NBC Nightly News last Saturday showcased just one of the health-insurance cancellation letters that recently has landed in the mailboxes of at least 1,379,000 Americans.
The notice from Illinois’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan:
For comment, NBC turned to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, former White House health-care adviser and brother of Chicago mayor and Obama’s one-time chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. This leading architect of the “unsinkable” S.S. Obamacare snarled: “A lot of those inadequate health insurance plans that don’t cover maternity care or have a very low dollar limit on them are inadequate.”
How dare he? How dare Emanuel and the other Obamites behind this growing, seething mess decide that, to paraphrase Obama’s infamous words, “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your healthcare plan. Period” . . . unless it’s “inadequate”? In that case — because they know what’s best for us dolts — they will prohibit such coverage. Rather, they will order us to buy insurance that they prefer, usually at higher prices.
What elitism.
Obama’s mouthpiece, Jay Carney, admitted Monday that Obama’s “you can keep your plan” slogan was a bright, shining lie. (NBC News’s Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye bravely pounded the last railroad spike into the coffin of Obama’s credibility with yesterday’s devastating report on his serial lies about this key Obamacare selling point, even after Obama knew he was lying.) Instead, health plans with which 88 percent of Americans are satisfied — according to last month’s Employee Benefit Research Institute survey — now must obey Obama’s “minimum standards.” These encompass ten new areas of obligatory treatment, including: maternity care, substance-abuse coverage, and mental-health benefits. These services boost the cost of insurance, and not everyone needs or wants them.
How dare Obama, Emanuel, Carney, and their ilk crush a woman’s right to choose her health plan? Shouldn’t she and her doctor make that decision?
And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care? Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all.
Should women who happen to be sterile be forced to carry maternity-care insurance? How about the millions of American women who are post-menopausal? Why should they buy maternity benefits?
How about single career women for whom motherhood may be five, ten, or fifteen years down the line, if that? Why make them acquire insurance for an eventuality that is far over their horizons?
“What about unplanned pregnancies?” leftists will squawk. Well, that’s why God created contraception.
Indeed, Obama insisted that Obamacare cover contraception for all women of reproducible age, regardless of income — without corresponding co-payments, co-insurance, or any other means of connecting the users of birth control with the costs of birth control. This free-contraception rule notoriously binds companies (like Hobby Lobby) and organizations (the University of Notre Dame) whose owners and managers harbor strong ethical objections to funding or insuring birth control.
So, in its fevered effort to live every woman’s life on her behalf, Obamacare’s “minimum standards” include mandatory birth control and mandatory maternity benefits. In other words, Obama has the federal government redistributing resources in order to keep every working uterus in America potentially vacant and occupied, all at the same time.
And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally? Why must they be forced to pay hard cash for more expensive plans that include birth-control pills that they do not want and maternity care that they do not need?
As they say, you cannot make this up.
Have Obama and the best and brightest in his orbit thought this through?
The question answers itself.