Your Opinion: Expand Medicaid

Dear Editor:

While the Legislature fails to even debate expanding Medicaid and closing the health insurance coverage gap, they use their time to try to over-regulate the state's only abortion clinic, applying unnecessary scrutiny to which other outpatient surgery centers are not subjected.

If the stringent regulation prescribed for the abortion clinic were indeed proposed out of concern for the well-being of women, as is sometimes disingenuously claimed, then why not apply the same standard to plastic surgery centers and facilities performing eye surgeries? Are their potential adverse surgical outcomes less onerous than anything that can happen during an abortion? Only if the only value women hold is their reproductive capacity.

In fact, the rate of adverse events associated with abortion is about the same as that with oral surgery.

What about the effect on women resulting from the loss of 1,800 health care jobs in Missouri thus far and closure of three rural hospitals due to failure to expand Medicaid? Are they unconcerned about women having to drive 50 miles for medical care, perhaps in an emergency situation, perhaps in labor?

It is enlightening to see legislators quake when they present their ludicrous anti-woman bills in committee hearings and endure the questioning of our valiant few feminist legislators. Clearly, the true source of their over-wrought hysterical reactions to the specter of women fully participating in the social, economic and political spheres of society is that their own inadequacies will be exposed by comparison.

The people of this state have spent countless hours over a number of years now pleading for health care. Hundreds filled the Capitol for five hours on Thursday. Some have been arrested at the Capitol in that quest. Others have died waiting for health care coverage. The issue deserves a floor debate and a vote, the sooner the better.

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