That’s the quote from Kathy Waligora of Ever-Thrive Illinois, in today’s article on the benefits of Obamacare for women, a piece credited to Judy Peres, “special to the Tribune,” and later described as being “produced in partnership with Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.”
(Yeah, I was planning on very light blogging this week, due to a client deadline and a sewing-project deadline, for the school’s Living Stations of the cross, coming at the same time, and really had to bite my tongue rather than respond to comments and articles promoting, effectively, open borders. And I wanted to write about Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over, though I wasn’t impressed with the book much. But a few words on this article first. . .)
Anyway, the article is all about the wonderful things Obamacare does for women: the requirement that all policies include maternity benefits (without any waiting period or pre-existing condition exclusion), the substantial list of preventive care benefits covered at no out-of-pocket cost, most significantly including all forms of contraception regardless of pricetag.
Downsides of the law, according to the article: insurers may not be obliged to cover, without out-of-pocket costs, expenses related to removal of IUDs or complications resulting from their use. Abortion coverage is a “gap,” especially under Medicaid. And the author profiles a women who wants to get pregnant via artificial insemination because she’s in a lesbian relationship and hopes to have these costs covered by insurance:
“Insemination would be covered for a heterosexual couple if they failed to conceive after a year,” she said. “But the language (of the policy) doesn’t mention same-sex couples. I might have to pay for the first attempt. If that didn’t work I’d be technically infertile, and the next attempts would probably be covered.”
In other words, this woman expects health insurance to pay for her attempts to get pregnant through artificial means, under the weakest definition of “infertility” (after the “first attempt”? when the usual definition requires attempting for a year).
Oh, and the author has discovered that vasectomies aren’t covered as a “free preventive service” but tubal ligation is.
So nothing new under the sun, right? A journalist (or, more likely, “journalist” — if the author is really an employee at an Obamacare-advocacy organization) thinks that Obamacare means free lunches for everyone. But it’s still grating to read this sort of “journalism” as I start my morning.
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