Weekly Pulse: Birth Control? It’s the Economy, Stupid

One health-related provision in the stimulus was sacrificed to political expediency in an attempt to wrangle Republican support for the stimulus package: Medicaid expansion for birth control.

The $825 billion economic stimulus package is finally taking shape
as House committees finalize their contributions to the bill. The good
news is that healthcare spending will be a major part of the stimulus:
$87 billion has been set aside to help states pay for Medicaid alone.

But one health-related provision was sacrificed to political
expediency on Tuesday in an attempt to wrangle Republican support for
the stimulus package: Medicaid expansion for birth control.

Medicaid is already the single largest source of public funding for
family planning nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The
stimulus provision would have made it easier for states to cover family
planning for low-income women who currently make slightly too much to
qualify for regular Medicaid.

House Minority Leader John Boehner made political hay out of the
provision, claiming that Dems were sneaking in millions for birth
control for reasons that had nothing to do with stimulating the
economy. He’s dead wrong, as Cory Richards points out at Rewire:
Healthcare spending is a tried and true method of economic stimulus and
the current bill sets aside billions of dollars for that purpose.

The idea that birth control coverage is less important than any
other kind of healthcare spending is absurd. Reproductive rights
activists pushed hard for the provision because they believe it would
give more women access to family planning.

By law, when states cover birth control through Medicaid, the federal government covers 90% of the cost.
The birth control expansion would simply have simply made it easier for
states to relax the eligibility criteria to cover more women. Providing
more services, to more people, with more money supplied by the federal
government is textbook economic stimulus.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama begged House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman to strike the birth control proviso. The expansion didn’t have a chance. By late afternoon, TPMDC was reporting that birth control was gone from the House bill and that the Senate Dems had signaled that it wasn’t coming back in their stimulus bill

Jodi Jacobson of Rewire
pegs the political dynamic as a farce in four acts: Democrats use their
majorities to advance some popular policy, Republicans freak out,
Democrats capitulate, elite pundits congratulate Democrats for shooting
themselves in the foot with such grace and aplomb. In the American Prospect, Nick Beaudrot notes that Obama is unlikely to win any Republican votes by striking birth control from the stimulus.

Elsewhere, writers were wrestling with other health-related issues. Simon Maxwell Apter in the Nation argues that the time has come to recognize PTSD as a legitimate combat injury and award Purple Hearts accordingly. But Debra Dickerson of Mother Jones
counters that the Purple Heart should be reserved for combat-related
injuries. Dickerson’s rejoinder seems to beg the question: If someone
gets PTSD from serving in a combat zone, is it a combat injury? And if
so, why doesn’t this sacrifice merit a Purple Heart?

In the Nation Sarah Arnold
argues that New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws are ripe for
reform. Arnold argues that a perfect storm for drug reform might be
brewing in the Empire State: Democratic governor, Democratic control of
both statehouses, and a financial crisis that makes locking up drug
offenders prohibitively expensive.

In the American Prospect, public health scholar Harold Pollack
examines our society’s worst drug problem: alcoholism. He argues that
our society focuses too much attention on treating alcoholism once it
sets in and not enough on crafting public policies, such as legal
drinking ages and liquor tax rates, to help prevent problem drinking.

The birth control stimulus skirmish marks a new twist in Obama’s
relationship with women’s groups and reproductive rights activists.
Last week, the new president elated women’s health groups by freezing
Bush’s last-minute anti-abortion rules and reversing the Global Gag
Order. Yesterday, many of these contingencies were shocked when he made
a public show of killing the birth control provision. The costs and
benefits of this particular tradeoff are sure to fuel much discussion
in the Media Consortium and beyond.