Hey, the bad guys didn’t win this round. That may not qualify as victory per se, but for the 15 million who would lose their insurance within the year (and the 22 million by 2026) it’s not the slaughter that seemed inevitable given that the government — all branches but the DMV — is controlled by Republicans. The great splashing sound you won’t hear is that of the women and orphans being tossed overboard, at least not this week. Not even the mouth-watering prospect of defunding Planned Parenthood, it turned out, was enough to unify the seismically fractured Republican Party behind its plans to deep-six the Affordable Care Act (ACA). For the time being — at least two weeks — the ACA remains the law of the land. That means insurance plans will still cover the cost of pharmaceutically induced erections that can last four hours if they’re proved to be a medical hedge against depression. Likewise, maternity care must still be covered, despite Republican insistence that states should have the right not to require this. So much for motherhood and apple pie.
For Santa Barbara — socked in by the most oppressive June Gloom to occupy the southland since, well, last year — the big news, of course, is the unfortunate limbo in which the much-beleaguered tanning salon industry has found itself since the passage of the ACA, which imposed a special tax on these businesses. Not everyone, it turns out, is as at ease with their fish-belly whiteness as I am. For such people, summers can be cruel without the sanctuary of a tanning bed unto which they can retreat. Taxes were also imposed on real medical device manufacturers and people making scads of dough — to help underwrite the massive government subsidies, roughly $800 billion. Those subsidies bought insurance for people who were legally required to have insurance but could not otherwise afford the premiums. This level of transactional complexity, by the way, is exactly what’s driving the surging popularity of the single-payer universal-health-care movement that currently has half the Democratic Party trying to chew the face off the other half. So much for the solidarity of resistance.
As Republicans struggle with what to do about women — certainly not appoint them to any committees making health-care policy — they have embraced the tanning salon tax as a demonstration of their concern for the “better half,” also known as the “weaker sex.” The Republican argument is that the 10 percent tax imposed on the tanning salon industry oppressively targets women because women, it turns out, avail themselves of these contraptions far more than men. In fact, they have cited studies purporting to show that $480 million of the $600 million in taxes collected from tanning salon operations have come from the pockets of women. That this is as close as Republicans can bring themselves to standing up for women might explain why males of this species feel so oddly compelled to repeatedly point out that they, too, have wives, mothers, and sisters.