If you’re in NYS, DO NOT SIGN UP WITH FIDELIS CARE.
If you support real religious freedom (i.e. your religious choices are between you and your god, you have a right to privacy)
if you have endometreosis or any other complex reproductive-system-related condition
if you want to keep seeing your gyno, and want to be able to access all the services your gyno provides
DO NOT SIGN UP WITH FIDELIS.
They don’t have the guts to say this anywhere you’d notice it while you’re perusing the plan benefits– I actually did try quite hard to go through all the fine print but I missed it. And clearly, New York State expects you to miss it. Because when I signed up, after a couple of months, they sent me this letter, which clearly indicates that they didn’t expect me to already have realized this:
“Fidelis, the health plan you joined, does not pay for family planning services.” (That last is bold and underlined.)
The back side of the letter tells me to go to Planned Parenthood. Here’s the whole text:
(Photo is of a list of places in several counties where you can get family planning services. Note that one of the counties in the list contains no family planning clinics and lists no options.)
I have a primary care physician who does my gyno care. This tells me, in effect, that I’m going to have to find another gyno to do that, because my insurance company won’t reimburse my PCP for a visit where she mentions birth control.
Now, what my personal medical needs are, are immaterial to this discussion, but I am making this post because I know a lot of people are trying to choose plans right now. And it is NOT OBVIOUS that Fidelis is a Catholic company– they changed their name from Catholic Health Plan of NYS for that reason, I think.
So– BE AWARE, because they’re sure as hell not going to make it obvious.
I don’t know if this is legal in any other states, or if Fidelis exists in any other states, but LOOK FOR THIS KIND OF THING when you sign up!! Explicitly CHECK TO MAKE SURE.
I am going to switch away from Fidelis not because I can’t stand to go to Planned Parenthood, but because I don’t want to support a company in any way that feels it can dictate my health choices because of its religious beliefs.
Thank you for the clarification! Excellently researched!
As the article states, it’s clearly not something that’s obvious when you’re signing up for healthcare. It shouldn’t be legal, and yet, they do it. And they don’t exactly announce that they’re doing it.
NY State residents, please be aware that on Election Day (11/7), the BACK of the ballot will have a referendum to vote on convening a NY Constitutional Convention. Placing it on the back of the ballot was a DELIBERATE move.
If it passes, it could be a disaster for ALL CURRENT AND FORMER NY State (including state, city, county, town, village and school district) public employees (police officers, firefighters, corrections officers, teachers, sanitation workers, teaching aides, librarians, bus drivers, lunch aides, highway workers, board of elections, etc.) who could stand to lose a great deal, including part or all of their pensions or medical benefits (even those who have already retired), that they were promised in return for their commitment to their careers in public service.
If you love anyone that is currently, or has ever been a NY public employee, please TURN YOUR BALLOT OVER and vote “NO”.
Okay, hold on. The framing here matters, and as a resident of New York I have to say that the OP’s framing and context is woefully inadequate. It’s technically correct but in a way that is incredibly incomplete, and frankly I feel like it is incomplete in a way that’s deliberately manipulative.
First off: we have to have this question put on the ballot every twenty years. (Ironically? Changing that is something that can only be accomplished by changing the state Constitution, which requires… a convention!) It was on the ballot in 1997. It was on the ballot in 1977 and 1957 too, and in-between the ‘57 and and ‘77 ones we actually had an out-of-sequence convention that made some modest changes. This isn’t some weird, unusual scam; this is just something that happens periodically up here.
It’s on the back of the ballot because we always use both sides of the ballot when space doesn’t permit everything to go on one side of it. Someones ox was gonna get gored here. It’s not a conspiracy; somebody was going to end up on the back. This should probably be changed, but our stupid optical scan voting machines become even more unwieldy if we have to futz around with multiple sheets of paper. If, like me, you think all voting should involve nothing more high-tech than a pen and a piece of paper, counted by hand, a good way to enshrine that change would be via a state constitutional convention.
The OP is right that it “could” be a disaster for state employees. But that’s only true in the sense that anything that has the power to fundamentally enshrine changes in the supreme laws of the state could be a disaster for literally anyone. So it could be a disaster for state employees. It could also be a huge disaster for, say, Wall Street. Or forced birthers. Or those “New York should split into two states” assholes who want to sever upstate from the city, which would basically destroy upstate’s tax base.
Anything a constitutional convention proposes has to go before the state, again, in order to be approved for inclusion into said constitution. It won’t just be a shadowy cabal; they have to get the people to ratify.
Having said all that… I’m still probably going to vote no on it.
Why? Because nobody was really prepared for this thing, which is kind of a big failure on the party of New York progressive politics because we absolutely saw this coming. Literally years away! It was scheduled. We ought to have had big plans for how to take advantage of it in ways that could deeply benefit our state. We could have enshrined a lot of really good shit into the highest (non-federal) law in the state. We could have done awesome stuff like, oh, say… abolishing the state senate. (Fuck bicameralism, by the way.) All kinds of cool shit.
But we weren’t ready. This sort of snuck up on people, and the current political environment, both within the state and the country, is pretty chaotic. And the Democratic Party in New York State, which would be taking the lead on any progressive or liberal pushes for change at a hypothetical constitutional convention, is quite frankly not to be trusted. We picked Andrew ‘fuckin Cuomo as our standard-bearer, after all.
I flirted with the idea of voting yes, if for no other reason than in my particular neck of the woods, “Vote No on the CON CON” signs are overwhelmingly in the same yards of the racist fucks with “MAGA” and “RESPECT THE SECOND AMENDMENT” signs. But ultimately I gotta say we just aren’t ready, and this is a very important thing that sort of requires us to be ready. So I’m a no, but a soft no.
But if you come to that decision, try and have all the facts. You shouldn’t listen only to me and you DEFINITELY shouldn’t listen only to the OP, who has given you a very, VERY slanted viewpoint on it. Go read up on it elsewhere as well. Take wisdom from many different places.
SliceOSunshine 