Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
The House and Senate bills both contain measures that restrict health insurance coverage for abortions. When you consider that the vast majority of private policies currently cover these services, this is a genuine step backwards for women's right to choose, in both practical and symbolic terms. Feminists are rightly livid, doubly so because they realize that these provisions are unlikely to be greatly softened given the delicate political compromises required to pass a health reform bill.
One question deserves more careful thought than it has received: How much will these measures actually prevent women from securing access to abortions? This is an empirical question. We don't precisely know the answer. It's depressingly unsurprising that most people's responses to this question are highly correlated with their political and moral views.
Moderates and conservatives note that the average cost of an abortion in America is less than $400. A woman determined to have one can hit the ATM, write a check, run up her credit card, borrow from a relative or a friend, or hit the local payday loan store. Poor people pay surprising amounts for cell phones and cable TV. They can be surprisingly resourceful in paying for abortions, too.
Zubin did a fascinating item last week about how, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the recession might be causing to people to retire sooner rather than later (in the aggregate). He pointed to the conclusion of this paper by economists Courtney Coile and Phillip Levine:
When the unemployment rate rises, more workers between ages 62 and 69 retire, particularly those with less education. ... On net, we predict that the increase in retirement brought about [by] the recent rise in unemployment will be almost 50 percent larger than the decrease in retirement brought about by the stock market crash.
Specifically: Coile and Phillip predicted that 258,000 workers would postpone retirement because of a drop in the value of their nest eggs, while 378,000 would retire earlier than planned because they were out of work and unlikely to find a new job.
But, as it happens, the bloggers over at the Office of Management and Budget recently did an item on the same phenomenon and came to a different conclusion:
While the impact of falling stock prices on older workers' retirement decisions has received a lot of attention this downturn, the more important driver of retirement rates appears to be unemployment, according to new research by Courtney Coile and Phillip Levine. (Sorry, pay-version only.) Using 30 years of data on changes in home and stock prices and labor market conditions, they conclude:
