Lynn is right-on to mention the "mysterious spike" in co-pays on birth control. My beloved patch shot up from $25 to $40. I went to my insurance and found a "Tier-Two" pill (Estro-Step), but there are NO Tier-One or generic birth control pills!

Why? Why aren't pharmaceutical companies making them? It's not like it'd be a losing proposition - those pills are pretty darn popular. It's yet another way to deny women a choice.

(Patch, patch, how I miss you and your fuzzy little residue!)

Let me see if I can trot out for you the "truths" I was raised with, both spoken and unspoken:

Good girls don't have sex. Not only do they not have sex, they don't want to. If you want to, it must be a sin. Only bad girls want it. There must be something wrong with you for feeling that way.

If you get pregnant, the best thing you can do for all concerned is have the baby, quietly and somewhere else, and give it up for adoption. Don't bring shame on your family, the boy who did the deed, or anyone else. You are a fallen woman, and must go quietly away. Go to another city to "live with Grandma" for a while.

Abortion is murder. Only immoral women who are wanton sexpots would ever dream of having them. People who think abortion is all right think that babies are disposable.

Babies are a gift from God. If you don't want babies, don't have sex. Women who have abortions are loose, morally bankrupt, and a pregnancy is what they deserve for their sinful behavior.

If a girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, it is all her fault. The boy is no longer in the picture.

Girls who get raped deserved it. They were in a situation they shouldn't have been in. You can't control men and their urges, you can only control yourself and what situations you get in.

Birth control is a sin. Babies were meant to come into the world. The only birth control is not having sex. Sex is for making babies, and only for married adults. Nothing else. Ever.

Men's urges are a fact of life. You (the woman) can't control them. You can only make yourself unavailable. Girls don't have urges like that.

Welcome to my world... the world I no longer live in, but the one that far too many Americans do live in.

OK, I actually READ the text of the bill. All of it. And what I got out of it was that they way they will DETERMINE what will and will not be covered is by taking all the conflicting state regulations and seeing what the majority of the states do in each case. In other words, if the majority of states mandate that birth control is covered, then birth control will be covered. Currently most states DO NOT have laws mandating this. However, there are still plenty of states that seem to be run by sane people which do not have official laws in place, but where such things could be passed. We only need three more! The odds are probably best for this in: Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, and Florida. Other states where you can make a stand are: Alaska, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas (had one, but it was gutted), Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Neither South Dakota nor Mississippi has such a law, either, but, um, good luck with that. Get cracking!

Furthermore, the idea of this is to let small businesspeople group together to get better rates. If you work for a megacorp or the government, THIS SHOULDN'T EVEN AFFECT YOU. I live in California, where I run a one-person consultancy. My health insurance options are extremely limited, and quite expensive. I can't get "small business coverage," because my business consists of only one person, and there isn't any point in taking on a partner. I am limited to medically underwritten individual policies which companies won't sell to me (and if you have ever been treated for depression, or currently take allergy medication, or have had an abnormal Pap smear, or have had any number of other fairly common conditions, they wouldn't take you, either), so I'm stuck with exorbitantly expensive state-mandated "guaranteed coverage." I am 30 years old and in good health. Insurance costs me $317 a month, for a policy with a $1500 deductible. (No, guaranteed policies are not HSA compatible--I wish!) Yes, that's right, I'm ALREADY PAYING for my birth control--I don't even hit my deductible paying for all of it, or even come close.

What tends to happen in California with small businesses is this: policies are so expensive that the only thing companies can offer their employees is something with a deductible so high that you end up paying for all the "small stuff" (which birth control is, in the grand scheme of prescription costs), and only covers you (with conditions, of course) if some horrible medical catastrophe befalls you. The other option, of course, is that the employer just doesn't offer anything, and you are left to fend for yourself in the Darwinist individual market.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this bill would actually represent a significant improvement for a lot of us in the small business boat, even if the birth control thing doesn't work out. At least the odds are better that we could get coverage at all! Even if we end up paying for birth control, it's not really going to be any worse than it is now.

Ideally, of course, we would all have some form of single-payer coverage. And while I'm wishing, I'd like a pony.

All this bill does is try to create a _market_ in health care. Want contraception coverage? Sign up with a provider that offers it - maybe it'll cost more, maybe you'll give up something else, but it's your choice. Don't want contraception coverage (i.e. you're infertile, trying to have kids, a nun, a man)? Then find a plan that doesn't offer contraception, but instead is (a) cheaper, (b) offers something else, whatever.

Currently, laws in many states require all insurers to offer a Mercedes insurance product, which is kinda nice, unless you're on a Toyota budget, in which case you end up with no car at all.

Of course, for this bill to really work, we need to abolish the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, and make individually-paid premiums deductible, to give people freedom of choice.