Romney is a still a piece of [inks] coward

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

At this point I would like to ask if any of us are aware of the non-contraceptive health effects of hormonal birth control and why some women might need or want them.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

At this point I would like to ask if any of us are aware of the non-contraceptive health effects of hormonal birth control and why some women might need or want them.

So, women are entitled to free mood stabilizing medication if they call it "pregnancy prevention?" This is exactly how costs explode. If women had to pay for their own birth control more would opt for the $9 generics at Walmart and Target. But, since someone else is paying, they can opt for the pricey name-brand prescription drugs that are no more effective at preventing pregnancy, but, have desireable side effects. $3,000 isn't too high a price to pay when someone else is footing the bill!

Okay, so the answer to my original question was 'no'.

Hormonal birth control, like any other hormonal drug, has multifarious effects beyond misogynistic canards, some of them good and some of them not so good from the perspective of overall health. There are conditions where you can lose parts of your reproductive or endocrine systems without this kind of hormonal treatment. Rare, but they exist.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

At this point I would like to ask if any of us are aware of the non-contraceptive health effects of hormonal birth control and why some women might need or want them.

So, women are entitled to free mood stabilizing medication if they call it "pregnancy prevention?" This is exactly how costs explode. If women had to pay for their own birth control more would opt for the $9 generics at Walmart and Target. But, since someone else is paying, they can opt for the pricey name-brand prescription drugs that are no more effective at preventing pregnancy, but, have desireable side effects. $3,000 isn't too high a price to pay when someone else is footing the bill!

Okay, so the answer to my original question was 'no'.

Um, the answer was,"Yes."  Again, drugs like Yaz advertise themselves as lessening hormonal mood fluctuations. Beyond that, some gals are using Nuva-ring to cease menstruating.

If Yaz is being prescribed as an alternative to other mood-altering drugs, then, it should be reimbursed in exactly the same way as other drugs in that category. It isn't. That's the financial problem with making birth control an entitlement: it drives up costs because it allows people to game the system for free drugs rather than incents them to lower costs.

You stand with big Pharma. I stand with the taxpayer.

No I do not stand with big pharma. If you haven't noticed I hate the current health care system and would like as strongly price-controlled and generic a pharmaceutical industry as possible with the possible exception of research and development. You're right that you do stand with the 'taxpayer', but that doesn't matter because the greater issue is that your use of the word 'taxpayer' indicates that, like most Republicans, your primary conception of US citizens is monetary.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Bob: I don't support the system that the PPACA created. At all. I just want to go back to the previous one even less.

I certainly stand against the taxpayer. I stand against ~*~'the taxpayer'~*~ as a dehumanizing construct.

Politico: Nullification is unconstitutional. Also, I'm fine with temporary monopolies on newly developed drugs--or newly developed anything, really--and I never said that I wasn't; after those few months or years, I put it to you that the entire thing can and should just be made generic and mass-produced as a public good. This is all assuming without evidence, of course, that it is impossible that we could find some way of developing drugs that didn't rely on the all-hallowed 'profit motive'.

Constructing fantasy worlds in which people and businesses can be held to basic standards of social responsibility and generalized decency in exchange for certain concessions to baser motives is preferable to complacently wallowing in the terms and premises of a twisted and malign reality.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Politico: Nullification is unconstitutional.

I really hate to defend Politico, but he never mentioned nullification.  It's a pure tenth amendment argument here. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

If the individual mandate does not fall within the "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" then since it is not "prohibited by it to the States" then it wold be unconstitutional for the Feds to implement, but perfectly legal for the States to do so (subject to any restrictions imposed by their own constitutions).

So it becomes a question of whether or not this falls within the taxation power, which is what we all knew it was anyway. Politico should have said so from the beginning rather than using this kind of rhetoric.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Politico: Nullification is unconstitutional.

I really hate to defend Politico, but he never mentioned nullification.  It's a pure tenth amendment argument here. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

If the individual mandate does not fall within the "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" then since it is not "prohibited by it to the States" then it wold be unconstitutional for the Feds to implement, but perfectly legal for the States to do so (subject to any restrictions imposed by their own constitutions).

So it becomes a question of whether or not this falls within the taxation power, which is what we all knew it was anyway. Politico should have said so from the beginning rather than using this kind of rhetoric.

What rhetoric are you referring to?

If some states want Obamacare, let them have it. But to force it upon states that do not want it is unconstitutional as the Supreme Court will decide soon enough.

To interpret that as pro-nullification rhetoric requires either stupidity or dishonesty since having the Supreme Court decide what is Constitutional is the complete opposite of nullification.

Not stupidity but rather momentary forgetful ignorance. I forgot the precise meaning of 'nullification' and only remembered its general meaning.  I always get a little jumpy and vaguely hackish around Tenth Amendment jurisprudence, because while I understand why the amendment is there I often find myself somewhat uncomfortable with the way it is used, particularly in right-wing rhetoric (perhaps because I fall into the strictest or second-strictest level of E.B. White's definition of a Yankee). Sorry.