Rush Limbaugh, Sandra Fluke and Why is Contraception Part of Health Insurance Anyway?

Forbes ^ | 3/3/2011 | Tim Worstall

[Qbert]

From what’s being reported Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke he owes the young lady an apology. Just on the basic issue of good manners if nothing else.

However, that’s not the part of the larger story that interests me. I’m simply terribly confused as to why anyone at all would want contraception to be part of a heath care insurance scheme...

[Snip]

Just for a moment, for the purposes of my argument here, leave aside whether a Jesuit organisation really should be forced to provide contraception...[Snip]

I’m interested purely and simply in the use of an insurance model as a method of providing this contraception. For it’s very difficult indeed to think of something less suited to such a financing model.

[Snip]

This just isn’t what we’re doing with contraception. It is what we’re doing when we take out insurance against large health care problems. Having a car crash, getting cancer, needing a transplant. These are things that happen to a minority of us so we pool the risks. That contingent loss is so huge that we really do want to insure the loss away. This also applies to hurricane insurance, flood, fire and so on.

But something that most of the women of the country are going to use for a significant portion of their adult lives just isn’t suitable for an insurance model. Leave aside those who don’t have heterosexual sex at all (a significant minority, yes, but a minority all the same) and with rare enough exceptions the vast majority of women in the country are going to spend a couple of decades of their lives managing their fertility. Such management is not an unexpected thing, it is not uncertain, it’s just part and parcel of what the 21 st century allows us to do.

[BusyBeeLA]

You seem to be under the false impression that the Left and the MSM will allow a fair and honest debate on this. If it wasn’t Rush, they’d have found someone else whose words they could twist, or some other issue all together. Their job is to distract and deflect from Obama’s dismal record. They are on their job, now we must be on ours. Fight fire with fire, and so forth. Not to attack you personally, but we don’t have to accept the narrative the Left is crafting.

[Lorianne]

I agree we don’t have to accept their narrative.
On that Rush failed miserably. The left always goes for the personal ‘victim’ example. Rush took the bait and went personal when he should have stuck with the LARGER AND MORE IMPORTANT issue facing hundreds of thousands ... millions of people being stuck with PPACA and its effects ... not one person’s anectodotal problems with her insurance. Attacking her personally was stupid on so many levels I cannot list them all.

Look, the left does this over and over and over.

A recent example ... they’ve done this with the mortgage ‘crisis’ for over 4 years now .... trotting out personal stories of people hard-done by the mortgage industry. They PRAY someone will attack each one of these people personally so they have another example of heartless Republicans not caring about individual people. But it is not about individual people ... it is about LARGER ISSUES AFFECTING HUNDRED OF THOUSANDS, EVEN MILLIONS of people, not individual victim cases that the liberal media trots out. ... as Rush well knows or should know.

[BusyBeeLA]

Maybe you’re right, but I just see this back firing on the Left in a big way this time around. Firstly because the conversation is now turning to the issue of Liberal double-standards, as evidenced by Obama’s presser today (though the more contentious moments were edited from the transcript). Secondly because Conservatives are already riled up about Breitbart, and now they attack Rush just when we’re dying for a fight. I don’t know about you, but I take these faux controversies and turn them into opportunities to argue the RIGHT side of the issue every chance I get.