With Trumpcare, GOP Takes Women's Health Hypocrisy to a New Level

The American Health Care Act, which passed in the House last week, is a cornucopia of Republican hypocrisies. Republicans claimed the problem with Obamacare was that premiums were too high and government subsidies to purchase insurance too low, but their replacement would allow insurers to charge older and sicker people higher premiums, while providing substantially less financial assistance to pay them. Republicans have been whining for years that Obamacare's passage was rushed (though it was debated for seven months), but they passed their slapped-together bill without holding a single hearing, just weeks after introducing it. And after howling that the Obamacare process lacked transparency, House Republicans not only voted on Trumpcare without waiting for a CBO score estimating what it will cost and how many people will lose insurance – they voted without even making the full text of the bill public.

But nothing illustrates the Trumpcare Republicans' willingness to abandon the principles they claim to hold so dear quite like what the bill does to women's health care. Let's set aside the fact that the party whose official platform advocates making abortion a crime just voted to allow insurers not to cover maternity care and to allow states to give fewer pregnant women and children Medicaid. Republican advocacy for policies preventing women from ending pregnancies but against policies protecting the health and economic stability of women who wish to bring their pregnancies to term may be the height of hypocrisy – but it's old news.

There is a less obvious truth about Republican values exposed by the Trumpcare provisions concerning women's health care: Their commitment to free markets and federalism is a farce.

Obamacare upended the status quo of insurers assuming the male body to be the default, and treating normal health care for women as something exotic to be had at extra charge. Obamacare forbids charging women higher premiums than men, and mandates that certain essential services be covered.

But anti-Obamacare Republicans reject the idea that individuals should have to pay into a system that covers services they may not ever need – that is, they reject the basic premise of insurance – or much of any role for government in making sure citizens have health care. Instead, they favor the idea that we should let insurers competing in the markets decide what services are covered, or at least let states rather than the federal government determine what the coverage requirements are.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/with-trumpcare-gop-takes-womens-health-hypocrisy-to-a-new-level-w481524?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=051417_10