Category Archives: Health Insurance
Abortion Ban Passes in Senate, Lesko Bill Down but Not Out
Two important bills went in opposite direction in the Arizona Legislature this week.
Arizona’s Senate voted 20-10 Tuesday to ban abortions of preborn children at 20 weeks. If this bill is eventually signed into law, it would change the current legality of abortion until a preborn child is “viable.”
Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (Tempe left-winger) boasted to reporters that lawmakers are empowered to determine life and death outcomes.
Sen. Steve Smith, Maricopa conservative, disagreed: “I would like to listen to the 50 million-plus children that have been aborted and killed since Roe v. Wade. I would like to listen to what they think of this bill.”
And so did Sen. Steve Yarbrough, Chandler conservative, who said, “There’s a third person in that room. There’s the baby. Who speaks for her, the totally innocent one with no voice? Who has the duty and the right to speak for her? We do.”
The bill now goes across the capital lawn to the Arizona House of Representatives for its deliberation.
The East Valley Tribune story prominently features in its story the views of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest profiteer of abortion deaths. But nowhere is Arizona Right to Life or the Center for Arizona Policy included in the story written by left-wing reporter Howard Fischer.
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The Arizona Senate Wednesday defeated HB 2625, a bill introduced by Rep. Debbie Lesko, conservative, to protect religious freedom. This bill declares that any entity or individual with a religious objection to paying for objectionable insurance coverage is free to contract with an employer and insurer who want to honor their conscience. The vote was 17-13 against.
Republican Nancy Barton tendered a last-minute “no” vote to keep the bill alive for re-consideration. But no-votes included Scottsdale abortion advocate Michele Reagan, Mesa RINOs Jerry Lewis and Rich Crandall, and Republicans John Nelson, John McComish and Senate President Steve Pierce.
Clearing Up the ACLU’s Distortions about Rep. Lesko’s House Bill 2625
By Catherine Glenn Foster, Alliance Defense Fund
Once again, the enemies of religious liberty have to resort to distortions as they try to convince citizens to jump on their anti-faith bandwagon.
Headlines from the American Civil Liberties Union and its cohorts are flying viral across the Internet with catchy little phrases like, “Use Birth Control? You’re Fired!” Sadly, even the mainstream media has begun to join in this echo chamber of falsehoods.
Where did the enemies of freedom at the ACLU come up with this whopper? At issue is Arizona legislation sponsored by Rep. Debbie Lesko, House Bill 2625. Lesko, a woman, is the one leading this bill, which protects the religious freedom of both women and men. And that’s all the bill does: restore religious freedom to several statutes passed in 2002.
The 2002 government mandates attack the religious freedom of all Arizona citizens by forcing all employers to cover abortion-inducing drugs and other objectionable items related to contraception — even if they must violate their religious beliefs.
HB 2625 fixes that by declaring that any entity or individual with a religious objection to paying for such coverage is free to contract with an employer and insurer who want to honor their conscience. In fact, other religious freedom statutes in Arizona already make the anti-religious mandates unlawful, and HB 2625 simply fixes those statutes to make them comport with existing law.
This is why the ACLU must engage in distortions to get people to oppose HB 2625. The people of Arizona love freedom, and HB 2625 simply restores one of the most cherished freedoms, religious liberty, to its rightful place outside of government coercion.
So how can the ACLU claim that HB 2625 would let McDonald’s fire its employees for using contraception? They’re just following the old maxim that if you say something enough times, people might start to believe it.
The facts, however, are these: Nowhere does HB 2625 create language letting anyone discriminate for any reason. On the contrary, the law puts a stop to government discrimination and restores a zone of freedom that was improperly taken away in 2002.
And the facts are even worse for the ACLU: The existing insurance mandate, which HB 2625 amends, nowhere declares that an employer like McDonald’s cannot fire people for using contraception right now. So, the ACLU’s claim that HB 2625 is somehow removing an existing protection is impossible. It cannot remove a protection that isn’t already there.
Moreover, despite the fact that the laws amended by HB 2625 nowhere talk about firing people for the mere use of contraceptives and do not stop an employer from doing so, there are no examples of any employer in Arizona ever doing such a thing. The ACLU just made it up as yet another fear tactic.
But, some have asked, what of the mandate’s clause targeting religious employers that would be removed by HB 2625? Yes, it would be removed — and for good reason. Any clause that singles out religious employers in this way almost certainly violates both the Arizona Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 9-0 decision in Hosanna-Tabor vs. EEOC. State legislators aren’t targeting anybody; they are removing a clause that did. If the ACLU wants to fault legislators for making state law consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, it is on shaky ground.
Arizona already has other laws that govern employment non-discrimination, and HB 2625 does not amend any of them. HB 2625 only amends language that specifically attacks religious groups so that the statutes will now let religious citizens have their freedom again.
The ACLU may believe its own press releases, but you don’t have to.
Grijalva, Pastor Vote for ‘Death Panel’
Arizona’s two socialist members of Congress — Democrats Ed Pastor and Raul Grijalva — voted FOR the so-called death panels in a House vote Thursday. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 223-181 to abolish the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a panel of unelected officials who would hold the power of allowing or denying medical treatment under the authority of ObamaCare.
Despite socialist denials, ObamaCare will include rationing. For example, senior citizens could be denied treatment by IPAB due to their age. ObamaCare as structured will contribute to the culture of death in America.
All of Arizona’s Republican congressmen voted against the death panels.
The defeat of IPAB is unlikely to pass the socialist-controlled U.S. Senate. But the Republicans did one of the most important things they were sent to Washington in 2010 to do: fight ObamaCare, a huge, socialist boondoggle which will raise insurance costs and remove personal control of medical treatment for Americans.
Focus on the Family: Obama Pushing what is not ‘Health Care’
Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, says of the Obama mandate against religious freedom …
This mandate elevates contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to the level of preventative healthcare. They are not. Plan B should not be considered equivalent to the polio vaccine. Pregnancy is not a disease. Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the White House’s “accommodation” reasoning—no matter, frankly, what in the end that accommodation turns out to be—is that religious liberties are not something any president has the legal authority to recognize or deny. As Christians, we believe these rights come from God; but you don’t need to believe in God to recognize such rights are protected for all citizens by the Constitution.
There is a limit to what government can compel us to do—or not do—particularly in matters of faith and conscience. It is in the best interest of all Americans, of every ideological stripe, that this limit, this line, not be crossed.
This is not about politics. It is about more than one government policy. It is about what’s proper—and it is never proper for government to force the people who elected it to violate their consciences.
Obama’s Wild Contraceptives Exaggeration Exposed
Writing on Townhall.com, Amy Ridenour rips gaping holes in last week’s assertion by President Obama that 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives. “And yet, more than half of all women between the ages of 18 and 34 have struggled to afford it,” he claimed. The White House Fact Sheet distributed the same day repeated this.
But the unvarnished truth and the president’s wild claims are two different things:
- According to the National Health Statistics Report (Number 36, March 3, 2011), only 86.8 percent of women aged 15-44 have ever had vaginal intercourse.
- Vaginal sex participation rates for women do not reach 99 percent until the 40-44 age cohort, and by then birth control becomes less necessary.
- Birth control is not expensive; it costs as little as $15 per month.
- Condoms cost about a quarter, and free condoms are widely available.
- Women do not bear all the financial costs for birth control. The Planned Parenthood-associated Guttmacher Institute reports that 16.1 percent of women rely on male condoms and another 9.9 percent the man’s vasectomy as their birth control method.
- According to Guttmacher, 6.3 percent of women rely on methods costing nothing — withdrawal and periodic abstinence.
