My rant about current healthcare disputes

Warning, I will annoy both liberals and conservatives.

The HHS mandate requiring employers to provide contraception & abortion & The Supreme Court upholding Obamacare – both of these issues are eliciting a lot of emotional responses in our society now and I have not heard a voice I agree with.

Obamacare (or whatever the actual name is for the law) I don’t really get why conservatives are so worked up about requiring people to buy health insurance…once everybody actually buys it, the price could go down because there will be fewer lost charges. If it weren’t for the new law, my sons would be uninsured right now. I work in Healthcare and our current system is so messed up (even though I am “Fully covered”) I have personally forgone medical testing and procedures available in the very building I work in because of cost and tedium. If I walk away from screening tests and other treatments, God only know what poor uninsured women are suffering without.

Having people trained to help others fill our Advance Directives IS A GOOD IDEA and it’s NOT a “Death Panel” …  I am a specially trained person who helps people fill out Advance Directives . If I were on a Death Panel, I would know, really. There are hyper-conservatives who are convinced that  the goal of Advance Directives is to pull the plug on grandma..one of them went ballistic at me once and asked me if Mary & Joseph would have them. My answer : Mary didnt need one and Joseph is the Saint of a good death, so yes, he would have one.

We have to engage in discussion about healthcare without fear mongers ranting that we are going to kill grandparents and little babies. I will never forget an article giving dire warnings that under Obamacare, we will go the way of Britain and refuse to resuscitate 21 week gestation infants. The person who wrote it assumed there was a treatment for 21 week infants ….too bad he didn’t ask a Neonatologist first.

Conservatives have GOT to stop the fearmongering…it’s mean and doesn’t help. Our system is broken.

Now to annoy liberals…

Maternity care is really expensive and people who need it and cant get it can be ruined. Lots of Health Insurance policies refuse to pay any maternity care and leave women really suffering under crushing costs of childbirth. No one is fighting for women who CHOOSE to become parents and need THAT medical care….isn’t it their right to CHOOSE to give birth? Where are the women’s rights people for those ladies?

Contraception (on the other hand) can be very cheap and bought on nearly every street corner in a city or suburb. Even prescription contraceptives can be bought out-of-pocket for way less that the cost of smoking or lattes…not a real trauma for those who might attend or work for Catholic Institutions to pay for themselves if they want it – CERTAINLY not enough to try to force Institutions to do something that they have a foundational prohibition against. Forcing the Catholic Church to pay for contraceptives is bullying and will  result in hardships MUCH greater than Sandra Fluke (and the like) having to shell out a few bucks for pills and condoms a her local CVS.

The Church is willing to pay the HIGH cost of Maternity care but not the cheap care of contraceptives…continuing this argument is going to cost us all more than it is worth. The Obama Admin is pushing this just to prove they can…they are showing NO respect for very real religious traditions…our society has historically done pretty well at respecting each others religions if we start pooping on each other now, it isn’t going to end well.

As far as the forcing the Church to pay for abortions…that is past bullying, that would be a hate crime. If we force this, we may as well force feed pork to those with a religious prohibition against it or tie Jehovah’s Witnesses down and give them blood transfusions and ALL of it would be wrong. We must not allow this to happen under our noses – it  would be a fundamental shift in how our country functions for EVERY ONE, not just Catholics.

There have been many circumstances where public funds did not pay for abortions in recent years and it did not lead to widespread death by self infliction as the dire warnings we have droned at us.  For anyone who thinks I only defend Catholic rights, no…I believe in the free exercise of religion – all of them (or none for those I love who do not currently believe in God).

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