Tag Archives: IVF

News

How health care mandates drive up health care costs

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

The ObamaCare legislation gives the administration the authority to compile a list of female preventive services that all new health insurance plans will have to cover without employing deductibles or charging co-payments. A medical advisory panel is recommending that birth control services should be one of these services.

The committee from the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine that issued the guidelines also suggests that free breast-pump rentals, counseling for domestic violence, annual wellness exams and HIV tests be part of all health insurance plans.

These mandates won’t come without significant costs. The additional benefits won’t be free, despite the left’s loose usage of that word in association with health care. The mandates will force insurance premiums higher and someone will pay.

The Congressional Budget Office said years ago that existing mandates at the state level — there are more than 2,000 of them, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance — raise premiums by 15%.

That’s just a starting point. CAHI, which has done heavy work on this issue, believes that state mandates push premiums up by 20%. In some states, the increase can be as high as 50%. The result is a cost curve that bends upward, not down.

Mandates at the state level run from the expected to the bizarre. They require insurers to provide such unorthodox coverage as wigs (hair prostheses), Oriental medicine, port-wine stain elimination, smoking cessation, acupuncture, midwives, counseling, and marriage, occupational and massage therapists.

As we’ve noted before on these pages, the state mandates are an insult to common sense. Why would a single man need an insurance package that covers in vitro fertilization, maternity leave, midwives, breast reduction or mammograms?

Does it make sense for a childless, unmarried woman to be forced into a plan that includes care for a newborn and screening for prostate cancer? And is there any reason a teetotaler’s policy should cover alcohol abuse?

These regulations are not only asinine, they wreck the health insurance marketplace. The longer the list of mandates, the less competition there is. When insurers have to carry these gold-plated packages, they can’t compete with lower-priced plans that have fewer benefits. This can price some customers entirely out of the private market.

Here’s a post from Ruth Blog that makes the financial aspects clearer, using “free” contraception as an example.

Excerpt:

First of all, preventive medicine implies the prevention of a pathological condition. Pregnancy is anything but pathological. Artificial contraception is an elective medical therapy for those desiring to block a totally normal and healthy physical condition. Not only is contraception elective, but the decision to have sex should be elective as well.

Secondly… If an unmarried woman makes the conscious decision to be sexually active, it seems she should also bear the consequences of such a decision. Her partner should be willing to share any burdens of the relationship, including the financial cost of sexual relations. If a woman is not in a stable relationship, it seems unreasonable to demand someone else has to pay for her sexual dalliances.

[…]Sexual activity is elective. Preventing the normal consequence of sexual activity, pregnancy, is elective. The use of artificial contraception to prevent pregnancy is a personal lifestyle choice, not a medically recommended therapy. Therefore, artificial contraception should not be considered mandated preventive medical care. In these tight fiscal times, we cannot afford to be too inclusive with what constitutes preventive medicine.

Note that the artificial conception would be free for women who want to have children without fathers. And we know how that works out.

The Heritage Foundation points out that mandates actually reduce the freedom and prosperity of women who don’t use these services.

Excerpt:

Many Americans find the use of birth control morally objectionable, and some women may simply have no need for a health plan that covers these services, based on any number of personal choices and other factors. Those that fall into this category would have no choice but to pay for unnecessary coverage if the recommendations are made law.

[…]If HHS takes an overly prescriptive approach regarding these particular measures, women who would prefer not to pay the higher premiums to carry health benefits they don’t need or to which they object won’t have that option.

In a truly market-based insurance exchange, women would be able to choose a health plan that met their needs and was consistent with their values, and those who wished to forgo certain benefits would have the freedom to do so. If any attempt at health reform is to succeed at reducing costs and tailoring coverage to the specific needs of each individual, it must ensure that consumers are able to choose the plan and benefits that work best for them, rather than submitting to the decisions of a bureaucratic board.

There is no opt out for moral women when these things are mandated as minimum coverages in every policy. There is no escape. My fear is that women would be forced to pay for these services and then feel obligated to use them since that is the only way to get any value for the money that is being forcibly extracted from them.

What health care mandates really achieve is 1) to buy votes from the providers of the mandated services, and 2) to transfer wealth from people who don’t want or need these elective services (e.g. – single chaste Christian men) to people who need it because of their own elective lifestyle choices. And the more I have to pay to subsidize other people’s breast implants, contraceptives, STI  treatments, abortions and in vitro fertilizations, the less I can afford to do the things that I want to do, which isn’t fair. My money is my money, and their money is their money. I should be allowed to keep what I earn and buy only the health care that I need. I have other uses for that money. Let the government do-gooders find some other way to boost their self-esteem instead of playing Robin Hood with health care.

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse lectures on marriage at Stanford University

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Stanford University is one of the top 5 universities in the United States.

Details:

Dr J gave this talk at Stanford University’s Anscombe Society on the reasons for marriage, and the ways in which it shapes society and the next generation. After Dr J’s talk at Stanford University, she took questions and answers from the students in attendance.  They had quite the lively discussion…  Please be advised–some of these questions may be overly explicit for very young listeners.

The files:

Here’s her biography:

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the founder and President of the Ruth Institute, president of the Ruth Institute a project of the National Organization for Marriage to promote life-long married love to college students by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.

She is also the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, (2005) and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (2001), recently reissued in paperback, as Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

Dr. Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980 and spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago during 1979-80. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years. She was John M. Olin visiting scholar at the Cornell Law School in fall 1993. She is a regular contributor to the National Review Online, National Catholic Register, Town Hall, MercatorNet and To the Source.

Dr. Morse’s scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Economic History, Publius: the Journal of Federalism, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Social Philosophy and Policy, The Independent Review, and The Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy.

[…]Her public policy articles have appeared in Forbes, Policy Review,The American Enterprise, Fortune, Reason, the Wall Street Journal, Vital Speeches, and Religion and Liberty.

She currently lives in San Diego, CA. She and her husband are the parents of a birth child, an adopted child. From March 2003 to August 2006, Dr. Morse and her husband were foster parents for San Diego County. During that time, they cared for a total of eight foster children.

Her talent is to apply the economic way of thinking to social issues like marriage, family and parenting.

News

New study finds that children of separation/divorce die 5 years earlier

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From Life Site News. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

While many studies have shown the positive effects of stable natural marriage on the physical and mental health of husbands and wives, an eight-decade-long research effort initiated in 1921 by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman has found significant negative effects on the children of failed marriages.

The study found that such children died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families.

In 1990, psychologists Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin began a follow-up of the work begun by Lewis Terman, whose main interest lay in a study of 10-year-olds in San Francisco, with the goal of forming a test to identify the potential of high intellectual achievement. One of the results of Terman’s work was the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

Friedman and Martin found that Terman’s original interviews with the children were so detailed and comprehensive that an analysis of follow-up interviews, and a study of the causes of death in the death certificates of participants, could shed some light on the significant factors that affect longevity.

The results of Mr. Friedman and Ms. Martin’s research are published in a book titled “The Longevity Project” and provide some sobering insights.

“Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood,” the authors said.

“The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.”

The authors noted that the early death of a parent did not have the same effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk as that of parental divorce and family break-up.

I think that depriving a child of a relationship with two opposite-sex parents over the long-term is child abuse. Children need to grow up with someone of each sex who is dedicated to them in a permanent, involved way. When will adults learn to think of what children need, instead of thinking of what adults want? Having a child is a very particular thing. There are certain beliefs you need to have, certain skills, certain assets and certain moral values. It’s not like buying a hamburger. It’s a little person that you are committed to. That little person will impose obligations on you. It is not there to entertain you, it is there to be loved and supported by you in effective ways. It’s not for you to use children like slaves to meet your own needs. Don’t have them if you won’t raise them.

Andrew sent me these articles from the UK about single motherhood by choice and fertility clinics for same-sex couples.