This is my commentary on health care. There have been a lot of them out there lately. I know because, after a summer abroad, I spent September wading through the muck and trying to make sense of how the overhaul would actually affect me.
At this point, the debate often centers on clearing misconceptions rather than discussing actual policy. We don’t get to ask, “Should the bill provide federal subsidies to cover abortions for the underprivileged?” because the Obama administration is too busy assuring the right that it won’t.
On Sept. 18, our first lady vegetable-gardening super-mom Michelle Obama emerged from the mire to remind America of an obvious but often neglected fact in the debate: The health care system in the U.S. disproportionately disenfranchises women.
Women, who “earn 78 cents to the dollar of every man,” as Obama said, generally pay far more for insurance than their male counterparts and are sometimes left uncovered or under-covered because of “pre-existing conditions” such as pregnancy.
Obama spoke from the perspective of a mother, daughter, and wife.
“If we want women to be able to care for their families and pursue things that they could never imagine, then we have to reform the system,” she said.
The speech focused on the most pernicious yet politically correct trials that plague women under the current health care system — issues such as breast cancer, for example, that Dr. Phil would generally feel comfortable talking about on his daytime talk show.
Abortion was predictably absent from Obama’s speech, but so was any discussion of women’s reproductive rights. Though more than half of all states now require insurance companies to pay for contraceptives, including Oregon since 2008, the likely inclusion of such a mandate in the national plan has a little too much armpit hair for the first lady to mention it in public.
Signs say that contraceptive coverage will be included in the final bill, but it’s a shame that the topic has been quarantined from conversation alongside abortion. As anti-abortion politicians in both the House and the Senate use the health care bill as a platform to decrease the accessibility of abortions for underprivileged women, it becomes increasingly important that the bill at least improve the availability of preventative contraceptives.
As Salon.com blogger Lynn Harris said, “opposing abortion and contraception is like opposing rain and umbrellas.”
If avoiding the abortion debate is necessary to pass the health care bill, then, at the very least, women’s advocates like Obama need to make sure that mandated contraceptive coverage doesn’t fall by the wayside. America’s twenty-somethings are going to need a lot of umbrellas.
By playing it safe, Obama neglected some of the most pressing issues for a certain population of commonly un- and under-insured women — the young and single. Apart from the weekly phone calls in which I treat my mother’s anxiety with a healthy dose of white lies, I’m not taking care of my family right now. I’m taking care of myself and pursuing those unimaginable goals that Obama touched upon.
Many of my goals will require not having babies before I’m at an age where I no longer need to find my furniture in dumpsters. This is not a radical concept, and there’s no reason Mama Obama should shy away from it amidst the political fray. Perhaps if the issues most relevant to people of my age and gender were more often included in the national discussion, it would be easier for me to make sense of the muck and get involved.
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Let’s talk about reproductive rights
Daily Emerald
September 30, 2009
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