Today’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup included this tweet from Larry Levitt:
There are many downsides to our employer-based health insurance system.
But, it is hard to imagine a public single payer plan covering abortions and related travel expenses for people in states where abortion is now banned.
No doubt the Twitter piling on is as seismic as Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony and I’ll forego adding to the angst.
I’m a recent retiree who benefitted from employer-based insurance. I believe that the M4A disruption factor is real. I’m unimpressed with the case made so far by M4A advocates. Moreover, based on my initial dealings with Medicare, it is a bureaucratic mire that makes dealing with insurance companies look like driving through a green light. I.e., I’m not reflexively unsympathetic to Levitt’s overall point that some employer plans are providing something of an unexpected backstop, and that this is laudable. Fair enough as far as it goes (which isn’t very far).
But the greater point is this: If the country had reached a consensus that health care is a fundamental right, its politics could not only yield M4A, it would never have elected presidents and senators who put the likes of Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on the Supreme Court in the first place. Even the most conservative states would have put the abortion issue behind them long ago. There would be no Dobbs decision because there would be no SCOTUS majority to make it and there would be no trap laws to trigger it. Abortion would be a long-established and uncontroversial right and be readily available in the bargain.
Instead, Dobbs reinforces the privilege and disconnect of what Jia Tolentino calls the “impervious class”:
those who support the right to abortion have tacitly accepted that poor and minority women in conservative states lost access to abortion long before this Supreme Court decision, and have quietly hoped that the thousands of women facing arrest after pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, or even healthy deliveries were unfortunate outliers.
Women fortunate enough to work for certain companies have options (for now). But too many others are left out in the cold. Thus, one effect of Dobbs is to further cement the elitism that the Republican Party claims to oppose. This is what comes from returning the authority to regulate or prohibit abortion to the tender mercies of “the citizens of each State…and their elected representatives,” especially where the voting rights of said citizens have been eviscerated by the same Court that professes to revere them.
