Some individuals are corporations. For example, a lawyer may likely be a professional services corporation. An entertainer may be a corporation.
In a similar vein, certain wedding service providers may not allow themselves to participate in a perversity of marriage known as homosexual marriage. The question is do they have the right to refrain from participating in an activity that is clearly a violation of their religious teaching? The answer is yes they do have that right but the state says they concurrently lose the right to be in business.
Returning to Hobby Lobby the same question arises: does Hobby Lobby have the right to select which health coverage they pay for as compensation for their employees?
From a different perspective the recognition that employee benefits are in fact a compensation to employees as a part of their overall pay package, does the government have the authority to decide for employers what an employee compensation package should look like?
The benefits of employer sponsored health plans are lower costs and higher coverage. Individual plans cannot compete with employer sponsored plans. To force, as Sotomayor said, employers to drop their sponsored health plans and allow employees to go to the exchanges is to consign an employee’s health to an inferior plan with an ultimate risk of death due to lack of coverage or lack of doctors. But even putting aside this argument of hysterical reality, it is important to note the government is interfering with a business’ model when a remedy would be to simply tax the employee.
Without any religious argument, an employer should be free to choose the total compensation plan for their employees. In fact, this is often a part of a business plan as a retention policy as well as an action of business branding.
A company may be known by how it treats its employees and for many companies it is their employees that represent the most important asset of the company.
What the government is doing is back-handed. They are forcing a cost on the employer without that cost represented as a tax. If an employee paycheck had a field for an abortion related tax, then the roles and responsibilities would be much clearer.
The word "individual" means a human being operating in a corporate capacity, either as a corporate officer, or personally within a professional corporate capacity.
The actual work of a lawyer or an entertainer is their work alone, for which they may be sued in their personal capacities. If they choose to incorporate, and represent their work THROUGH that corporation, then they voluntarily surrender their rights for taxed and regulated corporate privileges, in return for personal indemnification.
Returning to Hobby Lobby the same question arises: does Hobby Lobby have the right to select which health coverage they pay for as compensation for their employees?
"Hobby Lobby" is a corporation. A corporation has no rights. Corporations have privileges which are extended to them by the government solely at the pleasure of the government, and for the purposes of the government alone.
I'm not makin this stuff up - this is what these lawyers argue about in front of the Court. Everyone knows the law - what the lawyers argue about is what is in the best interests OF THE STATE. That's what Hobby Lobby's own lawyer is arguing - that it is in the interests of the State to extend the PRIVILEGE of religious freedom to the Hobby Lobby corporation. THAT is what the Justices are trying to decide.