Behind the Right’s Crazy Crusade to Make Women Pay More for Health Insurance

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/behind-rights-crazy-crusade-make-women-pay-more-health-insurance


In a sane world, when Rep. Renee Ellmers asked rhetorically last week “Has a man ever delivered a baby?” she would have been arguing not against, but for the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that men and women pay the same insurance premiums. After all, the special physical burdens borne solely by women to ensure the life and health of the next generation obviously benefit both genders, right? Healthy men today can thank their mothers for eating well and getting good prenatal care; likewise fathers are grateful to the mothers of their children for the same. (Michael Hiltzik runs down the case for sharing those costs publicly here.)

But no, Ellmers asked that question of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in order to rail against the ACA’s equal premium requirement. She thought it was a clever “gotcha” moment, designed to show the craziness of requiring all insurance policies to cover maternity care and contraception without a co-pay. (The doofuses at Breitbart agreed, declaring “Ellmers brings her A game.”) Amazingly, Ellmers chairs the House GOP’s “women’s policy committee” – so how could she be so tone-deaf in attacking the way the ACA helps that increasingly elusive GOP constituency, female voters?

Because the right-wing base of the modern Republican Party is dedicated to restoring men as the head of the household, and the nuclear, husband-headed family as the principle social unit. From Rick Santorum railing against contraception and preaching the nuclear family as the answer to poverty in last year’s GOP presidential primary, to Rafael Cruz Sr. telling an audience that “God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family,” today’s right-wing Republicans are increasingly comfortable with open displays of old-time crackpot patriarchy. This week Sen. Ted Cruz Jr. courts the right-wing preachers of the South Carolina Renewal Project, which is thought to be a key stop on his way to the GOP nomination in that early-primary state.

Let’s face it: The only way charging women more for health insurance and healthcare makes sense is if they have a partner who either shares that burden or shoulders it entirely. As in … a husband. Then it’s clear that the male of the species is doing his part to keep the species healthy and reproducing itself. A woman who doesn’t have a husband to play that role? Well, there shouldn’t be women like that – and certainly if there are, they shouldn’t be having children anyway, or even having sex, so they don’t need maternity care or contraception.

[RKP5637]

1. Men should be paying more! Difficult for a woman to get pregnant without a

man involved someplace along the line. Make men pay for what occurred, what they caused!

[LuvNewcastle]

2. Republicans lie awake at night thinking of ways to

divide the people against each other so they won't see their common enemies. This is yet another example.

[RKP5637]

3. Definitely! It's difficult to come up with much wherein republicans have not had

hatefulness, division of people, persecution and/or invasive dominance as part of their proposals.

[LuvNewcastle]

4. They've been playing that game for a long time and they'll keep

playing it as long as it keeps working. I wish people would wake up and see it. I'm afraid it will be too late when the people finally realize it.

[LisaLynne]

6. I think that's true, but in this case...

They really believe this. This isn't, IMHO, for them, about turning women against men, if that's what you mean. It's that they really think:

Because the right-wing base of the modern Republican Party is dedicated to restoring men as the head of the household, and the nuclear, husband-headed family as the principle social unit.

That's how they think the world should be ordered and pointing that out should NOT divide us. It should unite us because no progressive, male or female, should want half the population to be viewed as second class citizens.

[leftyohiolib]

5. just more divide and conquer

[HereSince1628]

7. Using personal policies as a vehicle to spread costs is confusing

especially for people who can't get past the former meaning associated with "My personal policy".

I am not at all surprised this has become hard for those on the right. They don't deal well with change and they have a huge psychological trigger on issues of fairness. Hooking someone else's costs into the price of "their' personal policy creates real psychological issues for them.

[loudsue]

8. Renee Elmers has GOT TO BE DEFEATED in the next election. She is part of the result of Koch

addicts in North Carolina, and we have to call her out on every single stupid tea-party thing she's done during the election.