8 April—As short sellers celebrate having made their killings like big-time bandits (which they are) with the windfall profits they realized in last week’s monumentally precipitous stock market tumble, this week it looks like at least some of the distressed equities are being revived. In anticipation of the next market cataclysm.

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This is the text of this morning’s Mallard Filmore comic strip: “Now that the JFK files have been released, we have over 60,000 pages of records about an assassination that happened six decades ago . . . / . . . Which is approximately 60,000 more pages than we have on the guy who tried to assassinate Trump eight months ago.”

Point taken. But Loren Fishman, who does the Filmore strip these days with or for Bruce Tinsley, conveniently ignores the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a better marksman than Thomas Matthew Crooks and actually accomplished his mission. Still, it’s incredible that Crooks was able to come so close. For better or worse.

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Health insurance generally doesn’t cover voluntary procedures unless they’re deemed medically necessary. And well it shouldn’t. So why are virtually all health and hospitalization policies required to cover pregnancy? Except in cases of rape, after all, pregnancy certainly must be considered as voluntary as sexual intercourse, even though it may not be expected nor desired. And don’t bring up the surprise factor after voluntary intercourse. No excuses.

Medicare is medical insurance mostly for people over 65, by which age virtually all women will have gone through menopause. Yet Medicare covers pregnancy.

Postmenopausal women on Medicare can become pregnant through artificial means including in vitro fertilization. Happily, that’s not covered by Medicare. (Or Medicaid, but that’s a whole nother story.) But the State of Connecticut mandates that private insurance cover IVF when medically necessary.

So that takes us right back to the purely voluntary state of pregnancy. When is pregnancy medically necessary? Why should it ever be? Does infertility put a man’s or woman’s physical health at risk? When is production of offspring medically necessary?

Why, then, should people who pay premiums for health insurance be forced to cover the cost of purely voluntary procedures involving pregnancy—including getting pregnant in the first place?