This story is utterly unremarkable, in this case reported by Jacqueline Tempera of the Providence Journal:

Two female lawmakers stressed the importance of protecting women’s access to birth control on a state level in a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

Rep. Katherine Kazarian, D-East Providence, and Sen. Dawn Euer, D-Jamestown, introduced matching bills this session that would protect a woman’s access to birth control in Rhode Island, regardless of any changes at the federal level….

A key provision in the ACA allows women to access birth control pills, as well as long-term options such as intrauterine devices, known as IUDs, or other implants, for a $0 co-pay.

In the past, I’ve mainly let this sort of rhetoric go with a simple question about why lawmakers want to forbid people from buying less-expensive insurance that only includes coverage for things that they need.  That’s really what’s going on, here.  Kazarian and Euer want men to pay for women’s birth control.  (Note: The legislation explicitly leaves out coverage of male condoms and sterilization for men.)  They want older women to pay for younger women’s birth control.  They want people who aren’t having sex to pay for the birth control of people who are.  They want Catholics and others who don’t use birth control because of their religious beliefs to have to pay for the very same products being used by other people.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking of what the elevation of this particular type of health care fundamentally means.  Every now and then, I’ll come across a request from some Rhode Island family asking people to donate to help them stay afloat while dealing with the sudden onset of a child’s life-threatening disease.  Throughout Rhode Island, parents with children who have genetic diseases have no choice but to find some way to afford the copays for life-preserving treatments that will never become unnecessary, unless some miraculous cure is found.  And of course, neither of these challenges goes away when the children become adults.

Perhaps Kazarian and Euer would insist that they’d support socialized health care that claims to make all medicine “free.”  Put the wisdom of that proposal aside.  What they’re pursuing right now is to make sure that women don’t have to pay for products that let them have sex while minimizing the chance of pregnancy.  That’s their priority, and it tells us a whole lot about what they believe.