Birth Control, ACA, HHS, and the RC Church

Posted on January 31, 2012 by markinaustin

Catholic Church Blasts HHS Birth Control Rule

By Emily P. Walker, Washington Correspondent, MedPage TodayPublished: January 30, 2012

 

 

WASHINGTON — The Catholic Church is protesting an Obama administration rule that requires nearly all employers — even Catholic ones — who provide insurance to their employees to include coverage of birth control services.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has come down against the administration for not exempting all religious organizations from the rule.

In a video posted to the group’s website, USCCB president Archbishop Timothy Dolan said the “administration is on the wrong side of the Constitution” and that the rule to provide birth control is a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which provides for the free exercise of religion.

Anecdotally, Catholics from the Midwest to the Washington, D.C., area said their churches addressed the issue in the past week via church bulletins that urged churchgoers to contact their members of Congress to support legislation to reverse the administration’s rule.

The Obama administration rule stems from a provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires no-cost coverage for preventive health services. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services cover the “full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods” in order to prevent unintended pregnancies at no cost to the beneficiary, and that includes birth control.

The final rule, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Jan. 20, says that starting on Aug. 1, 2013, health plans must cover all FDA-approved contraceptives, including hormonal contraceptives such as birth control pills, implanted devices such as intrauterine devices (IUDs), Plan B emergency contraceptives (the “morning-after” pill), and sterilization — all without charging a copay, coinsurance, or a deductible.

The plans will not have to cover abortions, however.

Churches and church-affiliated secondary schools are exempt from the rule, but other organizations with religious affiliations — including universities, charities, and hospitals — must comply. Such organizations petitioned HHS for an exemption after the preliminary rule was issued last summer. As a compromise, they have been given an extra year to comply.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” Dolan said in a statement.

The Catholic Church opposes preventing conception by any artificial means, including condoms, IUDs, birth control pills, and sterilization.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the USCCB told MedPage Today that requiring Catholic providers to write prescriptions for birth control would be asking them to violate the church’s teaching.

“If you went to the Jewish deli, you can’t complain because it doesn’t have pork,” she said. “If you went to a Catholic hospital, you shouldn’t be surprised that that a Catholic hospital won’t prescribe contraception and sterilization.”

Walsh said the USCCB supports legislation authored by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) that would amend the ACA to permit health plans to refuse to cover specific items, such as birth control or services that “are contrary to the religious beliefs” of the entity offering the plan, without penalty. The bill, HR 1179, would allow those plans to still be considered “qualified health plans” and therefore able to be sold in the health insurance exchanges created by the healthcare reform law.

The bill has 102 sponsors, seven of whom are Democrats.

The Catholic Health Association of the United States declined a request for an interview, but pointedMedPage Today to a statement made by CEO Carol Keehan, who said the group is disappointed that HHS exempted only churches, but not religious hospitals, from its preventive services rule.

“The challenge that these regulations posed for many groups remains unresolved,” Keehan said in the statement. “This indicates the need for an effective national conversation on the appropriate conscience protections in our pluralistic country, which has always respected the role of religions.”

_________________________________________________________________

During the debate in 2009, The Bishops fought to have abortion not covered by ACA and the Catholic hospitals split with them (you can look that up).  The compromise finally went the Bishops’ way on abortion, as I recall.  Birth control, not including elective abortion, of course, remained in ACA, with an exemption for Churches, but not for RC employers or RC Hospitals (which presumably do not want that exemption, judging by 2009’s experience).  Is there some way the Bishops have been subjected to a sneak attack here, or was this a fight that was just going to happen once ACA was implemented, no matter what?  It seems to me that HHS is implementing ACA here as written.  Is there an executive overreach here that I am missing?  Was there reason to think a “church” included a “hospital” affiliated with the RCC?

Your collective input is required for my edification.

Filed under: 2012, Affordable Care Act, religion | 20 Comments »

Statistical retrospective on Massachusetts health care revision just published

Posted on January 28, 2012 by markinaustin

Health Affairs published a retrospective on Massachusetts Health care.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/early/2012/01/24/hlthaff.2011.0653.full

Some highlights: Coverage is broader than it was in 2006, outcomes are better, costs are still increasing.  However, what I found most encouraging yet most problematical for ACA was that the use of ERs for non-emergency treatment has been reduced, but only in the last couple of years.

If ACA is to obtain a savings for the taxpayer, IMHO its best opportunity will be to remove non-emergency treatment from the ER.  I will be the among first to suggest that could have been done, years ago, without federal intervention, and there are examples of this around the nation.  For example, the @45 neighborhood clinics in SF, funded cooperatively by major employers,  the City, UCSF, and the two large insurers in the state, have been successful at this.  Now Massachusetts has proven successful at the state level.

However, the fact that there was no relief for the ERs for 3 years in Massachusetts indicates to me the lag time to spread the knowledge of “where to go” to those who need treatment.  That lag time would seemingly be, under ACA, a dependent variable upon other functions.  Is the state, responsible for the make-up of the “essential” package, disseminating information or remaining silent?  Does the locality actually offer alternate choices? [There are huge areas of the Big Empty in TX that don’t offer any choice but a 90+ mi drive to an ER, or to an unknown alternate facility].

NoVAH, could you please address this aspect of ACA – how it is to be implemented re: moving non-emergency patient care out of the ERs?

Thanks, in advance,

Mark

Filed under: aca, health insurance, movies | 24 Comments »

The Effect of Eliminating AFDC 1996-2010, a history lesson

Posted on January 23, 2012 by markinaustin

AFDC was a part of the original SS program that we older folks knew as “welfare”.  It was assailed by folks from all directions.  The late Patrick Moynihan decried the incentive to have more children on welfare because the checks were sized based on the # of children.  The Nobel winning physicist Shockley thought it encouraged the spawning of poor black kids who he wrote were inferior.  I think he called it a dysgenic effect, but I may have that word not quite right.  This was in the sixties.

Rs and some Ds pointed to the building of a permanent underclass. 

It was in 1992 that WJC campaigned to get rid of welfare as we knew it. Ds in Congress opposed him. He finally found an ally in Newt.  In 1996, AFDC was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Assistance is limited to two years, and not a lifetime. Work retraining or schooling is a requirement.  Here is how the numbers dropped:

Year Average monthly TANF recipients US Population (%) Poverty rate (%) Annual unemployment rate (%)
Average monthly TANF recipients, percent of U.S. families in poverty and unemployment rate
1996 12,320,970 (see note) 4.6 11.0 5.4
1997 10,375,993 3.9 10.3 4.9
1998 8,347,136 3.1 10.0 4.5
1999 6,824,347 2.5 9.3 4.2
2000 5,778,034 1.4 8.7 4.0
2001 5,359,180 1.9 9.2 4.7
2002 5,069,010 1.8 9.6 5.8
2003 4,928,878 1.7 10.0 6.0
2004 4,748,115 1.6 10.2 5.5
2005 4,471,393 1.5 9.9 5.1
2006 4,166,659 1.4 9.8 4.6
2007 3,895,407 1.3 9.8 4.5
2008 3,795,007 1.2 10.3 5.4
2009 4,154,366 1.4 11.1 8.1
2010 4,375,022 1.4 11.7 8.6
       

 Many Euro countries still have permanent welfare, and thus have %s on welfare like we had on AFDC.  I thought the move from AFDC to TANF was long overdue and I thought it put a big crimp in whatever “culture of dependency” had been created.  I would oppose deleting TANF.  I still think the public believes we have the old AFDC system, but I may be wrong.  I offer this in the spirit of historical information, just in case it is new to some of you. 

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MOVIES

Posted on January 17, 2012 by markinaustin

Rosanne and I try to see one movie a month without our twin granddaughters, who will be 3 on January 23rd. Further, we each agree to let the other go see movies one of us would not see on a bet.  Here, in order, are the movies we have seen together as a couple since January, 2011, with my brief notes.

I hope it is useful for y’all and would like similar feedback on the movies we missed, for the purpose of Netflicking them at home.

We both would recommend all but one.

“The Social Network” B+.  Of current interest.

“Winter’s Bone”  A.  Suspenseful and spare with a great lead.

“Nora’s Will”  A.  How a funeral movie should be.  From MX.

“The Ghost Writer”  B.  Very suspenseful and well acted.

“The Kings Speech” A- or B+.  Well acted. Dramatic tension in a small place.  An Aussie accented Edward was a stretch, however.

“Inside Job”  A-.  Much more compelling than any Michael Moore documentary because it is not ham handed.

“Kids Are All Right” B.  Good chick flick, but tries too hard.

“Incendies”  A.  Suspenseful and terrifying.  Canadian.

“Page One: Inside the New York Times”  Documentary.  Skip it.

“Bridesmaids”  B or B+.  Funny chick flick.

“The Debt”  B.  Good suspense, good acting.  I was granted this as a date movie in trade for “Bridesmaids”.  Aside from the NYT documentary, “BM” was my least favorite and this is Rosanne’s least favorite, but we agree that both are worth a look.

“Midnight in Paris”  B.  Fantasy romance comedy chick flick.

“The Descendants”  A.  Works on three levels.

“We Bought A Zoo”  B.  Not in the class of “Descendants”.  But by no means a waste.  Bit of a chick flick, I think.

“The Artist”  B+.  Brilliantly executed gimmick.  Won’t survive as a TV rental.  See it in the theater.

Filed under: movies | 31 Comments »

Whither Texas?

Posted on January 10, 2012 by markinaustin

Quandary.  Texas’ primary will surely be postponed until June.

How did we get here?

1]  TX Lege published its CD map based on the 2010 census.

2]  TX is a state that must pre-clear its map with the Justice Department or alternatively ask a USDC in Washington DC for a declaratory judgment.  No state had ever gone to court before, but TX thought it would do “better” in court than with a D DOJ.  This infused delay, as a matter of course – DOJ pre-clearance takes but 60 days.

3]  The DC Court has not finally ruled, but did make an interim finding that the TX plan violated the VRA.  The DC Court will finally rule in March, perhaps.

4]  TX had scheduled its primary for Super Tuesday in March, so, in an unusual move, the DC Court permitted a TX federal court panel to draw an interim plan for TX.  The San Antonio panel obliged, but without ever making its own preliminary finding that the TX plan violated the VRA.  

5]  TX appealed the SA map to the Supremes saying it was not based on a finding of a violation. Further, TX said, it could use its own map if no violation had been found.  The DC court case was not part of the appeal but it was not far from the Supremes’ minds, either.

6]  Read the link to see that the Supremes are confused, too. I think you will sense that the Supremes will probably come up with a compromise result that will be more about judicial administration of the federal court system, IMHO, then about the probable swing of 4 HoR votes by party that are the political stakes.  3 of 4 new HoR seats are R under the TX plan, but D under the San Antonio USDC plan.

7]  Remember that this is only about TX’s interim plan at this point – the final plan will be dictated by the USDC in DC, or the appeal of that case.  Problem for TX is that the interim makes the CD lines for 2012, and until we have a final ruling, we cannot have 2012 elections or primaries.  The Supremes [and all courts] hate tight timelines in complex matters.

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Two from Texas for Sunday

Posted on January 8, 2012 by markinaustin
Junior Brown 
My Wife Thinks You’re Dead
                 Lyle Lovett   I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You                                                                                        

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Good Morning TMW

Posted on December 27, 2011 by markinaustin

We are on the road in 25 minutes or so, and I won’t check in again until tomorrow night, but I thought TrollMcWingnut would find this NYT column of interest.

DECEMBER 26, 2011, 9:00 PM

Whose Tea Party Is It?

By THEDA SKOCPOL and VANESSA WILLIAMSON
Newt Gingrich’s brief turn as presidential front-runner was only the latest paroxysm of a tumultuous Republican primary season. What’s going on? Tensions within the Tea Party help explain the volatility of the Republican primary campaign, as candidates seek to appeal to competing elements of the Tea Party with varying success.
For our new book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” we interviewed Tea Party activists across the country over a sixteen-month period and found that the movement is not the monolith it is sometimes portrayed as. The conservative political upsurge has grassroots and elite components with divergent interests and goals. Mitt Romney, no favorite of the Tea Party grassroots, is currently pitching his candidacy to Tea Party elites, while Newt Gingrich and other contenders are vying for the rank-and-file Tea Party supporters.
We learned about grassroots Tea Party groups by attending their meetings, interviewing active members and reading hundreds of their websites and message boards. In early 2011, these Tea Partiers had no consistent favorite for the Republican nominee, supporting everyone from Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Donald Trump, but they did have one goal in mind for 2012: beating Barack Obama. As one Tea Party member we met in Virginia put it, “we have to get Obama out. Obama and the Communists he’s surrounded himself with.”
In recent weeks, Gingrich has reached out to these grassroots Tea Party voters, older white middle-class conservatives who remember him from his glory days as an insurgent Democrat slayer. Gingrich’s aggressive style and blistering critiques of the Democrats resonate with Tea Party voters. Gingrich has accused Democrats of socialist tendencies for decades; as early as 1984, he claimed that a Democratic member of the House of Representatives was distributing “communist propaganda.”

But Gingrich has also tapped into what we identified as Tea Partiers’ most fundamental concern: their belief that hardworking American taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for undeserving freeloaders, particularly immigrants, the poor and the young. Young people “just feel like they are entitled,” one member of the Massachusetts Tea Party told us. A Virginia interviewee said that today’s youth “have lost the value of work.”
These views were occasionally tinged with ethnic stereotypes about immigrants “stealing” from tax-funded programs, or minorities with a “plantation mentality.” When Gingrich talks about “inner-city” children having “no habits of working,” he is appealing to a widely held sentiment among the Tea Party faithful.
What’s more, Gingrich’s comparatively humane stance on immigration reform — offering immigrants a path to legal status with the approval of local community members — is more palatable to Tea Party members than one might expect. First, it reduces federal authority over a key Tea Party issue, a policy that appeals to the “states’ rights” conservatives who fill the seats at Tea Party meetings. Crucially, Gingrich is not offering, as Rick Perry did, taxpayer-funded benefits to unauthorized immigrants, a policy described by one Tea Party activist we spoke to as money wasted on “moochers.”
Immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern expressed by Tea Party activists, usually as a symbol of a broader national decline. Asked why she was a member of the movement, a woman from Virginia asked rhetorically, “what is going on in this country? What is going on with immigration?” A Tea Party leader in Massachusetts expressed her desire to stand on the border “with a gun” while an activist in Arizona jokingly referred to an immigration plan in the form of a “12 million passenger bus” to send unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.
In a survey of Tea Party members in Massachusetts we conducted, immigration was second only to deficits on the list of issues the party should address. Another man, after we interviewed him in the afternoon, took us aside at a meeting that evening to say specifically that he wished he had said more about immigration because that was really his top issue.
Tea Party activists are not uniformly opposed to government social programs, however. Our interviewees were very anxious that Social Security and Medicare be maintained. “I’ve been working since I was 16 years old, and I do feel like I should someday reap the benefit. I’m not looking for a handout. I’m looking for a pay out of what I paid into,” one Tea Party member explained. Their support for these programs was not just self-interested; several Tea Partiers said they would take a benefit cut if the savings stayed in the Social Security fund. One woman, a regular attendee of her local Tea Party, offered solutions that seemed totally out of keeping with the stereotypes of Tea Party members as knee-jerk tax cutters. After suggesting that any benefit cuts be aimed at those in the “upper income brackets,” she went so far as to say that she “would not mind a tax increase to try to get the country right again.”
Given the Tea Partiers’ abiding support for two key pillars of the American social safety net, it is no surprise that Gingrich’s plan for a Social Security overhaul is aimed only at young workers, not the retirees filling the rows at Tea Party meetings. But Mitt Romney has taken a different path, expressing his support for the Ryan budget plan that features huge tax cuts for the very wealthy paid for with relatively near-term Medicare cuts.
Many observers have suggested that Romney’s support for the unpopular Ryan budget was a misstep. But considered from another perspective, Romney is making a strategic move to aim for a different part of the Tea Party, the free-market elites and funders.
Cutting these programs is unlikely to appeal to the grassroots Tea Party, but local Tea Party members are only marginally aware of the national advocacy occurring in their name. Asked about national groups, local activists tended to shake their heads in confusion. In a typical complaint, one leader of a local Arizona Tea Party group told us, “sometimes when you sign up for a site, it puts out tentacles,” sharing information so that visitors receive a bewildering array of emails from other groups.Long-standing elite advocacy organizations that rallied around the Tea Party label in 2009 and 2010, like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, were crucial to the Tea Party phenomenon, providing funding for national rallies and conservative candidates, and focusing attention on well-practiced spokespeople to represent the Tea Party in the media and in Washington. But the national advocates have only tenuous ties to the grassroots Tea Party groups and are in no way accountable to the Tea Party at the local level. Their policy agenda is different as well. FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have sought major reforms of Social Security and Medicare for years — long before the Tea-Party label gained currency.
Tea Partiers also receive their information primarily, or in some cases exclusively, from Fox News and talk radio, outlets that are unlikely to turn a critical eye on conservative advocacy organizations. This lack of connection between grassroots and elite Tea Party-ism may allow Romney to placate the wealthy opponents of Social Security and Medicare without irking the Tea Party base.
For both Romney and Gingrich, appealing to the Tea Party is a bit of a stretch. Both men have been around too long not to have taken positions too moderate for the new, extreme-right, tea-infused Republican Party. In particular, there is little Romney can do to make Tea Party activists enthusiastic about him during the primary season. Though his claims to a businessman’s expertise should appeal to the many small business owners in the Tea Party, no one we interviewed had good things to say about anything but his potential electability.
But Republican primary voters, including those in the Tea Party, want to win the 2012 general election. As one Tea Partier told us, Romney is “not quite conservative enough – but we have to get Obama out.” They will overlook past heresies, even “RomneyCare,” in a candidate they believe can win the general election.
As long as the big Tea Party funders back Romney’s candidacy or stay on the sidelines, Romney has a good chance of riding out other candidates’ surges in popularity and using his vast organizational and financial advantages to beat out his opponents for the Republican nomination. At that point, the grassroots Tea Party members will have little influence; instead, momentum will shift even further towards the elite policy advocates. And these well-funded groups, which benefited from the Tea Party’s momentum in the first years of the Obama administration, will continue to seek their own policy goals, including those at odds with the positions of local Tea Partiers.
Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, and Vanessa Williamson, a graduate student in government and social policy at Harvard, are the authors of the new book “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.”

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Dedicated to Scott – but for the Anglophile in all of us!

Posted on December 24, 2011 by markinaustin
If you never saw the late Ian Richardson as the evil PM, Francis Urquhart (F.U.), this is a taste.  PM Cameron should be watching the 20 year old series now for tips.  Here F.U. makes mincemeat of the mawkishly liberal BBC interviewer.

Should you have trouble with the video loading, try letting it run long enough to buffer 30 seconds or so and then restarting the clip at the beginning, behind the buffer.

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Your expertise is requested on two fronts

Posted on December 19, 2011 by markinaustin

This 2006 paper claimed that American manufacturing retained its world lead and 20%+ of global manufacturing from c. 1980 to 2005.  It claimed job loss in the sector was entirely due to mechanization.


Cited within the paper is a Fed Reserve of Cleveland abstract, but its conclusions differ.

http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/Commentary/2006/0101.pdf

I would like to see the data broken out between defense and non-defense manufacturing output.  An analysis, over time, of the portion of output generated by S&P 500 and non-S&P 500 companies might show concentrations in manufacturing, like the trend in agribusiness away from the diminishing family farm component.


Some of you have access to, and often deal with, data that would tend to confirm or deny the premise of the 2006 paper.  Your thoughts are welcome.
*****************************
NoVAH, what do you think of the passing off of the minimum standards for coverage under ACA to the states?  Upside?  Downside?

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Some of you said this was coming

Posted on December 15, 2011 by markinaustin

Ryan-Wyden.

I think that both JNCP and NoVAH have mentioned this was going to be offered.

Wyden-Bennett was the health care bill I favored and although I can mount a defense of ACA, it is huge, where Wyden-Bennett was relatively elegant, and it was partisan where W-B was not.

Paul Ryan thinks before he speaks, a trait he shares with Ron Wyden.  I have linked to Ezra’s take, but I really hope to get NoVAH’s.

Also, I want to know if this may become the law.

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