Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Matthew Yglesias thinks instructively about why people imagine some kinds of preventable deaths are more important than others.

It’s quite true that human beings do not have a great intuitive grasp of statistical arguments or a great love for them. But the world would be a better place if people thought of these things in a more statistically informed way. Likewise it’s true as Jon Chait says that people generally think differently about intentional murders than thinks like car crashes. But this, though it’s definitely a fact of life, is also a problem that it would be good to ameliorate over the long run. People tend to view threats stemming from identifiable, individual villains as more problematic than impersonal ones. But while this is a fact of life, it’s also a mistake. If we do something to very slightly reduce the risk of a terrorist attack that has the inadvertent consequence of causing a large number of additional highway deaths then that would be a mistake.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m… fairly confident many of the same principle applies to matters of sex, choice, reproduction and contraception, agency and autonomy, etc. Opposition to hormonal contraception, for instance, not because of the small but real risk of embolism or thrombosis in the woman who takes it but instead an infinitesimal-to-the-point-of-imagination risk that ovulation and fertilization of a hypothetical “life” might somehow magically occur… and yet somehow not implant. To name one. To name another, fanatic willingness to murder healthcare providers in church over abortion but absolute zero, nothing, none interest, at all, in parting a hair to prevent about approximately equal numbers of miscarriages (environmental- or stress-induced or otherwise)... or to do anything at all about stillbirths, infant or maternal mortality, or prevention of childhood deaths from, say, asthma.

But again it’s a general principle. Although expand the scope just a teeny tiny bit and you’re left wondering about the “moral” hesitation in the early 1980s that allowed HIV to become a global epidemic instead of a relatively isolated outbreak, where squeamishness about thousands of “h-word” people (hemophiliacs, heroine users, and homosexuals) mainly in the U.S. allowed it to spread to tens of millions of “pa-word” people (pretty-much anybody.)

If the “pro-life” community was really “pro-life” instead of just anti-abortion then you’d expect them to give a rat’s ass about, oh, say, pre-natal care. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about infant mortality. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about stilbirth. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about maternal mortality. As a movement they don’t.

And since miscarriage “stops a beating heart” roughly as often as abortion (about one in four first pregnancies, about one in ten later pregnancies) you’d expect them to care about that too. As a movement, as individuals, as caregivers, and as “crisis-pregnancy” advisors they don’t.

My pro-choice partner and I got a good look at it when our planned, wanted first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and the best we got from “pro-life” crowd while it was still on-going and presumably still rescuable was a chipper “oh well, just keep trying, I’m sure she’ll be pregnant again in no time.” Gee, doesn’t get any more “pro-life” than that, does it?

So! If you’re a reporter, a constituent, or just someone passing one of these “principled men,” (and it was overwhelmingly men) who voted for the Stipak amendment, and you have an opportunity to ask them questions, on or off the record, how about asking…

“Have you ever given an instant of thought about any of the above? Has anyone you know? If not how does this make you ‘pro-life?’”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones gently pushes back at what’s effectively becoming a feminist ethnic slur before asking a really, really critical question about insurer’s reaction to the thuggish anti-abortion amendment in Saturday night’s House healthcare reform bill.

God knows we liberal dudes can be clueless sometimes, but are any of us really saying that this is no big deal?  That’s hard to believe.  What I can imagine us saying is that Bart Stupak had the votes and we didn’t.  That’s a huge problem.  But not a big deal?  Hardly.

On a related note, I wonder what the insurance industry thinks of this?  I know that if I were an insurance company, I’d sure rather cover an abortion (cost = $500 or so) than a pregnancy carried to term (cost = $10,000 or so).  But they’re probably too scared to speak up.

He said it here.

I’m tempted to digress and point out that that would be $10,000 for a routine pregnancy with no complications. The million or so c-sections a performed a year cost considerably more. Not even counting perpetual care the cost for treating a woman for a stroke from preeclampsia from an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy can quickly top $100,000.

Instead I’ll just say that there are procedures that have been used all year to obstruct assess the cost of various measures. So let’s start by asking the CBO to score Stupak’s hateful thuggery.

Back in June, 2008, when George Bush was still president, Barack Obama was nothing but a junior in-the-minority-party Senator from Illinois who thought he could get away with challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination, Denise Grady of The New York Times wrote

When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.

“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

Read the article here.

I admit the impression I got when I read the write-up at DailyKos was that this had all happened just a day or two ago and just around the corner. But just a little bit of Googling demonstrated it’s not actually topical at all…

...or wouldn’t be if…

...it wasn’t a perfect snapshot of the kind of jackass crap that drove the initiative for healthcare reform in the first place!

And why didn’t we hear howls from various and assorted right-wing psycho teabaggers, tenthers, and deathers with travel and sign-making expense accounts from Fox “News?” Well, you could say it was because Golden Rule is a private corporation and therefore more Infallable in Every Decision than the pope. But it could also be because Golden Rule’s founder was a major right-wing moneybags. But I digress.

The fact of the matter is that (going perhaps against common progressive wisdom) the environment private insurance operates into is aggressively stacked against it — yeah, they make money… and for that matter yeah, they can only make money by fucking sick people over — and it’s bull-whiz like telling healthy women they have to get sterilized before they can get insurance is a perfect example of why they’re not up to the task.

Golden Rule, a relatively small insurer (however pretentious its erstwhile pretentions of grandeur might have been) didn’t have the clout to negotiate efficiently with major medical centers that provide things like, oh, say, birthing centers and obstetrics surgeries. So they did what by the “logic” of the marketplace made the second-most sense: they refused to insure someone with FHPS (fecund healthy person syndrome.)

The idea behind healthcare reform, even the really watered-down versions, is in classic (Teddy) Roosevelt style, to create big enough markets for medical services to rebalance the market clout of service providers.

The reason people keep talking about a public option (and why, by the way, we need one) is that insurance-industry assholes like the little pencil-pecker at Golden Rule who cooked up the get-sterilized-first exception are still there pecking away with their pencils. A public option will help keep them in check as well. Not so much by increasing their profitability as giving people an alternative when their private insurer of choice starts making out-of-control demands.

But seriously? Get a caesarian before you get Healthcare? That might have been fine for George Bush and what was left of his party in 2008. But this is America and that kind of crap… from a pro-life private company, by the way, was and is intolerable.