Rick Santorum Kinda, Sorta Endorses Government-Supplied Contraception
Speaking last week at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, former GOP senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum argued that if the Obama administration wants to ensure all Americans have access to affordable contraception, they should simply give it away rather than mandate businesses include it in their employer-provided health insurance.
Understand, Santorum is saying government-supplied contraception is preferable to the birth-control mandate in which employers who provide health insurance to their employees must ensure that the policy includes contraception coverage. Be he doesn’t think the idea is so greate he would vote for it. Nonetheless, even though he wouldn’t vote for it, he’s mad at the Obama Administration for not trying to do the thing he wouldn’t vote for.
“They were interested in forcing people to bow to Caesar,” he grumbles. Yes. Obama wanted to have free contraception and to make every knee at HobbyLobby bow before his tyrannic visage. Bwahahahaha!
Maybe — that’s certainly a scary, scary way of looking at things — or maybe the Obama Administration saw that a “free taxpayer-funded contraception” amendment to Obamacare would be roughly as popular among Obamacare opponents as, I dunno, Obama himself, and resolved to get what it wanted by the employer-based health care system that was in place before. Obamacare, as it exists, isn’t any lefty’s idea of health care utopia: It’s the result of a million compromises,all made in the service of offering health care to more people who need it.
Since that’s how Obamacare generally works — the employer health system is still in place, with a big honkin’ bureaucracy built around it, instead of being replaced by a socialist single-payer system like the ones in the U.K.orCanada —that makes it the more likely scenario, don’t you think?
Anyway, that’s Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania’s former junior senator. Even when he stumbles on a decent idea, he ruins it with half-baked conspiracy theorizing. Yay.
