The White House has a neat-ola website where you can tell the President what it means to you to get the 40 dollars per month back that you'll get if the Republicans let the payroll tax cut extension pass.
I told President Obama what $40/month means to me, and you should too, if this situation sounds at all familiar.
Here's what I said:
You know what? That $40/month is not even quite enough to pay the giant ($50) monthly co-pay on my birth control, which is fortunately covered by my insurance to at least some extent, so that I don't have to choose between medicine and food.
The co-pay waiver won't help me. Within the next couple of years (no doubt before my employer-provided insurance changes enough to lose its grandfathered status) I will most likely be too old to be prescribed hormonal birth control.
I have been paying that $50/month co-pay now for several years. Not even so I can run wild in the streets like the Slutty McSlutterson Rick Santorum fantasizes that I am. Nope, I take it so that I, in my middle-aged nun-like celibate singlehood, can have monthly ladytimes that don't make me feel too sick and crappy to work. In order to keep the side effects of this "miracle medicine" low enough to be worthwhile, I need a special low dose transdermal kind, not the old-school, generic, take by mouth kind. And so every single month, under my semi-adequate employer provided health plan, I pay $50 for the privilege of taking this medicine.
I want to see some Democrats putting their damned foot down on this issue, instead of respectfully treating the Republicans like it's open for debate and maybe not so important after all. Don't just fight to cover the Catholic workers. Don't just cover people who are "grandfathered". Free birth control for all, even me, at my advanced age.
Dammit.
And then they need to put their other damned foot down and make abortion safe, legal, and doable without state-sanctioned nonconsensual penetration, nationwide. Because I am the 50.8%, dammit, and this party better start thinking about being responsive to women instead of to the minority crazies, or it's going to follow the Republican Party down the drain.