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Doug Miller
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Doug commented on the article |Kathleen:
I have two responses to your comment.
First, I think there is a reasonable case to be made that as a matter of policy we ought to prohibit gender rating in all forms of insurance. We don't for example, allow insurers to engage in race-based underwriting, even though claims experience might vary among different racial groups. So it's not clear why gender should be any less impermissible than race as a basis for underwriting.
Second, note that the above could only be achieved by government regulation -- you can't expect individual insurance companies to eliminate these distinctions on their own.
Imagine, for example, that a single insurer decided to equalize term life insurance premiums between men and women. Men's premiums would go down, and women's premiums would go up. Not surprisingly, women would stop buying life insurance from that company, because they could get a better rate from companies that did take into account their longer life expectancies.
Left with an all-male risk pool, the company's gender neutral insurance rates would rise to the original male level, so nothing would have been accomplished. Gender-neutral rates are therefore only achievable when all insurance companies have to offer them -- i.e. when the government steps in and regulates.
For that reason, I repeat my contention that so long as gender rating is allowed, and as long as gender rating goes both ways depending on the type of insurance, you can't really say that insurance companies who engage in it are motivated by animus. And to me, "misogyny" (from the greek miseō (to hate) + gynē (woman)) by definition incorporates the concept of animus.
This (again) is why I say that it's silly to sit around demonizing insurance companies, when we ought instead to examine whether the insurance model even makes sense if our goal is universal healthcare.
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Doug commented on the article |
Kathleen:
Let's hold off on the invective until we are sure we really disagree.
When someone draws a partial analogy, it is always easy to attack the analogy by pretending that the person meant to draw a complete equivalence between the two things, when you know perfectly well they did not.
Of course I am not comparing a pregnancy to a house fire in the "what the fuck is wrong with you" sense you imply (i.e. comparing human beings to property, comparing the beginning of a human life with the destruction of a person's home.)
Indeed, I'm not really comparing pregnancy to a house fire at all. What I'm comparing is the act of attempting to buy an insurance policy that will pay for the COSTS of a pregnancy when one is already pregnant, and attempting to buy insurance that will pay the costs of a house fire when the fire is already in progress.
Since insurance is about spreading the risk of uncertain events, no sane insurance company would issue a policy covering the costs of an event that is certain because it is already in progress.
I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH YOU that no one should go without health coverage for their pregnancy. But insurance is not the way to achieve this. Universal, single-payer healthcare is.
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Doug commented on the article |CTYankee:
But I don't HAVE any objections to abortion! Read everything I've written here and that should be obvious.
What I object to is the glib simplicity with which fellow pro-choicers imagine that anti-abortion people can be made to compromise on things like federal funding of abortion with platitudes like "you don't have a uterus so you don't get to decide" or "against abortion, don't have one." My point is that these and similar statements necessarily assume the truth of the premise that abortion is not what anti-abortion people think it IS: the killing of a co-equal human being.
A large scale change in views on abortion would require mass religious deconversion, coupled with rather advanced instruction in embryonic neurology. Unless that happens, a lot of people are going to continue to believe that fetuses either have souls or that their desire to live and experience of being killed are no different than yours or mine would be.
As to the idea that outlawing an action and threatening a punishment for doing that action are not affirmative protections against it happening -- surely you don't completely discount the concept of deterrence?
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Doug commented on the article |
Well, CTYankee, first of all I wouldn't restrict abortion anyway, as I don't think it's murder and I don't think a fetus is a human in the sense of a person with the right not to be killed.
But even assuming I thought it were murder, I'm not positing that the government would have a right to go around checking if particular women were pregnant or not, on the off chance that they might have an abortion. (Just as the government doesn't have a right to subject you to a lie detector test every month to check whether there's anyone you're angry enough with to consider murdering.)
What I meant was that if abortion were murder, society as a whole would have the right, and perhaps the duty, to "prevent it from happening" in the usual way that we try to prevent people from doing bad things to other people, which is to outlaw doing those things.
And such a law wouldn't properly be subject it to some kind of woman-only vote that would require a doctor's certification of fertility before you'd be handed a ballot--any more than people who are not parents should be excluded from voting on a law prohibiting child abuse. My point is that once we've determined something is a gross infringement of a human right, everyone has the right to weigh in on whether to prohibit that, not just the group of individuals against whom the law could be enforced.
Of course the government's ability to enforce such a law would be limited by the usual constraints on law enforcement -- probable cause, etc.
And of course I think such a law would be disasterous in its consequences, for all the obvious reasons. But again, that's only because I start from the premise that fetuses aren't co-equal human beings with a right not to be killed. If I thought they were, almost any negative result of an abortion ban (including hundreds or thousands of women dying from botched abortions) would pale in the face of a million co-equal human lives saved per year.
That, my friend, is what we're up against. People who honestly believe that we are murdering a million human beings a year. I don't think that they're bad people; I just think that they're honestly mistaken, in a way that has the potential to be very damaging to many, many women.
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Doug commented on the article |
Your exchange demonstrates why most (if not all) arguments about abortion wind up begging their own premises.
The argument that "men can't get pregnant so they don't get to decide about abortion" only holds water if you've already concluded that abortion is not murder. If abortion were murder, of course every member of human society would have the right, indeed perhaps the duty, to prevent it from happening.
Likewise, the argument that a pregnant woman's "situation [doesn't] provide sufficient justification to kill someone" necessarily assumes that a fetus is "someone" in the sense of a person with a right not to be killed.
All abortion-related arguments eventually reduce to opinions about the fundamental nature of the act.
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Doug commented on the article |
I think what all of the above illustrates is how difficult it is to separate out the moral questions surrounding abortion even in cases such as health care reform, where they're implicated only indirectly.
If you believe that a fetus has the same rights as an adult human being, then it's pretty hard to find any compromise on this issue, any more than you could compromise on murder, child prostitution, or slavery. The slogan "against abortion? Don't have one" is catchy but hopelessly glib -- clearly we have a moral duty to stop people from gross invasions of other humans' rights, so if you believe fetuses to be co-equal "humans" in that sense, it won't do just to refrain from having or performing abortions yourself.
And indeed, no matter how strong a woman's interest in terminating a pregnancy (which opponents unhelpfully trivialize by labeling "convenience" but is obviously a personal autonomy interest of a much higher order) , it would be a radical view indeed to suppose that her right to personal autonomy trumped the right to life of a human being. (A thought experiment: your village witch doctor tells you the only way to cause an abortion is with a potion made from a freshly-killed adult. Does your right to personal autonomy give you the right to kill your neighbor?)
On the contrary, if you don't believe that a fetus has the same rights as an adult human being, then it is outrageous and immoral for the government to prohibit you from making such essential decisions about your own body as whether or not you remain pregnant when you don't want to be, and whether or not you bring a child into the world when you don't want to. Or, as is the case with restrictions on abortion in health care reform, for the government to set up a system that generally subsidizes health care and all the various decisions about one's own body that allows you to make, but then specifically excludes the particular decision of abortion.
Since I believe the second proposition to be the case, I am certainly opposed to the Stupak Amendment, as well as the earlier Hyde Amendment, and restrictions of their ilk. But I don't pretend that it will be easy to convince anti-abortion people to go along with me.
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Doug commented on the article |
"Have you ever read the Declaration or the Constitution? . . . They even mention, (GASP) God."
One hates to be picky, but although the Declaration of Independence does refer to "Nature's God", there is no reference to God in the Constitution.
One is reminded of this week's Onion article "Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be": http://www.theonion.com/content/news/area_man_passionate_defender_of
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Doug commented on the article |
Even if the riders existed, the people who would need them most -- women who could not afford to pay out of pocket for an abortion -- are likely to be those least able to afford the additional premiums.
Furthermore, they would likely be quite expensive riders because everyone who won't need an abortion (men, women not of childbearing age or otherwise infertile, women philosophically opposed to abortion) will self-select out of the risk pool.
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Doug commented on the article |
Lee, while I wish there were a good constitutional argument against the Stupak amendment, I don't think it raises any 10th Amendment issues. The Stupak Amendment doesn't interfere with states' regulation of medical practice; it conditions private insurance plans' ability to enroll persons receiving federal subsidies on those plans not covering most abortions. An odious result to be sure, but not one that commandeers state government or interferes with sovereign state functions.
Furthermore, the 10th Amendment explicitly is about powers NOT given to Congress, and I'm fairly certain any defender of the Stupak amendment is going to point to the Commerce Clause as the source of Congressional power. Which, incidentally, we'd better hope is right, because if the Commerce Clause doesn't give Congress the power to regulate the services covered by health insurance plans, then a pretty sizable chunk of the health reform bill is unconstitutional.
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Doug commented on the article |
This doesn't surprise me at all. The average RNC worker, like most members of America's political class, probably has no personal moral qualms about abortion. Rather, abortion is a useful wedge issue adopted by the Republican party to garner votes among the large majority of Americans whose interests would otherwise be opposed to the party's primary aims, which are economic in nature.
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