No insurance for you!
That not-really-a-plan Obamacare replacement plan
several Republicans regurgitated this week has already been discounted by its authors, by House Speaker John Boehner, and
pretty much all Republicans. It would be nice to think that maybe one of the reasons lawmakers are failing to coalesce behind it is because it rolls back coverage advances for women, but of course it's not.
Despite the fact that the plan has been destined to fail since it was first floated a year ago, it's pretty much all they got at the moment. As such, it's worth pointing out that the plan is bad for women.
The Burr-Hatch-Upton plan would eliminate Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid, which seeks to expand public health insurance to additional low-income people. It would also scale back the tax subsidies to help people purchase private plans. And it seeks to reduce federal regulation of "essential benefits," dropping the current requirement for insurers to offer coverage for maternity care.
Obamacare mandates maternity coverage in all of the plans sold on its state-level marketplaces, a provision that quickly became a sticking point among opponents to the health law. Critics have latched onto it as an example of why they believe unnecessarily generous benefits will drive up health costs, complaining that having children is a choice and not everyone will need maternity care. During one House hearing, GOP lawmakers sarcastically asked former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius if she had ever heard of a man getting pregnant. Now, the Burr-Hatch-Upton plan addresses their concerns.
What mixed messages they send. Republicans also want mandatory coverage for birth control without additional copays to go away. So you can't get coverage for pregnancy and you can't get coverage for not getting pregnant. And they sure as hell don't want you to be able to get an abortion covered by health insurance. So how exactly is having children a choice in the Republican mindset?
It's not just lady parts stuff in Obamacare that these Republican men want to go away, too. The so-called plan does away with the ban on insurance companies charging women more for coverage just because they're women. They want to make insurance more expensive for older Americans by allowing insurance companies to charge much more for older people than Obamacare allows, a cost that will hit women disproportionately higher.
None of these things, though, reach the level of unacceptable to Republicans. No, the opposition from the rank and file is much more likely to be because they think this plan is way too liberal.