Health Plan Coverage and Contraception

The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that.  However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.

One inconvenience is the actual cost of contraception—to the user, not the rest of us who must pay for these “free” items.  Contraceptive pills can be had at places like Walmart for $9/mo, vaginal contraceptives are cheaper, condoms (don’t men have a role here, too?) are $6.50 the dozen.  These are not prices that will shatter anyone’s piggy bank.

Contraceptives are used to treat medical conditions, and they can be terribly expensive?  That’s the other inconvenience.  No they aren’t; those aren’t contraceptives.  They’re medications used for treating a medical condition; they happen to have a (if not the) major side effect of being anti-conceiving.  Insurance plans already covered such meds, and Obamacare could have, too, but the Progressive-Democratic Party eschewed that when they rammed through Obamacare.

In the end, there’s no reason anyone should pay for contraceptives other than the users.  Full stop.

Two Health Insurance Markets?

The Wall Street Journal has misunderstood the situation and the proposal [emphasis added].

President Donald Trump’s executive order on health insurance, the most significant step so far to put his stamp on health policy, is designed to give more options to healthy consumers. It also could divide the insurance market in two.

What Trump is purportedly going to do with his Executive Order is

  • instruct[] federal agencies to loosen rules on health plans that the administration says have driven up premiums and reduced insurance offerings
  • direct the Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury Departments to lay the groundwork for the growth of association health plans, coverage that would have fewer mandated benefits than many current plans available to small employers and individuals [and] that wouldn’t be subject to the full range of ACA requirements, such as the mandated package of benefits.
  • departments, in addition, will be told to take steps to expand the availability of short-term medical plans …  allow people to once again buy plans in that category that could last for almost a year.

However, rather than create two health insurance markets, these actions would do no more than begin to create one health insurance market.  There is no extant health insurance market; there is nothing present to become part of “two markets.”  What we have presently is neither insurance nor a market for it.  What we have is a health coverage welfare program that has some (very poor) options from which we’re required to select one for ourselves.

The beginnings of a health insurance market, in addition to being an actual market for health insurance, would, though, lessen the importance of the mandated welfare program—to the benefit of all of us, including those trapped in that welfare program.