What’s YOUR Vision of Love?

Help create an (Unofficial) Official Video and/or Cover Art for Kris’s new single!

 

A new era in Kris Allen’s career has dawned, and we want to see what it inspires in YOU, his biggest fans. Create a video, or design your own single artwork; it’s up to you!

 

Be creative!

 

You can feature pictures or videos of Kris (with the photographer’s permission) or anything else that the song inspires.

 

And why should you take part in this contest?

 

●      One, it’s a great way to help Kris’s single go viral. You never know, you might just create the next Party “Rock” anthem video.

 

●      Two, we’re going to hook the winner up with a gift card to the official Kris Allen Merch store, to let you pick up some of the new schwag that should be rolling out there soon (we hope)!

 

All submissions will be voted on by fans!

 

To be clear, yes, we know that Kris and his people are hard at work creating what will no doubt be a SIZZLING album/single cover, and who knows what he’s got up his sleeve for a video (we hope it’s not another desert). Why not have some ~uninhibited fun while we wait?

Find out more information here.  http://the-dirty-minds.com/profiles/blogs/what-s-your-vision-of-love

The Contraceptive Controversy: An Obstetrician’s Perspective

I usually try to avoid political controversy.  For the record, I am a registered Independent, so I have no political skin in this game.  As a perinatologist who only takes care of patients when they are pregnant and in the early postpartum period, my only professional interface with contraception is for the first 6 weeks postpartum, so it is not how I make my living.  I say all this so you will know that on this subject, I can be as unbiased as a intimately informed provider can be.

As you know, the Democrats want to make contraception a right that is provided at no charge to the patient.  Hopefully, no one really thinks that these services are free.  If you do, you should probably stop reading now.  Someone is paying for them.  The Democrats want to shift that cost from the patient to either the insurance companies, the employers, or the taxpayers.  Those of us who know how the world works realize that the cost shifts to the insurance companies will be paid by those of us who buy insurance, as the costs will either make premiums higher, deductibles higher, or co-pays higher.  The insurance companies will not be the ones taking the hit for this, of that we can be sure.  As employers, either we take less profit and suck up the costs of higher insurance premiums for our employees, or do as many have done, raise everyone’s deductibles or lay off or do not hire more employees to cut costs.  As employees, we are stuck with either paying a larger percentage of our health care costs, having a higher deductible for everything, or opting out of certain parts of health care packages such as dental, optical, or prescription drug coverage to make our “out of paycheck” costs less.  Clearly though, the costs are only being shifted, not eliminated.

For unemployed or underemployed people, either the Medicaid programs or other State-sponsored charity care programs will be saddled with the costs.  Most of these programs have to allocate their dollars very carefully to be sure that critical care is provided to low-income families.  Many states are insufficiently funded as it is, and this will provide an even more insurmountable barrier to providing basic care to all.

Before you quit reading and think I am against providing equal access to contraceptive services, let me say without hesitation that the way the Republicans are handling this issue is deplorable.  They are making it a religious freedom issue, which is inexcusable in my mind.  Many cities in this country are like mine.  There are 2 major public hospitals: one with a religious affiliation and one without.  There is also a major military hospital and a Native hospital.  Most major insurance companies have bid their services to the institutions and when an employer chooses an insurance company for their employees, the employees are then stuck with a “preferred provider”.  In most cases, that means that there is a large financial disincentive to the employee to have care at the non-preferred hospital.  So if your insurance company’s preferred hospital is the one with the religious affiliation, you are punished.

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you are having your last baby at the hospital with the religious affiliation.  You want to have your tubes tied, so as to make the contraceptive problem moot.  You have an epidural for your anesthesia during labor.  In the hospital with no religious affiliation, right after you have your baby, you would have your tubal ligation under the same epidural as you had your baby.  But in the hospital with the religious affiliation, you can’t have the tubal because it’s against the creed of this institution.  If you had known that, you would have had your baby in the other hospital.  However since this is your insurance company’s preferred hospital, you would’ve have to spend significantly more money to have your baby at the other hospital.  So now you’re stuck having your baby, having the epidural catheter removed, being discharged, being readmitted to another institution, and undergoing the additional risk and expense of another anesthetic procedure.

In some cases, it is actually dangerous for a patient to become pregnant for a period of time following another pregnancy.  Some woman should not become pregnant at all but cannot for medical reasons undergo the stresses of surgical sterilization.  There are all sorts of reasons for women not to become pregnant, not the least of which is that they just don’t desire to at the time.  In my opinion, if an insurance company has a prescription drug program, it should cover all prescriptions, contraceptives included.  For those people who cannot afford it, low income services such as Planned Parenthood and other public and private agencies that provide care for low-income patients should be fully funded to provide these services.  From purely a fiscal point of view, most everyone knows that it is infinitely cheaper to provide effective contraception than it is to cover a pregnancy.  Most insurance companies or employers get around this by limiting or completely disallowing pregnancy services.  Make no mistake; contraceptives are expensive.  Not because individually they are so expensive, but because they are so universally used, and some of the most commonly written prescriptions on the planet.  Women often wonder why contraceptives are not covered and Viagra is.  Even ignoring the feminist issues here, contraceptives are orders of magnitude more expensive because the number of people using them and the frequency of use make them much more expensive to cover than Viagra.  As for most things, the answer to the question is follow the money.

So what’s the answer to this problem?  Information, not obfuscation.  Ignore the moronic bleating of the Republicans who make this into a religious freedom issue.  When they become a preferred provider for a pluralistic society, that argument no longer holds water.  They have every right to not use contraception themselves and to encourage their parishioners not to as well.  But when they take on a secular contract for providing health care for the general public not affiliated with their church, all bets are off.  If they don’t want to follow the Federal government’s rules, let them quit using government monies for funding. 

On the other hand, don’t be taken in by the “let’s just make everything free for everyone” bleating of the Democrats.  If as a society we think that contraceptive services for everyone are important, let’s decide as a society to pay for them.  But let’s be sure that that burden is equitably shared, and let’s not pretend that it is not a burden.  It is not for free, and we must pay the price one way or the other.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is just burying their head in the sand. 

Thanks for reading.

Sherrie Richey MD, FACOG-MFM

President, Alaska Perinatology Associates