People with health insurance are forgoing expensive care, wannabe hipsters fundies in Seattle, and why you should check out the new youth-oriented blog Amplify.

 

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Lilly Ledbetter Act passes House

Insured patients struggling for care

Creepy Mark Driscoll

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing the editor and a blogger for an exciting new youth-oriented sexual health site called Amplify.  Also, a segment on how people with health insurance still can’t afford care, and what this means for sexual health, and a segment examining the threat hailing from a wannabe hip fundie preacher from Seattle.

Good news for people who believe in women’s equality and right to independence.  After the Supreme Court tacitly re-legalized pay discrimination based on gender, the House has come swinging back. 

•    lilly ledbetter *

I maintain that reproductive justice advocates should make equal pay a major priority.  Women can’t really and truly make decisions about their reproductive health unless they get paid fair wages and have enough of a financial cushion to make their choices freely without being forced due to poverty into undesired ones.

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This country was already in a health care crisis before the recession hit, so you knew things were going to get bad. But even my most pessimistic self couldn’t imagine how bad it could get in this country with people forgoing medical care because they simply can’t afford it.  But PBS’s Newshour did a report on a Nashville hospital that’s seeing a shocking rise in the number of cancelled appointments for cardiac care. 

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It’s just a brutal fact of life that while health care may seem objectively to be a priority for your spending, for most people making the hard decisions, it’s not.  And that’s especially true with prevention.  Because when faced with paying for a cardiac exam or paying your rent, you go in knowing that if you don’t pay your rent, you will absolutely lose your home.  But there’s only a chance you’re going to have a heart attack if you don’t get the exam.  Plus, if you do go to the doctor and find out something’s wrong, that’s another list of expenses that already broke people can’t afford.  So this isn’t surprising to see that people are cutting back on health care.  But that doesn’t mean, as some conservatives seem to imply in their anti-universal health care arguments, that health care is a luxury.  Far from it.

But that’s not even close to the most chilling part of the report.  What’s most frightening is they’ve found that people who do prioritize health care, who do have insurance, who are doing everything they’re told to do in order to stay healthy, are still not able to get the care they need.

•    health insurance 2 *

This was the point of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, even though that point was probably lost in the controversy.  I would suggest that the amount of controversy was aimed at making sure people missed the point.  But if you’ve seen it, the most striking thing is that he avoids telling stories of people who are simply uninsured.  He was smart enough to realize that most comfortably middle class Americans are sadly lean on sympathy for the part-time workers and the impoverished that can’t afford health care.  Instead, the whole movie was about people who have insurance, and they can’t get care, because the deductibles are too high or their insurance companies make up reasons to avoid paying out.

And now more and more Americans are learning the ugly truth.  Just because you have health insurance doesn’t mean you can afford health care.  What you get for your payments to the insurance company may equal squat.  After all, they can’t make money by doing the job of paying out claims. 

The most perverse part?  The care people are skipping is mostly preventive care, which saves money.

•    health insurance 3 *

In the sexual and reproductive health care department, this is huge.  You very clearly see the link between prevention and saving money down the road.  Regular screenings for STDs and cancer mean that you can nip those problems in the bud before they cause infertility or even death.  Inexpensive contraception now means avoiding having to pay for abortion or childbirth expenses later.  But when you have to pay a few hundred dollars out of pocket to see a doctor for a routine exam, it’s easy to just blow off the potential problems until they manifest and become harder to avoid.  And of course, more expensive to treat.

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The New York Times has an article out on the chilling new direction that some fundamentalist Christians are taking in their mission to subjugate women and put down gay people.  Basically, the strategy is to dress up the same old Bible-thumping in clothes that look kind of hip if you squint your eyes and are into a lot of bands like 3 Doors Down and the Pussycat Dolls.  But for all the trappings, it’s the same message about how women should be submissive and that Christianity is all about the all-powerful penis.  The big man of this pack of wannabe pseudo-hip fundies is Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle. 

The good news is that Driscoll has a whole lot of videos on YouTube to peruse, so he can’t hide a couple of salient facts.  One is that he is absolutely obsessed with sex.  Two is that he’s got masculinity issues out the wazoo.  He calls himself macho man, and he clearly thinks it’s important that you know that he has a penis and can beat you up.  This

•    driscoll 1 *

I know it’s considered poor form to say that someone is protesting too much, but I think the length and volume of Mark Driscoll’s protestations indicate a bit of overcompensation for something.  I’m sure this kind of WWW Smackdown talk does attract a lot of insecure men who want to be assured they’re cool.  But jeans and T-shirts will not distract from the fact that Driscoll is pure wingnut.  Like he’s one of those who thinks Bill Clinton invented the blow job.

•    driscoll 2 *

You’ll be relieved to know he thinks it’s okay if you’re married.  But seriously, he’s more obsessed with sex than one of us secular types he probably would consider terrible sluts.  But in all honesty, watching these videos made me freak out, because Driscoll is appealing.  It’s nice that he wants to respond to people’s dark fears about masturbation, birth control, and oral sex.  He’s funny. He provides a nice package for some ugly beliefs.  Like about who has a right to conduct a woman’s dating life for her.  Guess what!  It’s not a woman.  If she wants to ask a guy out, which is a big violation in the church of masculinity, well, just listen:

* driscoll 3 *

And you can imagine his opinion on homosexuality:

•    driscoll 4 *

Yeah yeah, we’ve heard it before.  We’re not against gays having sex.  We’re against non-married people having sex, and against gays getting married.  Which means that they’re against gays having sex in reality, but try to get a fundie to admit it.  I have yet to hear a single fundie come out against sodomy laws that only target gay people, though, so this excuse is as empty as it sounds.

And of course, he had to deal with a question about abortion and rape.  He pretends that this is a real hard question for him, but there’s no way on earth his conclusions were in doubt.

•    driscoll 5 *

That one made me shudder, because of he hams up this concern, but I don’t believe it for a second.  Of course, he tells a story of a woman who had a baby from rape and it worked out GREAT, and it got her Jesus and a husband and a great life and a child who grew into a pastor.  I have yet to see an anti-choicer say, “Well, the rape victim had the baby, and it broke her mentally, and she gave it away and every day she’s haunted by it, but it was still the lesser of two evils.”  I’d respect them more if they didn’t pretend that having a baby was some magic potion that made your life all better every time.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts.  The inauguration is on this day this podcast is released, and barring any last minute changes, they’re going ahead with having Rick Warren pray at the inauguration, I thought it might be time to play one of the more humorous nonsensical things he’s said.

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Cynics would point out that Warren’s ability to avoid non-stop sexual bliss in the arms of every woman he meets might have something to do with the desires of said women.  But I’m sure his comfortably large ego prevents him from realizing that there might be other factors at play besides his own remarkable abilities to restrain himself.