paid for publicly by the government. They contend the plan would eliminate the insurance “middle man.”
In one of today’s more bizarre health stories, we find tobacco giant Philip Morris likening itself to the NAACP in order to get out of paying compensation to smokers who were harmed while the company knowingly misled them about the health effects of tobbacco. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones explains:
In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Philip Morris, America’s largest cigarette company, compared itself to the NAACP. And to a South Carolina death row inmate illegally denied due process. And to indigent criminal defendants not afforded adequate legal representation. And it did so to win a case against an elderly African American woman named Mayola Williams whose husband died from lung cancer in 1997, after smoking three packs of Marlboros a day for more than 40 years.
Over at AlterNet, Martha Rosenberg reports that meat industry advocacy groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association are sponsoring “scientific” studies that purport to show that eating meat is better than the rest of the scientific community seems to think, which are getting published in prestigious medical journals. In June, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study called “The Recommended Dietary Allowance of Protein: A Misunderstood Concept.”
In its Oct. 15 issue, it had to print a correction stating that author Sharon L. Miller was “formerly employed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association” and author Robert R. Wolfe received money from the Egg Nutrition Center, National Dairy Council, National Pork Board and Beef Checkoff through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Do they graze their cows on Astroturf, too?
Kind of makes you wonder who’s funding the slew of new research purporting to show that high fructose corn syrup is no worse for you than sugar.
Here’s something that might cheer you up, if you’re feeling depressed about pseudoscience and creeping theocracy. In a special series, YES! Magazine explores various answers to the question: How can we have happy people and a happy planet?