Image via WikipediaLot of people, including me, are beyond pissed off that an overpaid, Viagra-popping radio blowhard who snorted himself deaf on Oxycontin, railed abusively on his show for three days at a private citizen who came to Washington to speak to Congress. This dirty old man suggested that her parents should be ashamed of her (they're not) and demanded that she should "send us the sex tapes." Could it be that said bloviating troll makes such vile assumptions because the only women in his life with whom he's ever had a "relationship" are either celluloid fantasies, or won't touch his disgusting person without a significant financial incentive?Well, he did issue a fauxpology, after his sponsors began leaving faster than the entertainment at a Costa Rican bachelor party. He magnanimously took back two of the words he said as unjustified and wrong.
But maybe he was provoked. Maybe the testimony provided by this young woman was so provocative, so filled with sexual innuendo, that any reasonable person would have conjured up lurid images of a co-eds having wild sexual encounter after wild sexual encounter.
So what did Sandra Fluke (pronounced Fluk) actually say?
Leader Pelosi, Members of Congress, good morning, and thank you for calling this hearing on women’s health and allowing me to testify on behalf of the women who will benefit from the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage regulation. My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school. I’m also a past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. I’d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and all of the student activists with us and thank them for being here today.Where did I miss the lurid sex part?
Georgetown LSRJ is here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the nonpartisan, medical advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraception coverage in its student health plan. Just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women. Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic and Jesuit institutions.
When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected, and I have heard more and more of their stories. . On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman from Georgetown or other schools or who works for a religiously affiliated employer who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage. And so, I am here to share their voices and I thank you for allowing them to be heard.
Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.
You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go without. How can Congress consider the Fortenberry, Rubio, and Blunt legislation that would allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraceptive coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same clinics?
These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy. Under many religious institutions’ insurance plans, it wouldn’t be, and under Senator Blunt’s amendment, Senator Rubio’s bill, or Representative Fortenberry’s bill, there’s no requirement that an exception be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.
In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription, despite verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. She wrote, “It was so painful, I woke up thinking I’d been shot.”
Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary. On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she sat in a doctor’s office. Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats, weight gain, and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32 years old. As she put it: “If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no chance at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the insurance policy that I paid for totally unsubsidized by my school wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I
needed it.” Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at an early age-- increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis, she may never be able to conceive a child.
Perhaps you think my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but it can’t be proven without surgery, so the insurance hasn’t been willing to cover her medication. Recently, another friend of mine told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome. She’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.
This is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends. A woman’s reproductive healthcare isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority. One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.
As one student put it, “this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.” These are not feelings that male fellow students experience. And they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder. In the media lately, conservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of cura personalis, to care for the whole person, by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problems this policy created for students, they would help us. We expected that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university. We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that if we wanted comprehensive insurance that met our needs, not just those of men, we should have gone to school elsewhere, even if that meant a less prestigious university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that, in the 21st century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.
Many of the women whose stories I’ve shared are Catholic women, so ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for access to the healthcare we need. The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and universities appreciate the modification to the rule announced last week. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the healthcare they need. That is something we can all agree on. Thank you.
Now, I do believe that America needs to stop fooling around with a patchwork of insurers and group, employer, or individual health care plans, and go to single payer, like every other civilized country. But until such time as we do that, basic insurance plans need to cover basic needs. For children, it means immunizations. Even if an employer sincerely believes that vaccinations cause autism. We need to cover prescriptions for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, even if an employer thinks psychiatry is evil. For men it means treatment for prostate cancer. For women, that means contraceptives and pregnancy care, regardless of whether they choose to avail themselves of either.
Bu-bu-but the government is forcing insurance companies to include these coverages, and forcing private companies to include them, against their religious beliefs.
Well, about 150 years ago there were plenty of churches who "believed" it was perfectly dandy for one person to own another human being, too. Said so right in the Bible. When we abolished slavery, should we have made an exception for those religious institutions that firmly believed slavery was their God-given right?
It's not the government who pays for insurance coverage, it is every hard-working American, in the form of his or her premiums. Even if the premiums are 100% employer-paid, it means employees are accepting insurance as part of their salary. If the plan is for students, they (or their parents) are directly paying for their insurance. Shouldn't it cover their most urgent needs?
If the government didn't mandate certain coverages, insurance companies would be very happy to keep on keepin' on, collecting premiums and reducing services. Warm and fuzzy commercials aside, insurance companies are posting record profits and paying their top execs huge benefits. Is it really so unfair for the government to step in and say, "If you're going to sell "comprehensive health insurance" plans, your basic plan must include X, Y, and Z" items for preventative care?
From White Man's Bourbon on Gawker:
Actually, I want the government to force many things on private companies. Like paying a living wage, not employing children, providing a clean and safe working environment, allowing workers to take sick leave without losing their jobs, paying workers compensation if they are injured in the course of performing their duties, not firing people without good cause, not sexually harassing people in subservient positions, allowing workers to organize to demand redress of legitimate grievances, making sure employees are not discriminated against on the basis of gender, or race, or religion... the list goes on and on and on and on. And all of these things were forced on companies... It's not called tyranny, it's called law, and it's the mark of a civilized society. It's what government is for.
Georgetown University President, John J. DeGioia said via e-mail to everyone on campus regarding Ms. Fluke:
“She was respectful, sincere, and spoke with conviction. She provided a model of civil discourse,” DeGioia wrote in his e-mail. “And yet, some of those who disagreed with her position – including Rush Limbaugh and commentators throughout the blogosphere and in various other media channels – responded with behavior that can only be described as misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
I have heard some suggest that said radio commentator is "being kicked when he is down," because enraged citizens are using their First Amendment rights to encourage sponsors of his program to withdraw, and suggesting boycotts of those who may continue to support him.
Granted, in the mass exodus of sponsors from his program there is much hypocrisy. They are shocked, shocked! that he would say such things, and in such a manner. Come on. It is not like he has just now begun to make crude and vulgar attacks against women. It's not like this is the first time he has boldly and deliberately lied to his audience. He has been doing it for years.
But apparently, this time, he has truly gone too far.
Posted by Mr Kurtz on The Daily Beast:
COLUMBUS, OH (The Borowitz Report) – Embattled radio host Rush Limbaugh suffered another major desertion today as he lost the support of one of his longtime sponsors, Satan.Do you think it makes sense to allow employers or universities to exempt any items from their health care plan coverage that they find "morally objectionable"?
The usually reclusive Prince of Darkness announced his decision at a hastily called press conference in Columbus, Ohio, his unofficial headquarters on Earth.
“Due to remarks of his that we consider unacceptable, we are terminating our relationship with Rush Limbaugh,” Satan said in a tersely worded statement.
According to one advisor to the Lord of Misrule, Satan had stuck by the radio host as long as possible but after he called a young woman a slut on the air Mr. Limbaugh had become “radioactive.”
“After a certain point, the association with Rush became problematic for Satan’s public image,” the aide said. “We went through a similar thing last year with Rupert Murdoch.”
Advertisers continued abandoning Mr. Limbaugh’s program in droves today, including companies who had sponsored it for years, like the online dating site NaziMingle.com™.
The only good news for Mr. Limbaugh today came from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who offered this muted statement of support: “Look, I wouldn’t have chosen the words he did. But it’s not like he called her a poor person or something.”
Did you watch, hear, or read Ms. Fluke's testimony?
Did you watch, hear or read Rush Limbaugh's show or show segments directed at Ms. Fluke?
How outraged are/were you by the rhetoric used by Limbaugh? Do you think his apology was sincere and should have been accepted? Do you think she should sue him for slander, as some have suggested?
Do you think this will all blow over in a few weeks, or is this something that will stay with you for a long time?
