Good lord, I knew the hate email and comments would come, but could you at least show a bit of intelligence before enticing me to swing the ban hammer and toss you off the forum?

In reference to the previous post (for those who don't want to click and just read it) this is about Sandra Fluke's intentional misdirection when it comes to birth control and health "insurance."

Let's put forward math to this, shall we?

We shall presume that Sandra is right, and that every woman should use birth control all the time, except, of course, when desiring to become pregnant.

In other words, every woman should have access to and use these drugs whether for personal choice of unbridled sexual opportunity (without the risk of pregnancy) or therapeutic purposes, and all "health plans" should be required as a matter of law to provide those drugs.

Ok.

So if we make that set of assumptions, what happens?

The price you actually pay as a woman, all-in, goes up.

Why?

Simple.

Let's assume 10,000 women in the world.  All of them want to use birth control pills.  They cost $15/month.  The total expense is therefore $150,000 per month.

Or is it?

Well, it is if every one of those 10,000 women buy it themselves. WalMart, CVS and the online pill sellers will all compete for the business, and the price will be about as efficiently determined as the market can manage.  It won't be perfect, but it will be, on balance, efficient.

Ok, now we'll change this model a bit.  We'll require under penalty of law (that's a gun, wielded by the government, shoved up your nose) that all "health insurance plans" cover this drug.

What happens?

The money now has to flow through at least one more set of hands.  That set of hands will demand to be paid for handling that money, since nobody works for free.  And magically, that $15 will become $16, $17 or even $20, because the people who work for that insurance company require a paycheck and there's only one place to get the money from -- you.

So by inserting the gun of the government into this equation and forcing this "public policy imperative" for something that everyone wants, the price goes up and the economic efficiency goes down.

It must, simply due to the laws of mathematics and the fact that nobody, even in a feminist utopia, will work for nothing.  The more hands the money or product has to pass through the more it will cost. 

Period.

So the real issue here isn't what's being presented at all.

The truth of this "argument" is that Sandra and her ilk want to force people who have no desire or need for birth control at all -- they're either too old to need it, to young to need it, want to conceive, are not having sex and thus have no use for it or are male and thus have no reason to consume birth control pills under any circumstance -- to pay for her elective choice to sleep with people and not get pregnant.

Now if you and I want to form a voluntary association to buy and sell prepaid health care with these provisions I have no quarrel with it at all.  That's the nature of voluntary associations -- you choose to either be in or out in the first instance.

But ObamaCare, and government-managed "health care" in general irrespective of form is not voluntary in any way, shape or form.  This, incidentally, includes the entire current health-delivery system including EMTALA, employer-centered "insurance" (that is not insurance) and more.

The entire system is at its core all about the use of force by the government to shove a gun up your nose and demand that you buy for someone else.

Under this very same rubric the government has the right to force you to buy my iPhone, my steak, my Beluga caviar, my Rolls-Royce, my boat and my cruise vacation.  Oh, and my sexual exploits including the exotic $5,000 a night suite and $1,500 an hour prostitute (in a place where such is legal, like most of Nevada.)  All of these things, just as is birth control, are voluntarily-consumed elective choices that we each have the right to decide we want, but we do not have the right to force anyone else to pay for them so we can have them.

Sandra doesn't want to talk about what the real issue is, nor the essential character of this debate. 

But I have, and I will, exactly as I have all the way back to when I went after the Catholic Bishops originally on the same grounds.

The simple fact of the matter is that this sort of crap is simply the latest manifestation of Marxism ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs") that has become manifest in both the Republican and Democrat parties.  Both parties are more than happy to play this game when it suits them, then scream about the other party being the evil spawn of Satan when it does not.  The Democrats latest (but by no means only or last) incantation of this assault comes from Pelosi-the-Satanic trotting out people like Sandra Fluke to lie about the cost of "birth control" and assert that "everyone wants and should have it" when in fact they know damn well that if everyone wants it the most-efficient and lowest-cost way for everyone to have it is for them to buy it directly with their own money.

The correct result of this screaming is for Obamacare to be repealed, for anti-trust exemptions for health care in all of its forms (including insurance) to be repealed, for cost-shifting to be barred as a matter of federal law (including repeal of EMTALA and asserting Clayton and Robinson-Patman discriminatory pricing statutes against the pharma and device makers, along with forcing the posting of price and level billing for all procedures in like kind and quantity) and for tax preferences for businesses to be eradicated -- either let everyone have "from first dollar" exemptions against income tax for all medical expenses (including insurance) or repeal all of those exemptions, whether personal or business.

And yes, I apply the exact same set of standards to Viagra and similar "recreational pharmaceuticals."  If in the future I have a use for such drugs I should buy them with my own money and not attempt to charge off the cost of my sexual pleasure on other people.

Since I began commenting on markets and economics, dating back to the 1990s, I have always maintained that cost-shifting in all of its forms is both inefficient and in most cases is morally and ethically indefensible.   That Limbaugh did a*****-poor job of illustrating his point doesn't make him wrong -- he in fact was and is right.  It just means that those on the left seized the opportunity to toss sand in their own vaginas and then scream about the self-inflicted pain after they were called out on their lies.

If you you haven't figured out by now is that no matter where the stupidity is or how politically explosive it is I am more than willing to wade in with a fact-and-math based exposition of the truth, you haven't been reading here long enough, you need an eye examination or a brain transplant, as yours is obviously defective.

And for the latter two options you need to pay for them with your own money.