I don’t have any opinion about whether your health insurance plan should cover the cost of birth control or whether it should let you get the stuff with no co-pays.
If that’s important to you, then you ought to choose a provider who offers it (assuming it’s popular enough for someone to offer it). If it’s not important to you or if you’re opposed to birth control, you should choose a provider that doesn’t offer it — since the lack of that cost to the provider will lower your premium.
Simple, right? It’s the market making choices about what people value and are willing to pay for.
But that’s not the way it is when the coercive state is involved. The latest example came today when the Obama administration announced that starting in just under 18 months, insurance companies will be required to cover birth control. Further, the companies won’t be allowed to charge a co-pay. Even if it’s unprofitable, companies will be paying for birth control for any customer who wants it.
There are a number of different angles to this story. For some people, it’s all about birth control, either because they believe the choice of having access to birth control is important or because they believe birth control is wrong. For some people, it’s about the economics of people getting drugs that they need or want. Still others are most interested in the move possibly cutting the birth rate among people who can’t afford kids. But I’m just going to focus on the simplest one — choice.
The democratic state claims that it wants you to have choice, but that “choice” is frequently all about making sure that you’re coerced into making the choice that politicians and bureaucrats want you to make. In this case, the state is trying to give women an incentive to use birth control, so the people in charge don’t really care that it takes away choice from everyone.
I no longer have the option of buying health insurance that doesn’t subsidize someone else’s birth control. Only in an Orwellian world can offering choice mean that my choices are taken away about what options I am allowed to buy.
The problem isn’t about birth control or even economics here. The problem is the coercive state (again) deciding what you’re allowed to do with your own life and money. That’s immoral.