[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
“First lady Michelle Obama will be speaking out to remove barriers to breastfeeding,” Politics Daily reported yesterday, “throwing the spotlight on nursing as a way to reduce childhood obesity.”
“Barriers” to breastfeeding? What could they be? Well, whatever they are, they appear (not surprisingly, given Michelle’s interest) to have a disparate impact.
Breastfeeding rates are low among African-American mothers compared to other racial and ethnic groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mrs. Obama took note of this when she addressed the Congressional Black Caucus Conference on Sept. 10.
“And because it’s important to prevent obesity early, we’re also working to promote breastfeeding, especially in the black community — where 40 percent of our babies never get breastfed at all, even in the first weeks of life, and we know that babies that are breastfed are less likely to be obese as children,” she said.
The First Lady, according to Politics Daily, “is going to tread carefully in what might be a sensitive area for some women — and not use her bully pulpit to directly ask more women to breast feed.”
I suspect breasts and their use are “a sensitive area” for all women, not just some, but even though Mrs. Obama may not want “to directly ask more women to breast feed” she apparently has no inhibitions against encouraging the IRS to bestow governmental favors on those who do:
Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service announced Thursday that the costs for “breast pumps and supplies that assist lactation are medical care” are now, under the IRS code eligible for tax breaks. That means that breastfeeding supplies could be treated as deductible medical expenses and/or be reimbursed under flexible spending plans.
Perhaps the White House and the IRS have forgotten that one of the most controversial features of Obamacare was its tax on “medical devices.” If they have, Googling “Obamacare tax ‘medical devices’” returns 227,000 hits. Don’t worry; I’m not going to point to them all, but here’s a typical one: “Medtronic, a maker of medical devices, predicted it will cut 1,000 jobs to cover a new ObamaCare tax on medical devices.” One more: “The total tax on the [medical device] industry would be about $2 billion a year, or $20 billion over the next decade.”
As Byron York points out in the article just linked, Zoll Medical Corporation in Chelmsford, Mass, about 30 miles outside Boston, “is the nation’s leading manufacturer of heart defibrillators, which save thousands of heart attack victims each year.” Obamacare’s medical device tax “‘will cost us somewhere between $5 million and $10 million a year,’ says Richard Packer, Zoll’s chairman and chief executive officer. ‘Our profit in 2009 was $9.5 million.’”
York concludes that “the makers of the devices that save our lives are to take a major hit.” Unless, of course, the devices encourage behavior that is favored by the first lady.
UPDATE
Megan McArdle reports today that in its frantic search for “Ever-More-Desperate Health Care Budget Gimmicks” to pay for the very expensive “doctor fix,” President Obama’s budget was forced to pay for the first two years of the fix by proposing various spending cuts out over ten years. One of those cuts is “Lower Medicaid reimbursements for home medical equipment: $6.45 billion over 10 years.”
The “breast pumps and supplies that assist lactation” have received waivers from the Obamacare tax on medical devices, but will the Medicaid reimbursements for those devices be lowered or continue at their previous level?
Does Mrs. Obama know about this? If the reimbursement rate is lowered, that would mean that the administration has given a tax break to rich breastfeeders while imposing higher costs on poor ones. (I’m sorely tempted to say that the First Lady will deserve some sort of booby prize if this rank unfairness is not corrected, but I won’t….)
