The Real 'War on Women,' Courtesy of ObamaCare

Grasping for straws, desperate Obama supporters continue to try to draw on the “war on women” canard, even with a tawdry video that uses sex to excite young women into voting for Barack Obama, if only for the free birth control promised in ObamaCare’s HHS mandate. What we are discovering, however, is that there is a real “war on women” going on, and it comes to us courtesy of the president’s signature health care law.

We have already observed that ObamaCare presents an obstacle to American women economically because many business owners, fearful of how the law will affect them, have stopped hiring due to the employer mandate. This section of the law coerces employers to provide a minimum of health insurance benefits to employees as defined by the federal government.

In addition, we saw that ObamaCare negatively impacts senior women, first because of the $716 billion that is taken from Medicare to pay for the new health law. As a result of this transfer of funds, doctors will continue to stop accepting Medicare patients since reimbursement rates will decline, resulting in longer lines to get in to see fewer Medicare providers. Second, senior women are likely to be denied care in the form of surgeries or treatments due to the law’s establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the unelected group of government bureaucrats that will be in charge of rationing care to cut costs.

But it turns out the IPAB is not the only “board” that ObamaCare empowers. ObamaCare, it seems, is obsessed with the phrase that the left has usurped, from the field of medicine, and politicized to mean “abortion and contraception,” i.e., “women’s preventive health services.” New boards, like the US Preventive Services Task Force, will serve to assess contraception and other “preventive” services to determine which should be covered in full, without copays. To offset the costs of these freebies, insurance companies will need to drop coverage for some services and treatments that don’t make the new board’s cut, and American women may not like what the board members decide. In 2009, the Preventive Services Task Force made the unpopular decision to advocate that women between the ages of 40-49 should not get routine mammograms.

Which women’s health benefits can we expect will be deep-sixed as a result of the Preventive Services Task Force? According to Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute, a few items that are likely to be rebuffed by the task force, depending on the political winds that blow, are:

• Chlamydia screening in most women over 25
• Cervical cancer screening in those over 65
• Routine tests to detect viruses that cause cervical cancer
• Breast cancer screening using digital mammography or MRI instead of the traditional plain film
• Screening for ovarian cancer and genetic tests that raise women’s risk of breast cancer
• Clinical breast exams in women older than 40
• Education on breast self-examination

Per the prescription of Nancy Pelosi, we have found out more about ObamaCare since Congress passed it. How timely that we now discover that ObamaCare is the real culprit in the war on women.