In another example of how a certain facet of a story can attract attention while blinding some folks to a larger issue, the state legislature of Illinois just passed a statute forcing insurance companies to define as “infertile” those who actually ARE biologically fertile, but are homosexuals who won’t naturally be reproducing with their same-sex partner.
You read that right.
Raymond Wolfe reports for LifeSiteNews:
Illinois lawmakers passed a bill redefining infertility to apply to homosexuals and single people and mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other infertility services for LGBT-identifying individuals.
Chalk up another victory for wokeness and the postmodernist corruption of the language.
Illinois House Bill 3709 amends the state insurance code to classify infertility as ‘a person’s inability to reproduce either as a single individual or with a partner without medical intervention,’ or ‘otherwise based on a physician’s opinion.’ Infertility is currently defined in Illinois law as, among other things, ‘the inability to conceive after one year of unprotected sexual intercourse.’
Strange. Since individual humans can’t engage in asexual reproduction or parthenogenesis, the idea of a “single individual” creating offspring is curious. The issue of same-sex couples naturally reproducing is just as curious, of course.
Wolfe notes that some Illinois State Reps simply don’t understand these facts.
Democrat Rep. Margaret Croke of Chicago, who sponsored the legislation, had suggested that the biological definition of infertility in Illinois law was ‘discriminat(ing) against people who do want to become parents.’ House Bill 3709, in fact, ignores the reality that people are not ‘infertile’ simply for having an ‘inability to reproduce’ alone or with someone of the same sex.
And, as Wolfe observes:
Services that must be covered by (health insurers) for single or LGBT individuals under the bill include ‘in vitro fertilization, uterine embryo lavage, embryo transfer, artificial insemination, gamete intrafallopian tube transfer, zygote intrafallopian tube transfer, and low tubal ovum transfer.’
And this new application of government force on insurers gets darker when one considers the fact that the IVF process often leads to multiple embryos who are destroyed, a practice that would only increase as more people gain access to the insurance-covered procedure.
But these are bleak aspects of state coercion that should welcome people to focus on the baseline of it all: the state coercion.
The core of the problem creates all these strange re-writes to reality and the possibility that humans will be created, only to be dumped into the IVF death bin, and that core is the assumption that the state can tell people who enter the insurance field how they will do their business.
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Right now, one can liken this to a politician not being satisfied with the publications that a bookstore owner offers on his or her shelves. Would people find it acceptable for politicians threatening those booksellers with closure and fines if they don’t carry just the kinds of books, by the “kinds” of writers, that the politician dictates?
Why isn’t this principle of freedom granted to peaceful people offering health insurance?
The principle doesn’t need to be observed only after a striking issue like this has popped up in Illinois. It could have been seen decades ago, when numerous states in the US passed statutes mandating what is euphemistically called the “guaranteed issue” mandate on private insurance carriers.
Leveraging emotion from stories of people with preexisting conditions having to pay more for insurance or not being able to get coverage because they represented too high a risk, leftists in both the Democrat and Republican parties in legislatures across the country said, essentially, “We don’t like that, and we’re going to MAKE you do business the way WE WANT!”
Hence, they forced insurers to accept people with preexisting conditions, people who already were ill, people who were recognizably going to cost the companies more…
Kind of like forcing a property insurance company to issue coverage to someone whose home already is on fire.
That’s not insurance. That’s state-mandated subsidy, i.e., forced payoffs.
And it inspired young, healthy people to avoid getting health insurance until after they got sick. Since they had other bills, and could get “coverage” after they got ill, they didn’t get policies, thus starving insurance companies of the “clean” money normally coming in to their actuarially-based income streams. This caused insurance companies to have to raise their rates, inspiring even more people to drop their policies, which, of course, inspired even more price jumps. I watched it happen in NH after “guaranteed issue” was passed here in the mid-1990s, and, two years after the statute was passed, rates had doubled, there were 40 percent fewer people under 35 with policies (during a good economy), and eight of the 10 private carriers had left the state.
The point is that the foundational problem in Illinois is the first assumption that government can tell private business to cover anyone, for anything. This new wrinkle in the story makes it more immediately bizarre and visible, and it allows us to see the longer-lasting lesson in ethics and economics that exists regardless of how bizarre or frightening the later manifestation of that initial breach of ethics and private business.
Wolfe notes that Illinois…
…joins a host Democrat-run states such as New York in liberalizing insurance requirements in line with LGBT ideology. Along with Illinois, Washington also moved this year to conform health insurance plans to the LGBT agenda, enacting a law two weeks ago requiring transgender surgeries be covered by carriers.
Until the 20th Century, the term “liberal” used to mean pro-liberty, and, outside political circles, it still carries connotations of “wide-open and accepting.” But within government, something is not “liberalizing” when it mandates actions on businesses. It might be “liberal” nowadays, but forcing “openness” IS force, and it has nothing to do with freedom.
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