With the Contraception Mandate, Price Consciousness Just Went Out the Window

As I had mentioned before, Planned Parenthood says that a woman on birth control spends between $15 and $50 a month. That, to me, says that woman are being price conscious about what birth control method they choose. And, logically, price is an issue because it affects the amount of co-pay or out-of-pocket expense that they must pay every month.

So, once you make all contraceptive methods free of co-pays, penalties, and deductibles under the Obama mandate, women will no longer be price constrained and they will naturally migrate to the more expensive methods that may have several advantages over their current, cheaper prescriptions. As a consequence, you can expect the overall expense for birth control in America to rise significantly in just a few years. For you and I, this means higher and higher insurance premiums to offset those higher expenditures.

Why Obama's Compromise On Insured Contraception Is Still Wrong

After creating a firestorm over his contraception mandate, Obama announced a so-called "compromise" that he said would allow religious institutions to sidestep the moral objection of providing birth control and still provide fully-covered contraception to its employees. That compromise was to place the burden for providing birth control onto the insurance companies. But, in all too many cases, the Catholic Church is the insurer. That's because, in 28 states, the Catholic Church had already been forced to become a self-insured employer to avoid state-mandated contraception insurance coverage. Now, the Church is being sandwiched in by both the State and Federal Governments and that's why this contraception mandate is still a violation of freedom of religion as specified in the Constitution.

Obama's Miscalculation On The Birth Control/Abortion Mandate

Unless you're a liberal Catholic, most of the political left hates the Catholic Church. They hate the Church's stand on both gays and abortion. Then, too, there's the results of a recent poll done by the Public Religion Research Institute that concluded that 98% of Catholic women used birth control. So, its no wonder that Obama went ahead with the ObamaCare mandate that any Catholic institution that hires non-Catholic employees must provide free contraception as part of their health insurance policies.

So, in one fell swoop, Obama thought he had scored a political double play. First of all, he decided that by making contraception free of co-pays and deductibles, he would be able to gain back many of the female voters who had turned away from him in the last 3 years. At the same time, he was able to secure his liberal base by forcing the Catholic Church to provide both contraceptive services and, even, abortion through free access to the morning after pill. And, I am quite sure that Obama calculated little or no backlash since most Catholic women and their spouses practice birth control.

But, what Obama didn't count on was the fact that his actions would be seen as a Constitutional challenge to the freedom of religion as specified in the First Amendment. And, consequently, the Catholic Church, as well as other religions, blew-back strongly on this decision because they understood that if Obama is able to subjugate religion in this case, any and all other freedoms of religions would be at risk going forward. Furthermore, by adding abortion therapies to the mandate, Obama offended more than just Catholics who are strongly against abortion. At a minimum, Obama may have offended the 46% of this country who claim to be pro-life. Then, too, of the remaining 54% who claim to be pro-choice, more than a third of those only believe that abortion should be performed in cases of rape, incest, and to save the mother's life.

Obviously, Obama is now in an untenable position. He can't, now, rescind his decision without offending his non-Catholic political base. If he allows his decision to stand, he may be in serious reelection trouble. Of course, there have been feeble attempts to defend his position by claiming that 98% of Catholics believe in birth control. But, with freedom of religion at jeopardy and abortion being thrown into the mix, it really doesn't matter how many Catholics practice contraception. Let's face it, Obama miscalculated this one from the very get-go.

Obama: The Man Who Would Be King

In an interview on NBC's Today Show, President Obama said the following: "What's frustrated people is that I've not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. "

Yes sir, Mr. Obama. Our founders developed a system of government that was based on a balance of power between the Executive, Congressional, and Judicial branches of government. They did that so that people like "you" wouldn't be able to act like kings and simply run roughshod over those in this country that don't necessarily agree with you. Ours is a system that forces compromises.

Let's not forget what Thomas Jefferson once said: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." That's why we are a republic and that's why our system of government is the longest lasting form of democracy in the world today.

ObamaCare's Free Contraception Is More Than Just A Religious Issue

All last week, the news media's attention was focused on the Catholic Church's objection to being forced to provide free conception under the latest ObamaCare edict. However, there's a bigger problem for all of us regarding the free contraception mandate. That is how much your health insurance premiums will be increased as a result of forcing insurers to provide that free contraception.

Somewhere between 60 and 80 million woman will now become eligible for this latest ObamaCare handout. Planned Parenthood estimates that women spend between $15 and $50 a month for various contraceptive methods, devices and drugs. So, when you add it all up, the health insurance industry is probably going to have to cover $30 billion dollars a year or more in providing contraception coverage. But don't expect the insurance companies to eat that cost. You and I will pay that amount in higher premiums. My guess is that it could amount to $200 to $300 in higher family insurance premiums. Once again, Obama's promise of lowered health care insurance premiums fails to be a reality.

Already, the average family's insurance premium has risen from just around $13,000 a year to over $15,000 since Obama took office. I suspect that $20,000 a year is not too far off; especially, if the President keeps mandating freebee services under ObamaCare.

Romney Is Right About Automatic Increases Of The Minimum Wage

On Friday, Rush Limbaugh railed against Mitt Romney's comments of the previous day, where Romney said he would support an automatic annual increase of the minimum wage; indexed by changes in the cost of living. Rush even went so far as to say that Mitt's position was "not conservative".

Even though I detest the minimum wage because I think it hurts businesses and actually raises unemployment, I have to agree with Mitt on this one. I think Rush is ignoring reality by being so blinded by his strong conservative ideology. The fact is that the Federal minimum wage will never go away. So, what you want to do is minimize its impact on businesses. The trouble with the minimum wage lies in the fact that, when Republicans are in power, they hardly ever vote to increase the minimum wage. Then, when the Democrats take over, raising it becomes one of their first priorities. And, they don't just raise it incrementally in small amounts. Instead, they play catchup on all the years that the Republicans neglected it. So, as a consequence, businesses are hit with massive wage hikes. For example, in 2007, the Democrats decided to up the minimum wage for the first time in years. As usual, they wanted to make up for all the lost years. As a result, businesses were hit with 3 increases in just two years with the final total being a hike of a whopping 41%; going from $5.15 an hour to $7.25. For a company of just 10 workers, that increase was equal to the 2007 pay of 4.1 additional workers. What's worse is the fact that two of those increases came at the height of the recession. It is no wonder that unemployment soared in 2008 and 2009!

In my opinion, any businessman would prefer to count on small annual increases in theminimum wage over time rather than be bludgeoned to death with massive and infrequent payroll hikes. And, I think most conservatives would agree after hearing the facts. Romney's position is better for business and that makes him a valid conservative.

More Unemployment Magic

Once again the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) has reported another truly unbelievable unemployment report with the unemployment rate dropping from 8.5% to 8.3% in a single month. Quite the feat when you compare that to all the other abysmal statistics regarding our economy:

• January saw a drop in consumer spending by 17%. And, it's consumer spending that drives 70% of our economy and, ultimately, jobs.
• January's Mass Layoffs Report was the highest in four months.
• 2011 saw the worst economic growth (GDP) in 2 years at an abysmal 1.7%
  
• Each week, more than 360,000 workers continue to lose their jobs.

The fact is that the BLS has been able to lower the unemployment rate by using a little "trick" in the way they calculate the unemployment rate. That trick is to shrink the labor force and, in doing so, create the impression that the employment situation is getting better; when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is that, in January, 1.2 million unemployed workers were no longer counted by the BLS as being part of the workforce because those workers were so frustrated that they stopped looking for work. And, according to the methodology used by the BLS, a unemployed worker who stops looking for work is no longer a worker. When you really think about, that 1.2 million workers is an absolutely, astounding one-month number. It's as if the entire city of Dallas, Tx. (our 9th largest city) had been jobless and then, suddenly, in January, the entire population decided to stop looking for for work.

The truth is that, if the BLS wasn't able work its magic with the numbers, the true unemployment would be closer to 11% and not hardly at today's 8.3%. And, of course, Obama should be doing cartwheels over the fact the "his" Bureau of Labor and Statistic has been able to work all this magic at a time when Obama desperately needs a declining unemployment rate in order to get reelected in the Fall.