Posted on 11/20/2012 1:12:51 PM PST by NYer
First Amendment rights are limited when there is a direct adverse effect on other people - like shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. The choice of a business owner to offer or not offer specific employment benefits should not even require First Amendment protection. Note that there is no discrimination in the particular example of whether or not a health insurance plan covers abortion related medications. If anything, the plan discriminates against men since they don't get the same benefit.
Private health insurance plans have a variety of limitations and covered and non-covered items. Why is the government involved in this at all? There is no harm to the employee from not getting many particular benefits, since they may never even use it, and in this particular example the cost of the medicine in question is minimal, and the "benefit" not being offered to the employees is, taken over the whole of the employees, negligible. Nobody that is employed needs insurance to protect themselves from a $50.00 risk.
Put another way, the government is proposing millions of dollars of fines because the employer won't agree to pay for a $50.00 pill that some small percentage of its 13,000 employees may rarely buy. Assuming half of its employees are men, 6,500 employees could potentially use a morning after pill. But of the women, no doubt some are too old to need such a thing, and many are married and also not as likely to be interested in a morning after pill. Some women of course are already using birth control. So for the men, the benefit being "denied" is of no personal value. For the women, it is the probability that they need or want the morning after pill times its cost. Overall I doubt you can show any harm to any employee from the lack of the benefit, and hence logically there is no reason to compel insurance for it.
But that's not the logic behind the law. The goal of the law is to force acceptance of a particular political viewpoint advocated by liberal Democrats, using huge fines as the hammer to force people to give up their values and viewpoint.
Donald, neither insurance nor charity are contradictory to conservatism. EXCESSIVE TAXATION is contradictory to conservatism because it is INVOLUNTARY. Conservatism is defined by free people who are free to make their own decisions on how they run their own life.
Ask your liberal friends why health care should be the only industry funded by taxation and a single-payer system. Why not do the same with food, clothing, housing, education, transporation, news, entertainment, etc.? If the government is so good that they can give us better health care through single-payer than through any other economic system, why should we not entrust everything else we consume to their perfectly fair, efficient and effective central planning?
“if the employer doesn’t provide health insurance he should at least pay his employees enough so they can purchase their own”
He will, or he won’t have employees, or at least not not valuable employees. That’s how the labor market works. Unless it’s a crap job, in which case traditionally young and healthy people work them.
“I’m all for moving away from an employer/insurance model and for going directly to a single-payer system supported by tax revenues”
Why, on earth? That’s like curing a headache by hitting yourself in the head with a sledgehammer.
“as (my ultralib friends) keep reminding me, your argument above is also counter to the whole purpose of insurance, the spreading of burdensome costs.”
A lib would say that. In what world is voluntarily entering a scheme whereby you may end up paying for other people’s misfortunes or them yours counter to taking responsibility for your own life? Only an adolescent mind could see no difference between private risk hedging and burden spreading and the State stealing money from Peter to pay for Paul’s cancer.
There is something very wrong with the education and mental state of a man/judge who rules that organizations and probably by his rules individuals are now in the USA no longer allowed to follow their consciences as to established and inherent religious conscience. Something about all these status/power seeking people to become judges is becoming apparent. The USA would be better off with less judges who feel driven to shape society instead of wanting to abide by the limits granted supposedly by the people. Our sports ‘judges’ have more common sense than our ‘legal’ judges as to the job they are paid for.
Your logic is worse than that stink.
“Why not do the same with food, clothing, housing, education, transportation, news, entertainment, etc.?”
We already do it with education and to a certain extent all the rest. Nevertheless, shhh. Don’t give them ideas.
Okay....let's cut to the chase. You are nuts!!
OK, this is funny. My sister is a JW and believe me when I tell you, they are so cheap you’d be lucky to get any kind of insurance in the first place.
“We are a secular nation, not Christian (anymore) and at some point will probably be muslim”
So? You don’t hear people attacking the decision on grounds of the right to the free expression of Christianity. If a muslim retail store doesn’t want to sell pork, so be it.
“A precedent of limiting coverage on religious grounds is dangerous grounds to be on?”
Why? Do you imagine employers won’t let their staff buy condoms, receive blood transfusions, or whatever else superstition forbids? There’s an elegant solution, and one our civilization gas apparently forgotten: get another job! Better yet, let’s decide as a society to divorce the corrupt union of employment and insurance coverage.
They keep pissing off all the christians and every hobby lobby across the country will be set aflame by their own managers to send a message “we will not comply”...
Oh, you mean the IRS.
And to top it off...you have ultralib friends. Your words...not mine.
Friends? Ultralib? And you are here?
Donald...I think I've replied to you on another thread....and said the same thing.
You are not a Conservative! Period.
Let us hope, and pray, that the American people wake up to this gross usurpation of power by Obama, his accomplices in congress, and his courts.
Yep, that’s why I said “mostly”. The likelihood of having a daughter on insurance at that age would be minimal.
You wouldn’t want them to go to a leftist indoctrination center anyways, which is what most post secondary institutions are these days.
Single payer leads to an end to medical progress. The effective, expensive new medicine can’t be used because it is not on the formulary. The approved drugs and procedures will be the old ineffective ones.
The model for the single payer system is the old Soviet agricultural system.
I like Christian healthcare, miracles and more miracles. I think we have the best healthcare going, who else has brought back the dead, or made the lame to walk?
“No, they CAN’T “force” them to comply.
Hobby Lobby can re-arrange their business so that they are not covered by the law.”
Or they could simply shut the doors.
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