Preventive medicine and contraceptive pills’; We’re in trouble

View 713 Wednesday, February 15, 2012

I have a ticket for a flight to Boston for tomorrow morning at O Dark Thirty, but I won’t be using it. I am scheduled to be an honored guest at Boskone, and I was planning to go for weeks, when I came down with this. Yesterday afternoon I decided I was still contagious, and given the way I felt I would be far more a burden than an asset to my friends, so I regretfully informed them I wouldn’t be coming. Given the way I felt all day it’s clear that this was the right decision. I don’t know what this thing is, but it has laid me out. The good news is that I feel better – not good enough that I would contemplate getting up tomorrow for a trip with anything but dread, but better, meaning that I was actually able to get an hour’s work in on clearing off my desk. If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a positive triumph compared to what I’ve been able to do for the past week.

I want again to thank all those who have responded to this weeks’ pledge drive and sent in subscriptions and renewals. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it won’t be around if it doesn’t get subscriptions. Taking my cue from KUSC, the Los Angeles good music public radio station, I don’t bug people very often about this, but from time to time I have a week long pledge drive. I do this when KUSC has its pledge drive. They spend a week, all day each day, telling people that it’s time to pay, and if you were thinking about subscribing but hadn’t got around to it this would be a great time to do it, and all the rest of it. So there. I’ve told you, and if you haven’t subscribed, or you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year or two, now’s the time to do it.

I have been thinking about the logic of providing free birth control pills and other such stuff to women as part of the Obamacare package, and I don’t really understand. The story is that the Obama package provides for preventive health care, and birth control pills are justified under that. This apparently presumes that pregnancy is an illness. It’s an illness that happens only to women, but given the existence of the human race it’s a fairly common condition at one or another point in a woman’s life. That doesn’t sound much like an illness.

I suppose the logic is that unwanted pregnancy is the illness to prevent. It’s certainly true that unwanted pregnancy is a life changing experience, and having an unwanted baby can be a disaster for any family. Of course there are plenty of instances in which it turned out not to be a disaster at all; you can find those stories in both fiction and non-fiction. But yes, unwanted pregnancy often has bad effects, and thus I suppose could be classified as an illness, and something to be prevented.

The question is how it should be prevented, and that gets us into religious matters. Clearly the simplest way not to get pregnant is not to engage in sexual intercourse. That really works, and we were at one time told that if all the girls were taught that in school, and made aware of all the mechanics of sex, the number of unwanted pregnancies would go down and down. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but for most of the history of this Republic, right up into the 1950’s and beyond, sex education was considered a family matter, and the public education authorities didn’t supply it, Moreover, it wasn’t considered polite or proper to talk about sex, and girls were brought up to enforce that as a social taboo.

Now all that didn’t work perfectly, but when I was in high school teen-age pregnancy was rare. It was more common in certain parts of the city than in the middle class areas where I lived, but it wasn’t all that common even so; and a good part of the time the result of an unwanted pregnancy was a fairly hasty marriage. There weren’t that many illegitimate children. There were enough that it worried social scientists, who thumped the drums for sex education as the remedy. There were classes involving condoms and cucumbers, because in those days condoms were the only real contraceptives. Condoms were pitched to both men and women, not only as protection against unwanted pregnancy but also as protection against sexually transmitted diseases. The Army gave out pro-kits to soldiers since it was a lot cheaper to give them condoms and antiseptic wipes than to treat the various STD’s they might come home with. Officers and non-coms were urged to make sure men thought about the subject, and one story that was always told was that you could be in a combat zone with no possible contact with women and sure enough in the morning report the sergeant would have to tell the company commander that Private asdfasdf had a fresh dose.

In his 1953 novel Childhood’s End Arthur Clarke wrote of a future in which there was reliable contraception and an infallible paternity test. This ended the sexual taboos, there were no more unwanted pregnancies, and mankind evolved to a new state of being. We invented the reliable contraception and paternity tests, and they certainly changed the social order, but not in the manner that Sir Arthur described. Moreover, the number of unwanted pregnancies went up and up, and the paternity identity capability didn’t do a lot to change things either.

In any event, Obamacare mandates that women be given free conception prevention stuff, which generally means pills. One may be certain that there is some lobbying going on: those who make the pills certainly want to sell them. So contraception prescriptions are now a mandated entitlement, and you get them free. Or women get them free. Men don’t need them.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Obama health care bill mandating free condoms for me, although it’s certainly easier to show that using a condom will not only be an aid in preventing pregnancy which may or may not be an illness, but also STD’s which certainly are and can be transmitted in both directions. The Army didn’t care so much about soldiers getting girls pregnant – in those days the remedy for that would be a transfer of the soldier to someplace far off – but it certainly did worry about a fresh dose of clap.

Of course once we start thinking about preventive medicines we can come up with lots more. Toothbrushes and toothpaste certainly prevent some fairly severe conditions that would be costly. What are not toothbrushes and toothpaste given as a free entitlement? Once we concede that someone else is responsible for paying for our health care prevention aids, and we are not our selves responsible for our actions – after all, there is a sure fire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy – then what are the limits? What is it that we are NOT entitled to? Perhaps every school child should be given tofu and broccoli for free? Actually, there appear to be places where that is argued quite seriously, but there’s a problem getting the kids to eat the broccoli.

So I do wonder: why the great emphasis on contraceptives for females? Why is that an entitlement of such great importance? Are free condoms next? And how long until you must eat your broccoli under pain of being paddled in the principal’s office?

Perhaps my afflictions have caused me to take leave of my senses? Sometime I think so.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a short article “Killer drones are science fiction” that takes an operations research approach to the situation: we don’t need automated drones because they won’t be any more useful or effective than what we have now.

“The key is to understand that regardless of whether a military strike is conducted autonomously or with human involvement, it is not an isolated act. The actual launching of a weapon onto a target is one step in a sequential process that the military refers to as the "find-fix-track-target-engage-assess" chain.”

The author looks at each of those stages and concludes that the decision to engage doesn’t take much time compared to the others; humans are useful in some of the other stages of the process; QED. It’s not a bad non-mathematical OR argument.

“Ready for another rotten highway bill?” asks Jim Demint in todays Wall Street Journal; and he explains why the bill is very likely to be rotten, and why there’s little possibility of anything else.

Of course the real question is why are highways a federal matter to begin with? When Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway system, it was largely proposed as part of a national defense system, and although it is forgotten now, part of the justification was the this would make it possible to build a large number of civil defense shelters – bomb and fallout shelters. At one time every major Interstate Highway intersection would have a shelter built into it. The Soviet Union went mad, and declared that the US was setting itself up for a first strike on the Soviet Union, and civil defense was actually an act of aggression against the USSR. Of course the USSR had civil defense as compulsory training for all its citizens, and built and designated fallout shelters, but they didn’t talk about that much. In any event the civil defense aspects of the Interstate system were abandoned (although some “demonstration” shelters were built in various parts of the country); but the highways were a federal matter because of their national defense necessities.

That’s no longer needed. The easiest way to handle the highways is to leave them to the states, or let the states form authorities and regional compacts; leave federal taxes out of the system. Of course that won’t happen, so yes, prepare for another rotten highway bill, in which money is put into a “trust fund” and then spent on something other than highways and all will be built by Union labor (Davis Bacon Act, a primary means of financing the Democratic party) and the beat goes on. And on.

General Motors, which is now owned by the UAW having been taken from the stock and bondholders, is now about to cut pension benefits – for white collar salaried workers. The regular union workers will still get the same defined benefits pensions that drove GM into what should have been bankruptcy in the first place.

And the beat goes on.

I’ve said this often enough, but it’s still worth repeating: the easiest way to get some economic growth going is to exempt more people from the regulations that prevent small businesses from hiring more workers. Double the exemptions, and see how the economy grows. That is, if your business is exempt from various regulations because it has 10 or fewer workers, you will have powerful incentives not to hire and eleventh worker. If Congress simply make that number 20 or fewer, those at the limits of growth will very likely hire more. There are similar regulatory exemptions at other numbers of workers. Double all those numbers. Watch the economy grow.

It might even start an American economic miracle. And how much harm could it do? We’re in trouble.

Our nation’s fiscal situation is perilous. At $15.3 trillion, our national debt (as measured by the Treasury Department) has already overtaken our national economy, which at the end of 2011 came in at $14.95 trillion (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Bipartisan compromises on spending got us into this mess, and we’ll never get out of it if Republicans don’t offer a fiscally responsible alternative to the out-of-control spending that Democrats endorse.

We should devolve the federal highway program from Washington to the states. We can dramatically cut the federal gas tax to a few pennies, which would be enough to fund the limited number of highway programs that serve a clear national purpose.

In return, states could adjust their state gas taxes and make their own construction and repair decisions without costly Davis-Bacon regulations and without having to funnel the money through Washington’s wasteful bureaucracy and self-serving politicians.

In order to avert a fiscal catastrophe in the near future, we’re going to have to get a lot more serious about curtailing unnecessary federal spending. These highway bills—both Democrat and Republican—are anything but serious.

Mr. DeMint is a Republican senator from South Carolina.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204795304577223421060960612.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I owe you some mail bags. I’ll get to them shortly. This debilitating cold/flu (Yes, I had my flu shots as did Roberta) have taken all my energy, and I don’t like doing short shrift mail with essentially no comments. I am recovering. It’s a lot slower than I thought it would be.