f.f. of Feminist Finance says of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposal to include birth-control funding in one of the bailout packages. She says the media’s treating the proposal as if it arose out of Peloci’s partisan eccentricity but…

There are a lot of crap suggestions on the table right now as far as what this new bailout bill will fund. Subsidized birth control for women who want it is not one of those crap suggestions. If the federal government is going to continue to pretend that it is concerned with stabilizing US households with this bailout bill, rather than just propping up big business, this is a perfect way to show it.

While certainly not a perfect system, clinics serving college students and low-income women used to be able to offer substantially subsidized birth control. When I was in school, my student health center offered birth control for $5 or $10 for a month’s supply, depending on what type you used. Enter the Deficit Reduction Act, which took effect in January 2007. It was intended to keep pharmaceutical companies from abusing Medicaid reimbursements, but it had an unforseen consequence of prohibiting longstanding arrangements between drug companies and clinics that allowed clinics to buy and distribute contraceptives at extremely discounted rates. In the wake of the Deficit Reduction Act, birth control costs for the women who use these clinics has gone up by as much as 1000%.

So it’s not as though this subsidizing birth control access is a zany, untested idea. We know it’s important. We’ve done it in the past. Let’s dial back the flipping out, or at least refocus it in other directions

She said it here.

Yup. Except for being about ZOMG The Sex the proposal’s actually pretty consistent with straight-up Keynesian stimulus theory: it immediately reduces household expenses for the 50-100 million households that currently pay retail for contraception, it’s “shovel ready” in the sense that it involves restarting recently-suspended programs and extending them in an off-the-shelf fashion to additional care centers, and by stabilizing household finance on the one hand and mitigating system-wide healthcare impact of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies** on the other, and doing it all at a point while individuals and institutions alike are still marshaling for as-yet undetermined social and economic fallout.

Compare that to, say, the ‘wingnut passion for “targeted tax cuts” or the (otherwise entirely laudable) progressive passion for not-yet-shovel-ready long-term infrastructure upgrades and… it actually looks entirely sensible.

Consider further than should healthcare reform pass in the next year it will almost certainly include family-planning components anyway and the proposal looks even more pragmatic.

So… why all the fuss? Especially from folks in public who privately support prevention-first style initiatives?

[** While not interfering in the least with planned, wanted pregnancies since patient participation is, duh, opt-in not opt-out. —fl]