Not the Poor Contraceptive User’s Friend Either

The Biggest Beneficiary of the Contraception Mandate? Drug Companies , announces an article by Avik S. A. Roy on The Atlantic ‘s website, adding more evidence for a point I made yesterday in Big Pharma Is Not Your Friend , though he’s concerned that the Obama administration’s rule “will enrich drug companies at the expense of people who want access to basic contraception.” After explaining the effects of making the provision of contraception “first dollar coverage,” he writes:

If you were surprised that PhRMA, the pharmaceutical trade group,  backed Obamacare , now you can see why: the HHS contraception mandate alone will be a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for the pharma industry. If your health insurance plan allowed you to buy a television, of any price, without any cost-sharing on your part, would you buy a 13-inch CRT or a 60-inch flat screen?

Roy then notes that “the definition of insurance has lost any meaning in the context of American health care.”

Insurance, traditionally defined, is meant to protect us from the risk of unexpectedly incurring  catastrophic costs . Car insurance, for example, protects us against collisions, but doesn’t cover our purchase of wiper fluid or gasoline. Homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover the cost of air conditioning. And yet, now, we have a federal law that forces health insurance to cover something that is even cheaper than gasoline or air conditioning.

It’s this perversion of the term “insurance” that helps highlight the weirdness of  Democrats accusing Republicans  of wanting to “ban” contraception. If a politician were to oppose a mandate forcing insurers to pay for gasoline or air conditioning, would he then be supporting a “ban” of these products?