Wingnut Outraged: Planned Parenthood Trying To Take Away Your Birth Control, Probably

It has been some time since we produced an edition of our semi-regular feature That’s Our Katie!, wherein we chronicle the idiocy of Townhall bobblehead Katie Pavlich. Mostly we have avoided writing this feature because doing so requires us to read Katie Pavlich’s work, and our therapist has had us working on our self-respect lately. But screw it, we successfully balanced our checkbook yesterday and we’re feeling good!

Katie has a short post titled "Planned Parenthood Wants to Limit Women’s Access to Birth Control to Save Obamacare," in which she claims:

[L]iberal organizations parading as women's rights groups aren't actually concerned about women, but instead about expanding government and implementing socialist policies in America.

This is … one interpretation. But let’s start at the end first, where Katie, citing no sources, says that Obamacare results in "100 percent higher healthcare premiums for women overall." We tweeted at Katie that we were curious as to where she got that statistic, and she sent back this.

She’s read our stuff! She knows who we are! We’re totally going to ask her to prom!

So we were on our own, and despite extensive Googling, we could find nothing to back up Katie’s stat. We did find a study by the conservative Manhattan Institute from last November that looked at policies purchased on the individual market for 2014 on a state-by-state basis and found they had gone up 41 percent in the average state from 2013. Broken down on a county-by-county basis, the rate increase for women was actually slightly less in aggregate than for men. The highest increase by age group was 44 percent for 27-year-old females. (The other two age groups were 40- and 64-year-old women.)

A reminder also too: This study was for individual plans, which only make up about 9 percent of the health insurance market. Of course those plans were mostly junk, offering high deductibles and next-to-no coverage, which led to higher healthcare costs on the back end when people whose individual plans did not allow them affordable access to preventative care got sick anyway and racked up huge hospital bills they couldn’t pay back. Also, premiums are one thing, but what about out-of-pocket costs? And what about group plans? The health care market! It sure is complicated!

Oh, are we mansplaining again? Sorry, we just can’t assume Katie has done her own research. Long experience has taught us that.

Back to the rest of Katie’s post, which is an attack on Planned Parenthood for not falling all over itself to thank Cory Gardner, Republican candidate for the Colorado senate seat currently held by Mark Udall, for his recent proposal to make birth control pills available over the counter. Which is a good idea. It is also a transparent attempt to throw the ladies a bone in exchange for their votes while not expanding access to contraception in a comprehensive way that would actually ensure overall female health. But here, let us outsource our mansplaining to an actual woman, whom Katie quoted in her own damn post:  Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund executive vice president.

If Cory Gardner and others were serious about expanding access to birth control, they wouldn’t be trying to repeal the no-copay birth control benefit, reduce Title X funding for birth control, or cut women off from Planned Parenthood’s preventive health services. This is simply a cynical political attempt to whitewash his terrible record and agenda for women's health. The reality is that Cory Gardner’s proposal would actually cost women more by forcing them to pay out of pocket for the birth control that they are getting now at no cost thanks to the ACA.

Why, it’s as if access to birth control means more to some women than simply "Gimme my free slut pills so I can slut it up all over town without getting pregnant, even though if I get pregnant, I’ll just have all the abortions I want ‘cause I’m a big slutty slut slut.” (Note to Katie: this is not misogyny, it is sarcasm. We think you might confuse the two. Oh God, are we mansplaining our misogyny? GET US OUT OF THIS RABBIT HOLE.)

But sure, let’s pretend every woman’s contraceptive care should be determined by moral scolds who don’t understand the concept of health insurance, and not by a woman and her doctor and her individual medical needs. Or that poor women without access to family planning services are shit out of luck because they are poor. That works ever so much better at maintaining health and keeping the abortion rate down while increasing FREEDUMB!

You can also keep running with the argument that liberals wanting to give women the tools to make the best decision for themselves is actually cover for turning them into victims dependent on Uncle Sugar while implementing socialism. That sure has been a winning argument for conservatives so far.

[ Townhall ]