Kathleen Sibelius and the Health and Human Services Department accepted the recommendations of the U.S. Institute of Medicine to expand the required women’s wellness services offered by insurance companies. This decision affects private insurance only — there aren’t federal funds covering these new services. But this is a welcome bit of good news, considering the highly organized onslaught women’s rights are suffering at this moment.
In a news conference Monday, Sebelius cast the new rules as part of a broader effort in the new health-care law to build a nationwide system focusing on prevention. But she also said they were crucial to another of the law’s goals: “to bring fairness to the health insurance market for women”.
Insurance plans are to begin coverage of these services — without co-pay — starting 1 August 2012. The required preventative care services include:
- annual “well-woman” visits
- contraception services, including sterilization, implants, prescription contraception including Plan B, and other methods
- screening of pregnant women for gestational diabetes
- screening for sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV
- more support for breast-feeding mother, including the provision of breast pumps
- counseling and screening for possible domestic violence.
There is a refusal clause proposed with this, giving religious groups or insurance provided by religious groups the opportunity to NOT cover birth control for its female customers. I don’t understand how the Government of the United States of America can provide sanction for so-called religious people to treat its women as second class citizens, but there you have it. Which sort of looks like if there is going to be Sharia Law in the US, it is coming via our homegrown Christianists, right? Because the point of Sharia Law is to create law of the state that is supposedly based upon religious texts. As a result, women and women’s issues are treated as second-class and certainly subject to patriarchal imposition of controlling rules on women. So let’s be clear about the codification of these refusal clauses — *this* is what creeping Sharia looks like.
ps to the News Journal — Bloomberg provides your model for how editorials tackling this kind of subject get done. It doesn’t matter that they agree with me — they got there in a way that didn’t require truthiness or the so-called common wisdom.