Senate Kills Blunt’s Anti-Contraception Amendment

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

By a vote of 51-48, the Senate agreed to table a Republican amendment offered by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that would have empowered employers to deny coverage of health services to their employees on the basis of personal moral objections. The measure represented the GOP’s response to President Obama’s rule requiring employers to provide contraception and other preventive health services as part of their health insurance plans. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME) — who announced her retirement earlier this week — was the only Republican to join Democrats in “tabling” the amendment, while three Democrats, Sens. Ben Nelson (NE), Joe Manchin (WV), and Bob Casey (PA) voted to preserve it.

During the nearly two hour debate, Republicans attempted to frame the issue as an attempt to prevent religious organizations from the Obama administration’s overreach and, despite supporting efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, maintained that women could obtain birth control from public sources. Blunt took to the floor to argue that employers would be discouraged from denying certain treatments by existing state mandates and a provision in the amendment requiring employers to replace the benefit with another service.

The most surprising support came from Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), a pro-choice Republican who has previously supported contraception equity measures without conscience exemptions for religious organizations. Collins expressed skepticism about the wide scope of Blunt’s amendment, but said the administration’ incomplete rule — specifically its lack of detail about how to treat self-insured plans — compelled her to support the measure. “I feel that I have to vote for Sen. Blunt’s amendment with the hope that the scope will be narrowed and refined,” she said, adding, “I do this with a lot of conflict.”

The Obama administration’s rule requires employers to offer contraception in their health care benefit plans, but exempts houses of worship and nonprofits that primarily employ people of the same faith from covering birth control. Religiously affiliated hospitals, colleges, and other nonprofits can also eschew the benefit. Their employees would obtain the coverage — at no additional cost sharing — directly from the insurer.

Health Insurers Consider A Caesarean-Section Pregnancy A Pre-Existing Condition

By Amanda Terkel Earlier this week, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported on the fact that in seven states plus the District of Columbia, “getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition.” The insurance industry figures that if “you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you’re more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure,” but what it really does is punish these victims for something that wasn’t their fault.

But that isn’t the only policy that health insurers have that primarily discriminate against women. First of all, most individual health insurance markets don’t cover maternity care. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 14 states have a requirement for such coverage, and the number of plans without maternity coverage continues to rise dramatically. Why? Anthem Blue Cross — which has been actively fighting health care reform — considers pregnancy optional and therefore not necessary to insure:

“The point of insurance is to insure against catastrophic care costs. That’s what you’re trying to aggregate and pool for such things as heart attacks and cancer,” said an Anthem Blue Cross spokesman. “Having a child is a matter of choice. Dealing with an adult onset illness, such as diabetes, heart disease breast or prostate cancer, is not a matter of choice.”

Even Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spoke an unintentional truth when he said of his parents: “When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four-and-a-half-months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a pre-existing condition.”

When a woman isn’t currently pregnant, she often still cannot get coverage. Many insurers consider a Caesarean-section pregnancy a pre-existing condition and refuse to cover women who have had the procedure. From a 2008 New York Times story about a Colorado woman who had Golden Rule Insurance:

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

The number of C-sections performed in the United States has been “growing steadily,” with approximately 30 percent of women having the procedure. Other insurance companies that don’t necessarily reject women with C-sections often do charge them higher premiums or “factor in chronic or recurring problems that might have led to the Caesarean.” What’s even worse is that once you’re denied by one company, it’s harder to get coverage somewhere else because you’ve been red-flagged.

Today, Golden Rule CEO Richard Collins is testifying before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy about “Bureaucracy of Private Health Insurance.”