The MS&L and Family Planning

I like to take the issues of the day and imagine how they would play out in the Medical Savings and Loan.

The big issue of the moment is that PPACA mandates that insurance includes contraceptive (including the morning after pill which prevents implantation after fertilization.) The Catholic Church holds that fertilization is conception.

The term "abortion" means to stop a process that has started. 

Theologians who see fertilization as conception would not call a pill that stops pregnancy after conception as a contraception. The would see a pill that aborts a pregnancy as something else.

PPACA mandates that Catholic organizations buy employees pills that they believe to be abortificants.

In the Medical Savings and Loan, people are self-financing their health care.

People wanting to buy the morning after pill would be doing some with their own money. This removes the issue of an church organization being directly forced to pay for a medicition that the church finds morally objectionable.

Whether or not this change would stop the debate is a different question.

The Medical Savings and Loan would change the political debate but not the moral debate raging around the issue of birth control.
The most interesting questions about family planning will come in the area of the Health Care Advocate.

In the Medical Savings and Loan, people are expected to self-fund their care and have access to health care advocates.

The first job of an advocate is to help people understand their health care expenses. Having children dramatically increases expenses.

The advocates will be drawn into heated discussions about when to start a family.

IMHO, this process of confronting people with all of the costs of having children will help them make better choices about when to have children.

On the dark side. The advocates are likely to have opinions about issues related to birth.

I would anticipate a large number of heated discussion about contraception, abortion, family planning and related matters between the advocates and others.

I suspect that there will be all sorts of political battles fought over what the advocates say and when they say it. I suspect that pundits on both the left and right will seek ways to compel the advocates to profess certain views.
The fact that people will be paying for contraception with their own money will change the issue but won't make a hotly contested political issue go away.

Personally, I think these important discussions are best handled at the personal level without government influence.

I also believe that confronting people with the cost of raising children well before they have children is a good thing as it will help parents be better prepared for the future.

The contraception issue should not be part of presidential politics. The fact that it is shows that PPACA is over the top.