I think unaffordable monthly premiums is how the GOP moves people onto catastrophic plans with lower premiums and $9,000+ deductibles. Last month HHS expanded eligibility for catastrophic plans, and Ron DeSantis has promoted them recently.
What irritated me about the press conference re IVF funding was that it started with RFK Jr bull about reduced testosterone and sperm levels, endocrine disruptors, blah blah blah, culminating with "we need more babies", basically.
Yet where is the help for those who can get pregnant the old-fashioned way? How about paid maternity leave, free or subsidized child care, etc? More babies would probably be born if the cost of having them weren't prohibitive.
Once insurance premiums are double/triple what they are now, plus increased food, energy, and, and, and. . . IVF? Infuriating. I went through IVF 3X's. First time didn't work, had a surgical procedure to address the possible issue, then it worked. 3rd time we used frozen embryos from the earlier retrieval. My 3rd son was the surprise, wait, what? How? LOL The financial strain was considerable and catastrophic to our marriage. My boys are amazing and their Dad is a saint for dealing with me. LOL
Every Trump promise is empty. The question-- When are we going to stop being surprised? Raising comparisons between the shit storm and normality is self-injury.
The most telling thing about this picture is that it's one of the only ones of Trump in the Oval Office where there are a number of women in the picture.
Was thinking the same thing. Also wondered about the nationality of the woman next to RFK Jr. for this insane, all-white admin. Oh, and is that President Ronald Reagan's pic on the wall? Mr anti-tarriff himself? LOL Probably thinks he is actually, Ronald McDonald Reagan.
I find I need to read beyond headlines less and less when it comes to the Trump news. Just about every piece falls into one of two categories: Trump lies or Trump is insane. Some include both.
Having been elected I don't think he cares about any of this because he knows "his" voters never hold him to his promises.
It is also interesting that that of all areas where "Project 2025" has had the least impact has been in healthcare because "project 2025" is totally preoccupied with controlling abortion, birth control, IVF and even surrogacy. Having been elected Trump no longer sees a political upside dealing with the issues.
Critical to all of these are Congressional Republicans and until they give something he can sign he is free to say whatever sells himself at any given moment. Even when he essentially told us that Big Pharma will pay us for taking their medicine.
IF Congress will take up these issues it is possible his Executive Orders might become codified but until then they are just performative bullshit that have no reality.
Your first mistake is to believe Trump is serious about governing, or policy making. The only thing he takes seriously is cruelty, revenge, racism of all varieties. His other interest is in adulation.
Trump has never been, and never will be, a "normal" president. Coverage may treat him as one when he's settling 8, 10, or is it 100 wars, but this is part of the normalization of his insanity.
Are we supposed to suspend reality too? A rhetorical question at this point, isn't it.
We must be suspicious when the details of any plan are not released, or are glossed over. Add that they are voluntary, and we can also believe that mega corporations are in it for the good of the people. Price cuts to Medicaid? What does it matter if Medicaid benefits are disappearing, as fast as the "handshake" stops.
By the way, have we every found out just what was in the folders that were signed by the motley assortment of dictators, strongmen, royal torturers as part of the Gaza peace deal?
To give one example from 2005: Total, all-in, cost of an extremely successful round of IVF was $18,750 (yes, I still have all the receipts). Out of pocket costs for meds included in the total cost was $2,121.
Even if the cost of the medications were to be cut in half, most families have to save up for years just to afford a ride on the emotional roller coaster of going through IVF.
"If Trump were serious about living up to his campaign promises..."
WHEN has Trump ever indicated that he was serious about anything other than enriching himself, persecuting his political foes, and doing favors for the 1%?
I think Felon Trump got what he wanted. He has the faithful standing behind him in the Oval Office while he signs this executive order to, wait for it, supposedly bring down the price of some drugs at some time in the future. Done! Everyone cheers, the media goes crazy over the story, his base is happy, and life moves on. Ask him in a few months about the progress made and see his response.
With regard to IVF, various things are important to note:
1) Trump probably does not really know what this is, probably just has vague idea that this is something done by couples trying to have a child.
2) IVF is a morally ambiguous, at best, procedure, one which, the way it is done now, literally creates fertilized embryos that get frozen in quasi-perpetuity. Catholics who appose both abortion and IVF are being much more consistent than evangelicals who support the one whilst opposing the other. And if attempts are made to force insurance coverage for IVF, more and more of those evangelicals will come to oppose IVF as well.
3)This part is very important, and will be the case even if the law were changed, and the IVF procedure itself altered, to essentially eliminate the extra frozen embryos problem-- having children is not a health care necessity, any more than hair transplants are. I have never had any, and do not deserve limited insurance funds spent on extra efforts to get some for me. Like it or not, insurance dollars are not infinite, and, even before the (apparent) imminent ending of the enhanced Affordable Care subsidies, millions of Americans cannot really afford health care premiums now, and/or are stuck with insurance that does not adequately cover the real health care needs they actually have, read, *real* health care needs. These people will not be edified to have any of their health care funds and overall insurance resources shunted away so that selfish would be parents can get free IVF-- really, they won't, even if they themselves have no personal moral difficulties with IVF.
I disagree about the moral ambiguity. IVF clearly passes the veil of ignorance test. If you were an immortal soul and your potential future parents were considering IVF after prolonged infertility, would you consent? If not, why not?
The moral ambiguity exists for anyone who subscribes to traditional Christian morality - Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox generally, and many Protestants. I don't know enough about Jewish, LDS, or Islamic moral theology to have an informed opinion, although I would expect that the ambiguity is felt by at least some in those groups. About non-Abrahamic religions, I have no idea. I doubt that it's an issue for atheists.
You can certainly convince yourself that there's no ambiguity and maintain intellectual consistency, but a Rawlsian veil of ignorance test (which I assume you're applying) just won't work on the groups above, whose beliefs and assumptions about reality don't align with Rawls's philosophy, although their pragmatic solutions to living together in a diverse society often do.
I don't find any use in trying to map modern technology to the speculations of ancient goat herders, carpenters and merchants - often garbled by via centuries of word-of-mouth, poor translations, and factional infighting - as to what the god or gods want, if they even "want" in any sense comprehensible to humans in the first place.
You are right that I cannot argue with such beliefs. They are not based on reason and do not accept evidence or logic as mediums by which the beliefs can be attacked, if such attacks come from outside a very prescribed circle.
What does this even mean? That because some as yet unconceived child could be conceived via IVF, IVF must be good? Or something else? And, of course, that future child had better get lucky, else he end up one of thousands of IVF-conceived souls that end up frozen in quasi-perpetuity, until and unless someone decides to implant them and carry them to term.
As a Calvinist I actually rest easy knowing the Lord will bring to life those whom He wishes to shower life upon.., and that He sortta commands people not to play God, either.
I've favored universal medical care for as long as I can remember, and the older I get the more I favor it. Personally, I prefer the German and Swiss models, in which the system is basically private, but non-profit and heavily regulated. The ACA could be developed into a system like those by people of good will. But whether it's that or "Medicare for Those Who Want It", or even "Medicare for All", I'd probably be for it.
Regardless of that policy position, though, I've always been careful NEVER to talk about health care as a "right". "Rights" in the American context have to do primarily with Liberty in the Enlightenment sense, and secondarily with fair treatment for everyone. Talking about public goods in quantitative terms rather than simple fairness terms (i.e. people in the same circumstances get the same treatment, and that may mean that they get nothing because the state doesn't provide that particular public good) ends up in a hopeless confusion of "Rights" with Wants. That's the philosophical problem.
The practical problem that you touched on, one that any American who's lived overseas in a country that has universal health care already knows well but to which people who have spent their whole lives in the US seem oblivious is that universal care is rationed care, always and everywhere. It can't be anything else, because health care is an finite public good with infinite demand. Over and above emergency care, in one form or another every country with universal care has a well-publicized menu of preventive care, medical conditions, treatments, and remedies that it will provide, and a much less publicized menu of possible exceptions that it may also provide with special review and approvals. That's how universal care in the real world works, and I think that's the only way it CAN work. There's little appeal to "Rights" in that scenario for services that aren't on one of the menus.; if they're legal they may be available in an ancillary private system for a fee, but the public system won't supply them. Many services that people may want won't make the menus, and like you, I doubt that IVF is on many of them.
That's true of course, and it demonstrates how motivated by greed most American voters are, whether they want to admit it or not, and no matter how eager they might be to cover up less savory motivations, such as greed, with much loftier and ethical concerns-motivated ones such as appeals to religious teachings. Witness how warp-driven the response of the Alabama state legislature was, to its own supreme court's outlawing of IVF, a decision just based on a clear reading of the anti-abortion law that selfsame legislature had bragged about passing. Trump, like all successful confidence men, knows well that, just as sex sells, so does greed. Making false promises to give Americans IVF free for the asking were an easy lie to tell, and worked-- almost no one who had planned to vote for him changed their mind once he did promise free IVF, and very few people who voted for him citing this as one of their reasons to do it have definitively broken with him now that this has indeed been revealed to be a, ahem, fib. Witness here the pathetic young DOGED into oblivion forest ranger from Northern MI the WAPO reported on this spring, who ignored her better judgment last fall, to vote for Trump, because she and her husband had learned they needed IVF to conceive, and it is really expensive.
Can you imagine the social media reaction if any politician said publicly today, as John F. Kennedy did at his inauguration in 1961, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."? The derision would be massive and instantaneous, from the Right AND the Left.
Franklin warned us and Lincoln emphasized the point: we can only lose our country through suicide. We seem to be well on the way there.
It has been a long journey from the Peace Corps to the Prosperity Gospel, and the Greatest Generation guys chatting about hitting the beaches at Normandy to fight those fascists, to their children and grandchildren getting Nazi tatts and talking about how empathy is bad.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil while the Senate Watergate hearings were taking place in Washington. One day an elderly lady (as I thought at the time; she was probably younger than I am now) that I didn't know stopped me on the street and said, "Your country is showing the whole world how free people govern themselves." Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship at the time, and her action was not without risk. She walked on and I never saw her again; I never forgot her, though.
Now, Brazil is teaching that same lesson to the United States and the rest of the world, and our government is sanctioning them for it.
The Brazilians, having only had their current incarnation of democratic governance for forty years, still all know pretty much full well that democracy and the gifts it bestows are not etched on any society like an engraved diamond (probably mixing metaphors somehow here) and can easily be lost, and the habits of democratic governance need to be fostered and nurtured, and those fighting these habits resisted. Too many Americans nowadays know little other than what they read on social media, and too many older folks who know better have already passed, with sadly more passing daily. These kids are not responsible for what they have grown up with, and need to be shown a better way.
I think unaffordable monthly premiums is how the GOP moves people onto catastrophic plans with lower premiums and $9,000+ deductibles. Last month HHS expanded eligibility for catastrophic plans, and Ron DeSantis has promoted them recently.
What irritated me about the press conference re IVF funding was that it started with RFK Jr bull about reduced testosterone and sperm levels, endocrine disruptors, blah blah blah, culminating with "we need more babies", basically.
Yet where is the help for those who can get pregnant the old-fashioned way? How about paid maternity leave, free or subsidized child care, etc? More babies would probably be born if the cost of having them weren't prohibitive.
Another look behind the BS that this Administration parrots. Thank you Jonathan.
Once insurance premiums are double/triple what they are now, plus increased food, energy, and, and, and. . . IVF? Infuriating. I went through IVF 3X's. First time didn't work, had a surgical procedure to address the possible issue, then it worked. 3rd time we used frozen embryos from the earlier retrieval. My 3rd son was the surprise, wait, what? How? LOL The financial strain was considerable and catastrophic to our marriage. My boys are amazing and their Dad is a saint for dealing with me. LOL
Every Trump promise is empty. The question-- When are we going to stop being surprised? Raising comparisons between the shit storm and normality is self-injury.
The most telling thing about this picture is that it's one of the only ones of Trump in the Oval Office where there are a number of women in the picture.
Was thinking the same thing. Also wondered about the nationality of the woman next to RFK Jr. for this insane, all-white admin. Oh, and is that President Ronald Reagan's pic on the wall? Mr anti-tarriff himself? LOL Probably thinks he is actually, Ronald McDonald Reagan.
Here's a similar promise.
Everybody's going to be able have a Tesla.
I just got Elon to give you its floormats for FREE!
I find I need to read beyond headlines less and less when it comes to the Trump news. Just about every piece falls into one of two categories: Trump lies or Trump is insane. Some include both.
Having been elected I don't think he cares about any of this because he knows "his" voters never hold him to his promises.
It is also interesting that that of all areas where "Project 2025" has had the least impact has been in healthcare because "project 2025" is totally preoccupied with controlling abortion, birth control, IVF and even surrogacy. Having been elected Trump no longer sees a political upside dealing with the issues.
Critical to all of these are Congressional Republicans and until they give something he can sign he is free to say whatever sells himself at any given moment. Even when he essentially told us that Big Pharma will pay us for taking their medicine.
IF Congress will take up these issues it is possible his Executive Orders might become codified but until then they are just performative bullshit that have no reality.
Your first mistake is to believe Trump is serious about governing, or policy making. The only thing he takes seriously is cruelty, revenge, racism of all varieties. His other interest is in adulation.
Trump has never been, and never will be, a "normal" president. Coverage may treat him as one when he's settling 8, 10, or is it 100 wars, but this is part of the normalization of his insanity.
Are we supposed to suspend reality too? A rhetorical question at this point, isn't it.
We must be suspicious when the details of any plan are not released, or are glossed over. Add that they are voluntary, and we can also believe that mega corporations are in it for the good of the people. Price cuts to Medicaid? What does it matter if Medicaid benefits are disappearing, as fast as the "handshake" stops.
By the way, have we every found out just what was in the folders that were signed by the motley assortment of dictators, strongmen, royal torturers as part of the Gaza peace deal?
To give one example from 2005: Total, all-in, cost of an extremely successful round of IVF was $18,750 (yes, I still have all the receipts). Out of pocket costs for meds included in the total cost was $2,121.
Even if the cost of the medications were to be cut in half, most families have to save up for years just to afford a ride on the emotional roller coaster of going through IVF.
"If Trump were serious about living up to his campaign promises..."
WHEN has Trump ever indicated that he was serious about anything other than enriching himself, persecuting his political foes, and doing favors for the 1%?
🎯
I think Felon Trump got what he wanted. He has the faithful standing behind him in the Oval Office while he signs this executive order to, wait for it, supposedly bring down the price of some drugs at some time in the future. Done! Everyone cheers, the media goes crazy over the story, his base is happy, and life moves on. Ask him in a few months about the progress made and see his response.
With regard to IVF, various things are important to note:
1) Trump probably does not really know what this is, probably just has vague idea that this is something done by couples trying to have a child.
2) IVF is a morally ambiguous, at best, procedure, one which, the way it is done now, literally creates fertilized embryos that get frozen in quasi-perpetuity. Catholics who appose both abortion and IVF are being much more consistent than evangelicals who support the one whilst opposing the other. And if attempts are made to force insurance coverage for IVF, more and more of those evangelicals will come to oppose IVF as well.
3)This part is very important, and will be the case even if the law were changed, and the IVF procedure itself altered, to essentially eliminate the extra frozen embryos problem-- having children is not a health care necessity, any more than hair transplants are. I have never had any, and do not deserve limited insurance funds spent on extra efforts to get some for me. Like it or not, insurance dollars are not infinite, and, even before the (apparent) imminent ending of the enhanced Affordable Care subsidies, millions of Americans cannot really afford health care premiums now, and/or are stuck with insurance that does not adequately cover the real health care needs they actually have, read, *real* health care needs. These people will not be edified to have any of their health care funds and overall insurance resources shunted away so that selfish would be parents can get free IVF-- really, they won't, even if they themselves have no personal moral difficulties with IVF.
I disagree about the moral ambiguity. IVF clearly passes the veil of ignorance test. If you were an immortal soul and your potential future parents were considering IVF after prolonged infertility, would you consent? If not, why not?
The moral ambiguity exists for anyone who subscribes to traditional Christian morality - Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox generally, and many Protestants. I don't know enough about Jewish, LDS, or Islamic moral theology to have an informed opinion, although I would expect that the ambiguity is felt by at least some in those groups. About non-Abrahamic religions, I have no idea. I doubt that it's an issue for atheists.
You can certainly convince yourself that there's no ambiguity and maintain intellectual consistency, but a Rawlsian veil of ignorance test (which I assume you're applying) just won't work on the groups above, whose beliefs and assumptions about reality don't align with Rawls's philosophy, although their pragmatic solutions to living together in a diverse society often do.
I don't find any use in trying to map modern technology to the speculations of ancient goat herders, carpenters and merchants - often garbled by via centuries of word-of-mouth, poor translations, and factional infighting - as to what the god or gods want, if they even "want" in any sense comprehensible to humans in the first place.
You are right that I cannot argue with such beliefs. They are not based on reason and do not accept evidence or logic as mediums by which the beliefs can be attacked, if such attacks come from outside a very prescribed circle.
Pot, meet Kettle! 😂
What does this even mean? That because some as yet unconceived child could be conceived via IVF, IVF must be good? Or something else? And, of course, that future child had better get lucky, else he end up one of thousands of IVF-conceived souls that end up frozen in quasi-perpetuity, until and unless someone decides to implant them and carry them to term.
If you could ask the soul affiliated with the future embryo if it consented to its parents undergoing IVF, why wouldn’t it say yes?
No = oblivion
Yes = 30% chance at life, 65% chance of failing to implant or miscarriage, 5% chance of being discarded or used for research as a 5 day blastocyst.
The latter two possibilities aren’t meaningfully different.
As a Calvinist I actually rest easy knowing the Lord will bring to life those whom He wishes to shower life upon.., and that He sortta commands people not to play God, either.
I am fine with you "knowing" whatever you want. But if it is not based on facts and reason, keep it out of politics.
On the basis of what facts do I get to reason how to decide which way to go regarding whether to support IVF, and how are such facts to be obtained?
All good points, especially the last one.
I've favored universal medical care for as long as I can remember, and the older I get the more I favor it. Personally, I prefer the German and Swiss models, in which the system is basically private, but non-profit and heavily regulated. The ACA could be developed into a system like those by people of good will. But whether it's that or "Medicare for Those Who Want It", or even "Medicare for All", I'd probably be for it.
Regardless of that policy position, though, I've always been careful NEVER to talk about health care as a "right". "Rights" in the American context have to do primarily with Liberty in the Enlightenment sense, and secondarily with fair treatment for everyone. Talking about public goods in quantitative terms rather than simple fairness terms (i.e. people in the same circumstances get the same treatment, and that may mean that they get nothing because the state doesn't provide that particular public good) ends up in a hopeless confusion of "Rights" with Wants. That's the philosophical problem.
The practical problem that you touched on, one that any American who's lived overseas in a country that has universal health care already knows well but to which people who have spent their whole lives in the US seem oblivious is that universal care is rationed care, always and everywhere. It can't be anything else, because health care is an finite public good with infinite demand. Over and above emergency care, in one form or another every country with universal care has a well-publicized menu of preventive care, medical conditions, treatments, and remedies that it will provide, and a much less publicized menu of possible exceptions that it may also provide with special review and approvals. That's how universal care in the real world works, and I think that's the only way it CAN work. There's little appeal to "Rights" in that scenario for services that aren't on one of the menus.; if they're legal they may be available in an ancillary private system for a fee, but the public system won't supply them. Many services that people may want won't make the menus, and like you, I doubt that IVF is on many of them.
That's true of course, and it demonstrates how motivated by greed most American voters are, whether they want to admit it or not, and no matter how eager they might be to cover up less savory motivations, such as greed, with much loftier and ethical concerns-motivated ones such as appeals to religious teachings. Witness how warp-driven the response of the Alabama state legislature was, to its own supreme court's outlawing of IVF, a decision just based on a clear reading of the anti-abortion law that selfsame legislature had bragged about passing. Trump, like all successful confidence men, knows well that, just as sex sells, so does greed. Making false promises to give Americans IVF free for the asking were an easy lie to tell, and worked-- almost no one who had planned to vote for him changed their mind once he did promise free IVF, and very few people who voted for him citing this as one of their reasons to do it have definitively broken with him now that this has indeed been revealed to be a, ahem, fib. Witness here the pathetic young DOGED into oblivion forest ranger from Northern MI the WAPO reported on this spring, who ignored her better judgment last fall, to vote for Trump, because she and her husband had learned they needed IVF to conceive, and it is really expensive.
Can you imagine the social media reaction if any politician said publicly today, as John F. Kennedy did at his inauguration in 1961, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."? The derision would be massive and instantaneous, from the Right AND the Left.
Franklin warned us and Lincoln emphasized the point: we can only lose our country through suicide. We seem to be well on the way there.
It has been a long journey from the Peace Corps to the Prosperity Gospel, and the Greatest Generation guys chatting about hitting the beaches at Normandy to fight those fascists, to their children and grandchildren getting Nazi tatts and talking about how empathy is bad.
A long journey? That's for sure!
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil while the Senate Watergate hearings were taking place in Washington. One day an elderly lady (as I thought at the time; she was probably younger than I am now) that I didn't know stopped me on the street and said, "Your country is showing the whole world how free people govern themselves." Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship at the time, and her action was not without risk. She walked on and I never saw her again; I never forgot her, though.
Now, Brazil is teaching that same lesson to the United States and the rest of the world, and our government is sanctioning them for it.
Are you referring to that tariff Trump put on Brazil over Bolsonaro?
The Brazilians, having only had their current incarnation of democratic governance for forty years, still all know pretty much full well that democracy and the gifts it bestows are not etched on any society like an engraved diamond (probably mixing metaphors somehow here) and can easily be lost, and the habits of democratic governance need to be fostered and nurtured, and those fighting these habits resisted. Too many Americans nowadays know little other than what they read on social media, and too many older folks who know better have already passed, with sadly more passing daily. These kids are not responsible for what they have grown up with, and need to be shown a better way.
In light of Cheetolini's latest tantrum I find the photo taken in the oval office very interesting with the portrait of St Ronny Reagan overseeing...
The LAST place I would go to buy a prescription drug would be "TrumpRx.com".
When you go to the website, all you get is a blank screen. As expected.
Not even a “this site is under construction.”
He must have just told an aide to create the site.