Category Archives: Healthcare

Community Conservatism: Healthcare Under Fire

The

The “A”CA – Good for Elites, Bad for the Middle Class

Contain the Cost of Healthcare and Preserve Options for the Middle Class

This is an issue that requires a bit of an introduction. We believe it is very important to recognize that our healthcare system is both incredible in its productivity and humanity…and very much broken. The middle and lower class see healthcare is a pressing concern because the cost to maintain insurance is getting high enough that it is forcing some serious and uncomfortable decisions onto struggling families who have to balance their budgets. The CBO estimates that, by the year 2045, the average American family will spend nearly 20% of its take-home pay on health insurance (about what they currently spend on their mortgage!). At the same time, unfunded liabilities to cover the cost of government-backed health programs like Medicare and Medicaid will soon account for 100% of all estimated tax revenue taken by the government. While we briefly mention Medicare, for anyone looking to find out more about this, Reuben A. Guttman, a false claims attorney interviewed may be something worth looking into, as his insight into the medical field may give people a better understanding of what impact false claims may have on this industry and for patients.

This is obviously an enormous problem. One that threatens to destroy our economy, cripple our access to quality care, and generally make us miserable in the not so distant future.

There are many theories for how we might go about solving this problem, but few of them have been fleshed out enough to back with the force of legislation. Prior to the bastardized half-breed of state-driven insurance mandates and taxes that is now commonly known as the Affordable Care Act, there were two competing visions for the future of healthcare in American. On the left, you had advocated for a single-payer state-run healthcare system as is common throughout the European Union and in Canada, among other places. On the right, you had advocated for transparency in healthcare service charges, tort reform, and interstate insurance commerce. The left’s concept would immediately be recognized by the American public as a massive tax hike. The right’s concept is a series of piecemeal, small-scale ideas that don’t sound like they can really fix the problem of out-of-control healthcare costs on their own.
The healthcare system has cost far beyond the basic ones associated with providing care directly. There are costs associated with:

• Medical Research and Development (and government regulation thereof)
o The research has basic costs
o The government heavily regulates how this research must proceed to get drugs and equipment to market
o The government research institutions try to assist in a wide variety of areas and this unfocused mandate yields inefficiencies
• Malpractice Insurance
o Private practice doctors report that something like half of their profits go straight to malpractice coverage because malpractice lawsuits now routinely go for huge payouts and the insurer must cover the cost. With serious injuries as a result of a healthcare provider’s negligence occurring, it’s no wonder payouts are as large as they are.
• Hospital Administration
o Here again, there are basic administration costs for running any healthcare business
o And then there are bloated government regulations that require record-keeping that rarely makes sense and is exceedingly expensive, while forcing administrators to retain fleets of expensive lawyers
• The Actual Medical Care
o Even here, there are basic costs…and then there are costs associated with doctors padding their bills to bilk the insurance companies (or at least to force them to pay out as much as they possibly can)
o And further, there is the cost of unpaid medical care given to people who are not insured and cannot pay
o And, ironically, there is the added cost of the government’s drive to get us to see our doctors more regularly (preventive care), which has yet to show any evidence of reducing expensive and undesirable health outcomes
• Insurance Company Administration
o And then we have the insurers – who are, themselves, heavily regulated by the government, and are also guilty of padding their bottom lines, and perhaps of paying out more than they should when doctors are overbilling
• American Status as Cost Sponge
o What I mean here – the US is doing most of the work to lead the way on new medical breakthroughs because countries running on single-payer systems or depending on US financial assistance to function cannot afford to do high end medical research – the result is that all of the world comes here to advance medical science (at great cost to our government research institutions), but we in the U.S. pay higher prices for all of the beneficial new drugs and technology they produce, because other places around the world can’t pay enough for big pharma and big med-tech to break even without us being charged far more

The ACA does, to its credit, recognize many of the places where profiteering, waste and excessive spending are occurring, but the liberal answer to each spending sore spot is the heavy hand of more regulation. Rather than just propose a series of bills the way we’ve done elsewhere in this series, we will explain what the ACA does about each sore spot and the risks that method poses vs. what the conservative counter should be. We’ll use the same bullets from above to organize our plan.

A) Medical R&D Costs

The ACA doesn’t specifically address medical research in a major way, other than to levy a medical device tax and make matters worse for research, but the common answer on the left is to move the cost out of the private sector and into increased government spending on the issue. This way, private sector companies can charge less for the drugs and technology they produce and the actual cost of the work can be spread among the taxpayers less obviously. The conservative approach would include carefully relaxing certain regulations on big pharma and big med-tech regarding the cumbersome and lengthy process to get from experimental drug to approved market-ready drug or experimental medical device to sales and reduce the scope and cost of the FDA. It would also include a restructuring of the NIH, CDC and other government health researchers to significantly narrow their focuses and cut the sugar out of their research diets. And finally, the GOP approach should include a repeal of the medical device tax in the ACA.

B) Medical Malpractice

The ACA doesn’t even tackle the cost of malpractice insurance for private practitioners or legal counsel for hospitals – one of its most disappointing failures, but one that is understandable, considering that the Federal Legislature can’t really regulate state civil courts). The left has, traditionally, completely ignored the increasing need for tort reform. Unfortunately, so has the right. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a Republican talk about the need for it, but they tend to be economists, rather than politicians with any clout. The GOP must act now to enact stiff limits on settlement amounts in medical malpractice cases in the states. We recognize that medical mistakes are always extremely damaging and life-altering (or ending) for their victims. This is why many of them will enlist the help of a medical malpractice lawyer (just check out this law firm here which has resulted in $2.25 million for things like drug defects in medical cases). We also recognize that the legal system shouldn’t be a lotto-draw for someone looking to get even with a doctor or make a quick killing after a mistake. The GOP should also enact “loser pays” laws for all civil matters, including medical malpractice. Unfortunately, these are generally matters reserved for the states, and the GOP must spearhead the effort at the state level to address them. If you have suffered a medical concern and feel like malpractice has occurred, checking out the time period to sue for medical malpractice can help you if you have had to wait a period of time to raise the issue.

C) Hospital Administration and Record-Keeping

The ACA likely made these costs much worse, I’m afraid, by changing medical billing codes to a ludicrous, byzantine array of unrecognizable codes and further regulating how this information is to be collected. The GOP should move to vastly simplify medical insurance/incident/billing codes, and take a more holistic approach to auditing hospital financial and medical records.

D) Medical Fees and Insurance Models

As we know, the ACA attempts to decrease the number of people who are uninsured and thus to lower the liabilities for hospitals who must treat all patients, whether or not they are insured, by requiring that everyone get health insurance and taxing you if you do not. On top of this, the ACA requires all businesses of a certain size (more than 50 full time employees) to offer health insurance or pay massive fees. The ACA requires that children under the age of 26 be allowed to remain covered by their parents. And it requires that insurance companies never reject someone who has a pre-existing condition. And finally, the ACA requires that those plans cover a huge range of medical services in an attempt to capture all of the potential costs. The theory was that young, healthy people were going uninsured to avoid paying for it when they felt invincible at rates high enough to balance out all of the people who’d been rejected for preexisting conditions. The mandate-driven approach has proved to be a spectacular failure. Many are choosing to pay the tax – especially the healthy – many more are finding that their plans are far too expensive and have huge deductibles as insurance companies look for ways to shield themselves from the increased cost of covering high risk people. And, of course, if the government is forcing the insurers to cover everyone, many insurers will drop out of the marketplace, and that is exactly what is happening.

Having said all of that, we do not think that every idea in the ACA is bad and we do not think it is necessarily the best approach to wholesale repeal it at this point. We believe that there should be a national program to provide everyone with catastrophic insurance (to protect hospitals for huge unpaid bills, and patients from bills that ruin them financially). We also believe “guaranteed issue” and the clause extending coverage to children under the age of 26 are popular because they are necessary. We even believe the idea of a national health insurance marketplace is a very good one (we wouldn’t have the government running it, we’d set up a cooperation between the various health insurance providers and let a private company maintain the marketplace). Here is what a conservative plan would look like:

• Repeal the individual and employer mandates
• Require all Americans to buy catastrophic coverage plans the same way we require them to buy at least minimal collision insurance if they drive
• Nationalize the healthcare market (no more state insurance networks; this is not simply “selling across state lines”, this is true nationalization) and allow insurers to offer a la carte supplemental coverage – if you need coverage for prenatal care, you buy it; if you need coverage for prescription drugs, you buy it, etc.
• Require healthcare providers (private doctors and hospitals and clinics) to publicly announce their price points on a government-managed website for all of their procedures to allow consumers to price compare instead of being blind to the cost – market awareness frequently leads to market efficiency
• Require insurers to similarly announce what they’ll pay out for given procedures (in an attempt to prevent the sort of “doctor charges way too much to max out what the insurer will pay out” games we previously mentioned)
• Give tax credits to people who buy preventive care packages and repeal the Cadillac tax
• Enact the Ryan/Wyden plan for Medicare

E) Insurance Company Administration

The ACA includes a bunch of downright frightening top-down controls in an attempt to reign in insurance payouts for Medicare (because retired people are expensive, health wise, and paid for on the government dime), including but not limited to yet another in a long line of ill-advised price-fixing schemes promulgated by the left. They keep trying to fix the market to their liking and it keeps going spectacularly wrong and cause misery every time. This time, I’m referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board. While I would stop short of calling it a ‘death panel’, there is excellent reason to fear this entity and its impact on the end of life process. IPAB will basically regulate insurance company payouts to Medicare by fiat, which will cause doctors and hospitals to begin to refuse to perform certain procedures, leading to a downward spiral in the quality of care for the elderly. We saw a glimpse of this with the VA – where aging WWII and Korean War veterans were being denied access to treatments and redirected to hospice care in some cases. The left sees the IPAB as a way to end insurance company inefficiency and doesn’t understand why this process should lead inexorably to premature death in some cases, but we have many examples – starting with the British National Health Service. The conservative answer to insurance company bloat and overpayment is, as noted above, to improve price transparency and let the customers straighten out the market. We would also add that government could play a role here with some far less heavy-handed regulations on payouts based on the going market rate for the service, once the service itself is priced publicly. Data is power – market data leads to a powerful market. Either way, the IPAB must be dismantled as soon as possible.

We’ve laid out many proposals here that attempt to make healthcare decisions less costly and stressful for the middle class, but rest assured, we’ve barely scratched the surface. We are hoping that this will start a dialogue among conservatives as to what sort of healthcare platform GOP Congressmen should build heading into 2016.

Watching the Watchers: Resistance to Transparency a Problem at Every Level of Government

We do not have leaders in the United States of America. We have representatives. They are chosen by us to do a job for us. They are our employees. We do not owe them any respect or subservience beyond the same basic respect we choose to show fellow human beings, and in particular those who are our employees.

And we have a right to watch them.

Yet at all levels of government, we face rebellion against our right to watch.

STATE LEGISLATURE IN THE NEWS FOR VIOLATING OPEN MEETING LAWS

Open MeetingsOne of the Republican candidates for my state’s legislature actually came to my door twice this election cycle in an effort to earn my vote. Even had I been otherwise inclined to vote for him, his refusal to answer voter guide questionnaires would have been a deal-breaker.

He explained at my door that politicians who answer voter guide questions are sometimes “discriminated against for their religion.” Only by questioning him on my porch was I able to elicit his position on issues from gay marriage to the War on Drugs—which he supports because “we need to be moral.”

He won handily without my vote and is now a state senator. His counterparts in the state House have just made news by, once again, being accused of violating Montana’s open meeting laws. Earlier this month, the House Republican Caucus met in the basement of a hotel without providing the requisite notice. During the 2013 session, the Caucus similarly met in the basement of the state Capitol without posting notice.

The state media have been quick to point out that both parties and both houses of the state legislature routinely violate the state’s open meeting laws. The interviews with the politicians engaged in such violations are candid and telling. One Democrat senator, for example, detailed how rather than simply post the notice and allow reporters to cover the event, his party would instead make just enough people leave to be under the limit of the notice requirements:

“We were always mindful of the numbers,” added Sen. Mike Phillips, D-Bozeman. “And when we realized we were over the limit, someone would leave.”

One of his Republican counterparts lamented that the open meeting requirements make it “impossible” for elected politicians to talk to each other:

Where do you draw the line?” he asked. “How does a group function if they can’t get together and talk to each other? This is supposed to be a country of freedom of association and freedom of speech. If you’re going to take that away at a caucus, how is the caucus going to function?”

He does not seem to understand that the caucuses can still talk, even if the people they work for are listening. If they do not want the voters to know about it, perhaps they ought not be doing it.

POLICE DEPARTMENTS RESIST BEING RECORDED

olson_scottOn Saturday night, Ferguson police arrested a member of the press, apparently for standing on a sidewalk. This comes in the wake of federal court orders directing that Ferguson police not engage in any practice of interfering with citizens’ right to record police. These orders were obtained based on events following the death of Michael Brown, in which police detained journalists, wrongfully interfered with people recording the protests and police response, and instituted a no-fly zone to prevent the media from flying over.

Both cops and citizens behave better when they know they are being recorded. Recordings exonerate innocent people who have been wrongfully accused and help ensure that the right people are punished. Those who have been wrongly accused may find that someone similar to these denver criminal defense attorneys may be able to help them with their case, helping them to prove their innocence and get their life back on track, As Reason’s Ronald Bailey has reported:

Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent and the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.

Yet all over the country, police continue to harass citizens who lawfully record the police, a fairly well recognized right in these United States.

Police officers are not our overlords. They are public employees hired by the people to enforce the laws passed by the people. Like any other employer, We, The People, get to watch the work done by our employee police officers.

MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY

Obama secretOpen enrollment for Affordable Care Act health plans began in mid November. States have been releasing their enrollment numbers. But trying to get enrollment numbers from the federal government continues to be like pulling teeth.

In the wake of an embarrassing revelation about an “unacceptable” mistake inflating the total enrollment numbers, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell has ordered her agency to come up with ways to increase transparency. I hope she follows through.

But the “most transparent administration in history” has a mixed record on living up to its own hype. Lingering questions remain about the transparency of the drone program. Just this week, the administration continued its established practice of dumping thousands of new regulations on the eve of a major holiday.

Let us not forget that last month, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page called this administration “the most restrictive” and “most dangerous” to the press than any other in history. She echoes sentiments expressed earlier this year by New York Times editor Jill Abramson, who said the Obama administration is setting new standards for secrecy:

“The Obama years are a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control,” says Abramson. “It’s created quite a challenging atmosphere for The New York Times, and for some of the best reporters in my newsroom who cover national security issues in Washington.”

* * *

Those that are covering national security, according to Abramson, say that is has never been more difficult to get information.

* * *

Abramson says that the Obama Administration uses legal loopholes to make things difficult for journalists and media organizations. She says, for example, that the Obama Justice Department pursues cases against reporters under an obscure provision of the 1917 Espionage Act.

“I think, in a back door way using an obscure provision of an old law, they are tip-toeing close to things that, here in the United States, we’ve never had,” says Abramson.

* * *

While Abramson says that the White House hasn’t completely shut out the U.S. press corps, even routine media coverage has become difficult to obtain.

“The amount of friction and confrontation involved in just going about what I see as perfectly normal coverage, that in the past wouldn’t have even provoked a discussion, becomes a protracted and somewhat exhausting process,” she says.

As technology and government overreach continue to threaten the walls of privacy that traditionally protected Americans, we must be vigilant in making sure the watchers are themselves watched. They are not leaders, but employees. We should demand that they conduct themselves as such. That entails consistently subjecting their official conduct to scrutiny.

_____________________________________________________

Open Meetings image via In El Dorado County News. Ferguson image via The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch. Obama image via Poor Richard’s News.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

Long Slow Burn – GruberGate as a Microcosm

GRRRRRR

We, here, at The Liberty Papers do not generally share our correspondence, but the big issues of the day are, in fact, talked about at length in our site’s Google Group as we coordinate what we’ll be talking about at this lovely blog. Without being specific or quoting anyone directly, I would like to put forward what the group reaction was to the so-called ‘GruberGate’ scandal. In a word:

‘Meh’

If you’ve been living under a rock or watching nothing but MSNBC (same difference, really), I’ll give you a quick summary of what GruberGate entails. For six years, conservatives have blasted away at the Affordable Care Act (hereafter, the ACA). For six years, we’ve been talking about how the promises made by people trying to get it passed were impossible to keep, how the bill would raise the deficit, make healthcare more expensive and less stable, drive away doctors, narrow your networks of providers – basically the exact opposite of every claim put forward by Democrats between 2008 and 2012. The media uncritically reported White House talking points for most of that time, doing absolutely zero digging and finding no evidence of problems with the law as a result.

Then some guy who’d lost his insurance after being promised that that wouldn’t happen and decided to do some actually investigating. Within a day of beginning his search, he found video footage of one of the ACA’s chief architects, Jonathan Gruber, candidly discussing the ACA with his peers in Academia in which he said THIS (follow the links to see the videos), THIS, and THIS.

Many things have been said about GruberGate, and I won’t rehash them here. The response to this story by many libertarians (not just those of us writing here) has been a collective “well duh!” We have, after all, been talking about everything that Gruber willingly admits in his various talks on the ACA – that it’s a pack of lies intended to fool the American taxpayer by fooling the Congressional Budget Office, that it amounts to a giant national experiment and the architects have no clue what it’ll do, that expanded coverage can’t happen without raising revenue to pay for it, and that the archetype (RomneyCare) was already a failure, being propped up by federal dollars all along. We knew all of that. The insults he lobs at the American voters aren’t entirely unfounded either. Many Americans, like it or not, vote without any idea of what they’re supporting. So why should we get up in arms over it.

After arguing rather cantankerously with my fellow bloggers here, trying to explain why this story enraged me so, it dawned on me what was really going on in my head. I may come to self-awareness later than I should on occasion, but I generally get there if I think on it long enough. This whole story – the story of the Affordable Care Act from conception, to birth, to signing, to repeal efforts to angry Americans who feel lied to and voting R to prove something to the left to the GruberGate controversy…it is a microcosm of everything I’ve been battling for years.

When the ACA was first being discussed, the conservative reaction was a combination of people like those in my family, who were horrified by the likely outcome of such a bill and who relied heavily on health insurance to make their various medical problems affordable to treat, but who reacted by studying the proposal and attempting to logically argue as to why it was a very bad bill indeed…and people screaming at town hall meetings because they just instinctively feared such a big, sweeping change. It’s human to fear change, and in this case their fears were justified, but instead of focusing on doing the work of exposing the lies in the ACA, most of conservatism was consumed with death panels and doomsday imagery of Uncle Sam examining a woman’s lady parts (yes, that was a real conservative ad).

Now I’m not saying I think the IPAB is good for “end of life” care…it’s not. But ‘death panel’ rhetoric sounds literally insane to your typical low-information swing voter who might be swayed by bringing a convincing argument to the debate. And, of all of the conservative reactions to the ACA, which ones do you suppose were primarily covered by the media, by ACA advocates and in the political discussion on Capital Hill – the reasoned arguments as to why the ACA would fail and make things worse, or the fear-mongering?

But guess what – that made someone like me who worked hard to understand the problems with the ACA into a looney tune screaming about death panels when I voiced my opposition to the law before any leftist. They accused me of being a liar. They accused me fearing change. They accused me of not caring about the poor and the uninsured. And they had the support of, once again, an uncritical, unserious mainstream media telling them any concerns about the ACA raising costs, impairing the system, causing doctor shortages or narrow networks, etc. were just crazy conservative fear mongering. Our detached, empirical expert, Jon Gruber, says so – read the study.

When the truth came out – when it turned out that Jon Gruber believed everything I did about the ACA except the part about those results being bad for healthcare…when he gleefully admitted that RomneyCare was a failure economically, that the ACA had nothing to do with making healthcare affordable, and that he and his colleagues had no clue how to bend the cost curve down – and then had the audacity to call us stupid for believing him, I would have been satisfied. I wouldn’t have been angry for long – it would have brought some semblance of peace to be vindicated in the fight. Except that the reaction of the left was to lie even more, minimize Gruber’s roll in crafting the bill, and then…call conservatives fear mongers again for reacting to this story with anger and for losing trust in government to solve problems like these.

This is inherently the entire problem I have with the left – every time their bad ideas don’t work and people realize it, they find the loonies in the conservative ranks and make those guys their opposition, and when you try to bring reason to the party, they accuse you of just being one of the loonies. And when you turn out to be RIGHT…oh well whatever nevermind. That fight never mattered anyway – on to the next fight.

Until conservatives are willing to call liberals (and other conservatives) out for not fighting fairly, for distorting the history of the argument, for scanning through the crowd for the easiest person to attack, for straw men and lies, for parliamentary tricks and poor research, and for their ugly assumptions about the American people, we will always lose the argument. Always. And that…is what is truly terrifying me into anger. We were right. All along, conservatives were right about the ACA and the insincere, cynical motives of its creators. We were right, they were wrong, and somehow, we still lost the argument. And it’ll happen again and again until we get angry enough to turn the tables on them – to call them out on their unfair tactics and their bad science and their twisted, utilitarian assumptions.

We’re about to have the same fight on immigration. Learn to recognize their tactics and fight back, or there will come a day when you remember how right you were about the negative consequences of an open border, and how little it mattered that you were right.

SCOTUS Has Accepted Appeal of Case That Could Topple Obamacare

SCOTUS

On Friday, United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal in King v. Burwell. The plaintiffs in that case assert that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act only allows tax credits to people who buy insurance “from an exchange established by a state.” The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal disagreed and ruled that the federal government may interpret that language as allowing tax credits to purchasers who bought insurance on one of the federal exchanges, operating in the more than 30 states that declined to create their own.

On the same day the Fourth Circuit delivered its decision in King, a panel in the D.C. Circuit found for the plaintiffs in a companion case captioned Halbig v. Burwell. This conflict would ordinarily invite SCOTUS to weigh in. However, the D.C. Circuit then accepted a rehearing en banc in Halbig. Thus, even though the King plaintiffs appealed, many observers speculated SCOTUS would wait to see if a conflict really developed, or if after rehearing in Halbig, the courts ended up aligned.

As a result, it is somewhat surprising that SCOTUS accepted the King appeal, and it may signal bad news for the Affordable Care Act. As Nicholas Bagley writing a SCOTUSblog explains:

[F]our justices apparently think—or at least are inclined to think—that King was wrongly decided. … [T]here’s no other reason to take King. The challengers urged the Court to intervene now in order to resolve “uncertainty” about the availability of federal tax credits. In the absence of a split, however, the only source of uncertainty is how the Supreme Court might eventually rule. After all, if it was clear that the Court would affirm in King, there would have been no need to intervene now. The Court could have stood pat, confident that it could correct any errant decisions that might someday arise.

There’s uncertainty only if you think the Supreme Court might invalidate the IRS rule. That’s why the justices’ votes on whether to grant the case are decent proxies for how they’ll decide the case. The justices who agree with King wouldn’t vote to grant. They would instead want to signal to their colleagues that, in their view, the IRS rule ought to be upheld. The justices who disagree with King would want to signal the opposite.

And there are at least four such justices. If those four adhere to their views—and their views are tentative at this stage, but by no means ill-informed—the challengers just need one more vote to win. In all likelihood, that means that either Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy will again hold the key vote.

If I read this correctly, the speculation is that four (or more) SCOTUS justices agreed to accept the case in order to send a signal to the lower courts still considering challenges to this provision of the ACA. The signal they wanted to send is that those other courts should not necessarily follow King, because SCOTUS might think it was wrongly decided.

A reversal of King (i.e., a finding in the plaintiff challengers’ favor) would seriously undermine—perhaps fatally—the structure of the Affordable Care Act. Fully 87% of the people who purchased policies through the federal exchanges during the first open enrollment period are receiving subsidies. If the government cannot give subsidies to low-income purchasers, it cannot tax them for failing to have the insurance, and the entire system collapses under its own weight. Fewer people can afford the insurance, the risk pool shrinks, costs rise, and more people are forced to opt out.

If on the other hand, SCOTUS upholds tax credits not authorized by Congress, it would be one more in a long line of revisions, waivers, exemptions, delays and modifications made to the law made by the very administration that purports to uphold it.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

Can We End the Insulting “War on Women” Meme Now?

Lady Parts

Colorado Senator Mark Udall has a strong record of fighting back against surveillance state abuses. If I lived in Colorado, I would have considered voting for him, as the lesser of two evils, on that basis alone. Instead “Senator Uterus” squandered that advantage by running on the phony and demeaning “war on women.” Let us hope his defeat, along with that of Wendy Davis, sends this insulting meme to the quick death and deep burial it deserves.

Even the use of the word “war” is offensive.

War is the Rape of Nanking. It is the Sebrenica Massacre. War is the Rwandan Genocide. It is 45 million people dead in four years under Mao Ze-Dong and twenty million murdered or starved under Stalin.

War is the freakin’ Holocaust.

Acid attacks, honor killings, forced marriages, slavery, and stoning. Those things might rise to the level of a “war on women.”

Having to pay for your own birth control does not. Neither does a deadline of twenty weeks to terminate a pregnancy. If the wage gap was real (it is not), even that does not constitute “war.”

Using that word to describe anything experienced by women in the 21st century in the United States is an insult to my fortitude and intelligence, and to the victims of real wars all over the world.

But the meme does not stop there. It doubles down on this heaping pile of insult by treating certain issues as inherently interesting to women.

I am more than the sum of my “lady parts[1] and the issues inevitably lumped together under the rubric “women’s issues” hold little interest for me.

Abortion has been protected since 1973. Only 28% of women believe it should be legal in all circumstances. Like 72% of all women, I am not one of them. The wage gap has been massively and repeatedly debunked.[2] The right to purchase and use birth control has been protected since 1965, and I have been able to afford it since I took my first job as a teenager. To the extent I have political concerns about birth control, it is to support over-the-counter availability, as proposed by Udall’s Republican challenger, or to wonder: If birth control is so unaffordable, how are women to pay for the health insurance policies covering birth control as just one of many expensive mandates?

Here are my issues: I think the growth of the surveillance state is an unacceptable trade-off in the fight against terrorism. I worry that the U.S. is crossing moral lines in its reliance on drone warfare, and that we are getting bogged down in never-ending conflicts in the Middle East. I fear our overseas interventions constitute sprinkling water on little terrorist Mogwai. I want non-violent drug offenders released from prison and reunited with their families. I worry about inflation in consumer prices outpacing real increases to income. I believe free markets produce the most beneficial results and that minimum wage laws destroy jobs and harm low-income workers. I think government debt and deficits are immoral and untenable burdens to pass on to our children. I am opposed to restrictions on political speech.

I care passionately about each one of those things.

When politicians suggest I should instead be focused on free birth control or manufactured outrage over phantom discrimination, it is like they are saying, “Oh, don’t worry your little head about those other issues. Those are for the menfolk to work out.”

It is like I am being patted on the head and told, “You’re pretty smart…for a girl.”

To those on the left who want to keep this meme alive, please watch this video of a woman fall down, get back up and start running again. Then consider whether you really want to tell us you think buying our own birth control is too hard.

[1] Unlike man parts, lady parts are protected by U.S. law, both figuratively—as set forth in this post—and literally.

[2] When economists control for educations, occupations, positions, length of time in the workplace, hours worked per week, and other similar variables, the gap narrows to pennies on the dollar. It may not exist at all, since even the remaining gap may be explained by “legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories,” lumping together such disparate professions as sociologists and economists or librarians, lawyers and professional athletes.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.
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