This is Part 2 in a series. Read Part 1 here.
The leaders of the Republican Party claim to be on a mission to reduce this nation's "crushing burden of debt." The centerpiece of this effort is Rep. Paul Ryan's 99-page 2013 budget proposal. Because GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has embraced it wholeheartedly, I call it the Romney-Ryan budget plan. From the very beginning, the plan states that a federal budget "also serves as an expression of Congress's principles, vision, and philosophy of governing."
You can say that again. And the federal budget's vision isn't just a lofty collection of ideals -- it has real-world implications for real-life people. The Romney-Ryan budget plan does not have the support of the Senate, so at this point it is only an expression of the values of the conservative-led House and its cronies. But many of these folks are asking for our votes this November. That's why I'm writing this series of posts on the Romney-Ryan budget plan. Women, in particular, must take a careful look at the economic proposals emerging from our nation's increasingly radical right wing. Just how do Romney and Ryan think they can help the people of this country "build a prosperous future for themselves" while "safeguarding America from the perils of debt, doubt and decline"?
The first thing women should know about the Romney-Ryan budget is that it has been called the single largest transfer of wealth from middle- and low-income earners to millionaires and billionaires in our country's history. Since women are over-represented in the ranks of middle- and low-income earners, not to mention drastically under-represented among billionaires, it's fair to say the Romney-Ryan budget disproportionately takes from women to give, overwhelmingly, to people who look (and have bank accounts) like Mitt Romney.
Of the many ways in which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's economic vision is bad for women, a good place to start is with women's health care. The Romney-Ryan budget repeals the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as the ACA or "Obamacare") in its entirety, thereby snatching away from millions of women the health care services that the law is just now beginning to make affordable.
For women, repealing the ACA goes in exactly the wrong direction. By the time it is fully implemented, the law will have opened up access to comprehensive health coverage to nearly all of the 19 million women in the United States who were uninsured when it was signed into law in 2010. Moreover, at the time the law was passed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that it would produce "a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010-2019 period."
The reality is that the ACA is a good first step toward getting the nation's health care costs under control. Women especially need this to happen because, throughout a lifetime of unequal pay, in jobs that frequently don't offer health benefits, women don't have a lot of savings to fall back on to pay for sky-high medical expenses.
The National Partnership for Women & Families calls the ACA "the greatest advance for women's health in a generation." Unquestionably, the law helps women in five key ways by:
Healthier women with more money in their pockets sounds like a win-win to me.
But the Romney-Ryan budget plan would put an end to all that. It promises to repeal the ACA and replace it with ... well, they don't say. They claim an intention to "move toward patient-centered reform." Please note that whenever a conservative offers up a "patient-centered" or "consumer-centered" approach, that means they're passing more of the cost on to you. What would really happen after repeal of the ACA is that we would go right back to where we were during the Bush years, with health care costs spiraling out of control, patients denied coverage of lifesaving health care by profit-hungry insurers, and the worst overall health outcomes in the entire industrialized world.
And it gets worse, as Romney has promised to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood and fully supports Ryan's votes to zero out funding for all Title X family planning clinics. Now, the advantages of family planning funding couldn't be more clear. The ability to plan one's family, to choose whether and when to have children, is both a matter of women's reproductive freedom and a public health issue. Unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, breast and cervical cancer -- these are issues that have an economic impact on this country, and we can't turn away from them because of outdated, sexist notions about women's reproduction.
Contraception helps young women postpone getting pregnant until they finish school or job training. The typical U.S. woman wants only two children; to achieve that goal, she will need to use contraception for about 30 years. Yet, the cost of contraception often deters women from choosing the method what would work best for them. This is especially true of methods with high up-front costs, like long-acting IUDs and implants. Consider these twin facts: According to Planned Parenthood, "34 percent of women voters report having struggled to afford prescription birth control at some point in their lives and, as a result, used birth control inconsistently;" meanwhile, according to the Guttmacher Institute, women who use birth control consistently and correctly account for only five percent of unplanned pregnancies each year.
For many women, Planned Parenthood centers and other government-funded family planning clinics are their only source of health care. Planned Parenthood alone serves 2.9 million clients in the U.S. each year, 72 percent of whom have incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level. These clinics provide preventive, primary care that includes testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screening and prevention, as well as contraceptive services.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, one out of seven women age 18-64 has no usual source of health care. The ACA changes that. Without health care reform or family planning clinics, where exactly should these women go?
So let's review. Obamacare -- and incidentally, I'm willing to embrace that term because President Obama does care about women's health -- helps millions of women gain access to affordable contraception, mammograms, cervical cancer screenings and other health services. That's right, millions. Fully funding Title X family planning clinics helps many more. By contrast, instead of thinking responsibly about the women who would love to have health insurance if only they could afford it, the Romney-Ryan budget would send us back to where we were in the Bush era, except this time there would be no federally-funded family planning clinics, leaving millions of women more vulnerable to illness and financial hardship than they are today.
On that basis alone, voters should reject the Romney-Ryan budget and its standard-bearer, presidential contender Mitt Romney. But there are many more things wrong with the Romney-Ryan budget, which I'll explore in future posts. Stay tuned.
Follow Terry O'Neill on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Terryoneill
Sure sounds like he said he'd get rid of it to me. He and his pals can afford health care...he just doesn't think anyone is "entitled" to it.
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/its-romney-ryan-plan
Most women who use birth control are married. My mother - a card carry conservative - used it and I would hardly call her "promiscuous". I have worked since I was 16 and since 2001 none of the companies I worked for offered insurance. Sometimes I could afford my own - sometimes not. In the latter case, I would have physicals at the places you denegrate. One of my friends' life was saved when PP found a tumor (her doctor wouldn't see her because she was out of work and didn't have any money).
We don't want anything for free: We just want to be able to access services we need. If the Healthcare Reform Bill is revoked, millions of women will be without insurance. Those with it will have to pay out-of-pocket for services that are now covered. Before you grouse about the unfairness of that, please see what services insurance allows men. I am sure they are totally covered. (my paps, mammograms and lab tests were NEVER covered until now and I usually paid upwards of $2,000 for a physical and that is WITH insurance).
The Democrats WILL win over women because they at least don't speak down at us or - like you - call holy judgement on the lot of us without any idea of what women
Liberals think that anyone (usually the adults on the right) says, "We can't afford that; we are !6 trillion in debt," is 'mean-spirited' beause they "don't want to help people."
Liberal women think that anyone who doen't want to give whatever it is that some woman wants is "waging a war on women."
Liberals think that because the GOP wants to dump the very flawed bill known as Obamacare, they don't want a better bill, one that removes the bad things and puts in some good things that the Democrats left out.
Liberals think that they are wonderful, superior human beings.
Don't liberals ever get anything right?
Conservatives think that everything they want is somehow a "right". Having designated something a right, they then think they are entitled to rip rights away from others to get it. That needs to change.
Conservatives think that that anyone (usually the adults on the left) says "We need to be able to afford that; taxes have to rise" is a communist trying to steal hard-working peoples money.
Conservatives think that insitutional sexism and tearing away rights from women is not a 'war on women'
Conservatives think that because the Obamacare bill was pushed through by a Democrat president, it's automatically evil (when it was based on the state bill pushed through by a Republican).
Conservatives think that they are wonderful, superior, harder working human beings.
Don't conservatives ever get anything right?
Woohoo, I can do it too!
You need to snap out of it. That attitude is one of America's biggest problems right now. You have done a lot of damage to our country and you refuse to acknowledge any fault, you are never responsible, never wrong, and every policy (experiment with our culture) has been a huge success, etc.
You need to engage in some honest self-examination. Politically speaking, liberals are NOT the wonderful people they think they are-not by a long shot.
His goal, btw, is not to "spread the hurt" but to balance the budget responsibly.
Go to the blackboard and write these words 100 times:
$16 trillion in debt, $16 trillion in debt.......
Our credit based monetary system demands ever-increasing debt. All we have to do to fix this is to go to pure fiat money and cancel those debts, as they are mostly owed to people who did nothing to earn the money behind the debt. Having eliminated the credit basis of money, there would be no need to ever go into debt again, and we could still have a healthy economy, in fact, it would be much healthier because we would have eliminated the single largest factor that produces booms and busts.
I read the Constitution, and I don't remember seeing the line that says the government should be giving anything away.
The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. This clause has been paired with the Commerce Clause to provide the constitutional basis for a wide variety of federal laws. To keep us moving FORWARD, we must continuously grow the role, responsibilities and resources of the Federal Government until we have a totally fair and just society.
Anf they can't write a letter without calling conservative some infantile name.