Stupidity or Duplicity: WE pay anyway!

Do you think they just don’t get it? In a supposed attempt to find some “middle-ground” in order to make the “middle-men” whole as to the cost of birth control, the administration is acting like we are in the “middle-ages”—all poor and uneducated. First, the administration’s talking heads took the position that the cost of free birth control would be a savings for employers, now forced to pay for it because, pregnancies and abortions are much more expensive. The employers now have to pay for a product, to prevent a cost that their health plan is paying. The premise is that paying the lower cost birth control will lower the plan’s coverage cost and the health plan will then, in turn, lower the premium cost to the employers—not hardly!
Also, there is a big assumption that the rate of single mother and unwanted pregnancies will decrease because of improved access to birth control. I am not sure I agree with this either. Free or subsidized birth control is widely available, it just is not conveniently available everywhere. I am not attacking a woman’s right to have access to birth control. We have a very strong habit, of late, of confusing the discussion of access with no-cost access. It is the no-cost access I have the most problem with. The cost is not free, we all end up paying for it anyway, and the system that is based on mandates, despite the method of the mandate naturally inject inefficiencies and vagaries of control, so that a significantly reduced percentage of dollars spent actually go to pay for the good or service. Look at the healthcare debate numbers from the president’s round table at Blair House with republicans in 2010. By numerous authorities, from both sides of the aisle, only about 35 – 45 cents on the dollar ever make it to real care. So why do we do it this way?
The government now classifies birth control as preventative care, because the ACA or Obamacare requires health plans to cover prevention at no cost. Exercise prevents heart disease, so this should be classified as prevention, as well. Health plans really should cover gym membership at no cost. And, you know having fresh fruit prevents scurvy, health plans need to cover free fruit. Listening to peaceful music lowers stress levels, and therefor prevents high blood pressure and the risk of stroke so good music systems are preventative and should also be covered for free. And of course a warm, comfortable home is clearly preventative to lots and lots of health related problems so I guess “health plans” should provide this as well. This is the same issue I have with the insurance purchase mandate and the rationalization of its constitutionality by the extension of federal power justified by pointing to prior extensions of federal power under the commerce clause.
It is not the idea of helping people; women in this case, get access to care that is the issue. It is the duplicitousness of the need for access by extension to now mean everybody else needs to pay for it, and the effort to obscure the nature of the extension logic that I am finding most troubling. The argument that is being used, now over and over again, goes like this . . . Someone, or some group, needs access to something—or for political gain, we can convince them that they are being discriminated against because they do not have this access and we want to give them access so they will see us as looking out for them, what we are providing is now considered preventative, we passed the law that says if its preventative it must be provided at no cost, ipso facto, you have to pay for this group to get it because it’s the law.
The straw that is breaking the back of many on this issue is now that this administration is saying well, since you are objecting to assuming this cost, we, the government, will find some way to make you whole here, you won’t have to shoulder the cost. Everything the government does cost the people of the United States money. No matter how they try to spin this, it costs us money. We are the government and we are the only source of money. So nothing they can do at the federal level is going to make anyone whole without laying it on the backs of all of us in the long run. Simply saying OK we will let you get a credit to reduce something you pay us over here, just reduces the income the federal government needs to pay what is already spent ten years ago. Do they really think we believe they will not increase fees somewhere else to get the money? If they lay it on the back of some other industry, they are going to increase prices that we all pay so once again it is out of our pockets. There is no escape from zero-sum economics. Even if they just print new money out of thin air, as they have been doing for forty years now, it reduces the buying power of our currency and prices go up, again we pay.
Finally, it is time we realize that we only have finite resources, and everything we do costs us in one way or another. Paying for birth control for everyone is just reducing the money we need to pay for everything else. People are now living much longer and as we crossed from average life expectancy at the mid-seventies to where we are not in the eighties, the average cost of care has rapidly increased. Now we demand that heal plans no longer just cover basic life-saving procedures, we expect they also cover quality of life items as well. The technologies we have developed to make this real gain in median life span is based on very expensive technologies adding to the costs, and the magic bio-chemical bullets we have developed to fight the war with the other species, like bacteria, and viruses, etc. are increasingly costing more and causing more side effects as these species have evolved to be resistant. All of this, with some other reasons as well, is causing the steadily increasing cost for our healthcare. Sometime soon we need to begin to discriminate at what point people are individually responsible for at least some of these costs.
So I wonder are the people coming up with these ideas really this stupid. If they are not stupid, then do they think we are this stupid? Or are they simply Machiavellian? My initial reaction is they are not smart enough to be this duplicitous, but perhaps I am mistaken!