We’ve said all along at IWF that the real war on women is the abysmal economy. Since President Obama took office, unemployment among women has gone up 15 percent.
But this will pale by comparison to what will happen to us in a second Obama administration when Obamacare begins fully to take effect. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Avik Roy—who blogs brilliantly as The Apothecary—has posts on this issue on Forbes (here) and National Review (here).
An out and out misanthrope could not have done a better job of coming up with ways to harm women than the geniuses who gave us Obamacare. Here are three highlights:
Medicaid. Medicaid is already a mess. Three-fifths of all Americans enrolled in Medicaid are women. Obamacare’s reckless expansion of this program places additional strains on the ability of states to serve their existing Medicaid population.
Female entrepreneurs. Women are expected to create a majority of new small-business jobs in the years to come; the number of businesses owned by women nearly doubled from 1987 to 2007. Obamacare hammers small businesses with additional taxes and the employer mandate requiring all businesses with 50 full-time workers or more to provide government-approved health insurance to their employees.
Women in service-industry jobs. Nine of ten women in the U.S. work in the service sector; i.e., non-industrial and non-industrial work. It’s hourly-wage service-sector businesses, such as retail and dining, that are most likely to pare back hourly work so as to avoid the Obamacare mandates. Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, is restricting some of its hourly workers to 29-hour work weeks in order to avoid the Obamacare employer mandate, which counts 30-hour work weeks as full-time.
The rates of survival from breast cancer are likely to decline under Obamacare. Currently, 84 percent of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer survive at least five years. The rates of survival are higher for those who have private insurance. Since Obamacare will funnel 11 to 17 million more people into the Medicaid system, this rate is likely to decline.
The breast cancer survival rate in the U.K., whose system was held out as a model by a prominent Obamacare designer, is 70 percent.
Mitt Romney is scheduled to give a big speech on the economy, probably tomorrow. I hope he talks about the war on women—the real war on women, the one that threatens our very lives.