Don't need no stinkin' health insurance exchange

   "We don't need a government health-care plan to be able to solve the problem," quoth Rick Santorum. "What we need is a process in this country where people will have an opportunity to go out and use their resources."

    Tell that this couple, Mr. Ex-Senator.

    A few years shy of Medicare, the husband and wife face these costs for health insurance: $578 a month — "the cheapest program possible" – with $3,500 individual deductibles. All told, their out-of-pocket costs are $10,000 a year and rising.

     I know about this because of emailed exasperation from the female half of this couple after she read that Texas had refused to set up its federally required health insurance exchange program.

     Texas is one of nine states, Florida being another, sandbagging on the requirement of the Affordable Care Act to make the cost of health coverage less crushing. The exchanges increase competitive pressures on insurers as customers shop for coverage online. Federal subsidies are attached for those most in need.

   Gov. Rick Perry put the kibosh on any progress toward an exchange system in Texas until after the Supreme Court rules on the Affordable Care Act and Barack Obama's presidency goes before the voters.

   The other states freezing the ball in defiance of "Obamacare" are Republican-controlled. Until their calculated defiance ends, their uninsured are effectively without a country, at least as pertains to what Congress did to address those Americans' needs in 2009.

    What these states are opposing is the essence of a painstaking compromise. Whereas a single-payer system would save untold suffering and crippling costs — just visit Britain, Canada, Germany, name it, to know how — those like Obama who campaigned on doing something about swelling seas of uninsured came up with the insurance exchange concept, built around private insurance.

    Ah, but millions of uninsured persons be damned in GOP-controlled states. Let them find the "resources" to fend off catastrophe — and of course provide profits to keep the middle man happy.

     America: One nation, of, by and for the middle man. The little man be damned.

     It's true that no one knows how things will shake down when the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, just as no one knew what would emanate with Social Security and Medicare. But despite the criminally inflated assertions that the act is a job-killer and more, the fact is that a lot of people are benefiting as we speak.

      In Florida alone, data from the Department of Human Services reports that seniors on Medicare have saved $142 million on prescription costs in 2011. This comes from the closing of the "donut hole" in the Medicare Part D drug benefit, affecting 238,362 seniors in the Sunshine State alone.

     Those who are getting as much as a 50 percent discount on prescriptions under this change had better hope that the Supreme Court's right wing does not prevail when the court considers the Affordable Care Act next week.

    Back to the Santorum approach to health care, which is for Americans to just find jobs and make enough money to have it:

    The Washington Post reports that more than a quarter of the people who have found jobs in this recession — one caused by blue-sky deregulation and Reaganomics — have had to settle for temp jobs that have no benefits.

    Things are not getting any better in the big-boxed, outsourced marketplace as states like Texas and Florida play partisan games. In my state, Colorado, employer-provided health care coverage have declined from 64 percent of Coloradans to 58 percent — that's over a span of only two years. Imagine the situation 10 years hence.

     And imagine the costs to each of these working families. After all, Medicaid is for the poorest Americans. The uninsured are people who make too much for Medicaid.

     Basically, what we have now is resistance from people who have what they need — health insurance, often including Medicare — and who don't want to consider what it costs for those who have none.

     "I guarantee you the antis have never had to pay for their own insurance, doctor visits or medicine," said the Texas woman, boiling over with frustration as her state poses again to not be a part of the union.

    That may be a figurative claim, but take this one literally: It, and the political party ruling it, is not part of the solution.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Women will be heard in 2012

  President Obama made one too few phone calls last week.

  The one he made was smart and important, offering support to Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke in her courageous stand for smarter policies about women's health.

  Obama's next phone call should have been to Rush Limbaugh, just to say thanks, and to say keep it up;. Keep demeaning women, Rush. Convince more and more they've been abandoned by your political party.

   This must grate, but: Every word Limbaugh utters on this subject makes it that much more likely Obama will be returned to office. Women will make it so.

    Don't believe it? Since December, Obama's approval ratings among women have jumped 10 points, according to an Associated Press/GfK poll.

   As for Limbaugh, bailing advertisers have reached double-digits as waves from a social media storm lap up against his chalky edifice. We all know Limbaugh likes to hear himself talk. However, even he might not appreciate the extent to which his words —  "slut" and "prostitute" just his headline terms for Fluke, a bright and gutsy young woman —  report like 10 million whip cracks on Twitter and Facebook.

    This is a problem for Republicans, for as whatever Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum aspire to be, Limbaugh is their party's de facto co-chairman, sharing the gavel, as always, with Roger Ailes and Fox News.

    Republicans in Congress helped this situation along by excluding women like Fluke from hearings on legislation that would have allowed insurers to opt out of a host of women's health measures, contraception being just the most obvious.

    Meanwhile, Romney and Santorum debate over how many angels can balance on a birth control pill.

    Much was made of the alleged political damage Obama inflicted on himself with the health insurance mandate, since adjusted, that drew Catholics' scorn over the issue of church-run institutions and contraception.

   Sorry, folks, but the very votes Obama might have lost were already lost to single-issue voters who won't countenance a pro-choice president, no way, no how.

    The actual political effect of these discussions, in fact, is just the opposite. The more Republicans act as adversaries to family planning — particularly contraception — the more they hurt themselves with women, who live the issue daily.

    To most women, contraception should never be an issue at all, no more so than mumps vaccine.

     A license to wanton, unwed sex? The birth control pill has a lot more uses than avoiding pregnancy — to reduce menstrual pain, to treat excessive bleeding, to treat migraines. Rush, this is one battle from which you should have excluded yourself. But the Democrats thank you for imposing your largeness into it, bursting in the picture like the Kool-Aid man — you know, like you want the government to do in women's reproductive decisions.

     Abortion? In a stinging commentary in the Denver Post, Lisa Wirthman writes, "It's precisely because we don't provide federal funding for abortions that we must invest in public funding for contraception." True.

     Yet, Republican legislatures make sport of targeting Planned Parenthood, the nation's go-to agency for family planning for the poor. Why? Because some affiliates perform abortion.

     To judge from the actions of statehouse adversaries, abortion is illegal. No, it isn't, and women are indebted to entities like Planned Parenthood that make sure the option is available and safe.

      Back to contraception and insurance: Twenty-eight states require insurers to cover it. That's right. Obama's mandate is more the norm across this nation than the exception.

      It's smart. It's cost-effective. (Alternative: First obstetrics, then pediatrics.) It allows women to decide how many mouths they will feed. Oh, it also prevents abortion. Period.

      But just keep talking, Rush, Mitt, Rick, John Boehner, MItch McConnell. Though not parties to your conversation, women are listening.

      Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.  

Candidate uses head as battering ram

   "I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance." — Socrates

    At his next U.S. Senate debate, should Craig James pledge to Socrates' humble oath, I'll change my opinion of him. 

    At the expectation that, should James read this and rush to his Bible, I've beaten him to it, and to 1 Peter: 

    "Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance."

    At a debate of Republican challengers to represent Texas in Kay Bailey Hutchison's soon-to-be-vacated seat, James, former SMU and NFL ball carrier, longtime ESPN talking head, denounced fellow Republican candidate and former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert for participating in a gay rights parade.

     You'll see no such display from Craig James. At the debate, he called homosexuality "a choice," and said that gays and lesbians "are going to have to answer to the Lord for their actions."

    Say this for James: While too many of his peers suffer now from too many head injuries, his calculating political brain has not calcified. He is absolutely certain to get votes for this — from absolutely certain voters who'd never be swayed by anything approximating evidence of what they speak.

    This is not a discourse about what makes a gay person gay.

    I don't know what does that. Nor does James.

    This is what Socrates was talking about: admitting you know nothing, yea though you talk a good game. Understandably, the Greek empire knew best to nip that kind of talk.

    My take on gay people, I acknowledge, is pretty simplistic and unresearched — unlike the caverns of data-collated certitude James clearly has tapped.

    Results of my unscientific study: Basically, all the gay people I've known have been just like all the other people I've known with the exception of sexual orientation.

    That means a whole lot of them are the best people I've known, and I do so hope to know many more, because the results of my research thus far have been encouraging.

     Gay marriage? In these days of splintered homes and general alienation, it's odd that anyone would have to make the case for monogamy and commitment on any basis, even if, as Rick Santorum worries, it involves a dude and a boa constrictor. May they live happily entwined, I say.

    As actress Anne Hathaway ruminates on the increasingly successful state-by-state push for same-sex marriage: "Love is an emotional experience, not a political statement."

    Of course, politics is an emotional experience as well, and that means playing to one group's passions to marginalize other groups, whether they be the poor, the dark-skinned, the Mexican, the Muslim, the single woman making an excruciating decision, the fill-in-the-blank.

    Agreeing with Socrates about what it is that we can't know, most of what's contained in Craig James' Bible would imply hardship before one's maker if one sought to make whole swaths of humanity feel horrible for what they are.

     It's remarkable to think that one could benefit politically from saying things of which one has no knowledge, particularly if they are fiction. Then again, I don't know. James could be right. Most people who gain their bearings between the tackles are right on most things.

    As a football hero and a talking head, James knows he has a leg up on many opponents who would suffer from their lack of field vision.

    Ex-Mayor Leppert, for instance, was trapped in his office making buses run and trying to keep police and minorities happy. Similarly, in appearing at a gay rights parade, he was trying to represent a city of diversity in ways he thought wise.

     What a strategic error. Was he not using his head?

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.