Yup. I agree with you there. Not such an easy task back then with the spectre of Reagan still hanging over everything. Though even then, having an exemption for peyote (as we do in Canada) wouldn't have been such a big deal.
Using these bandaids isn't the best solution, but I don't fault them for using it under the circumstances.
This opens up a major pandora's box.
What if you work for a company run by Scientologists who don't believe in psychiatry? Can they refuse to cover your mental health treatment?
If your company is run by CHristian Scientists who don't believe in blood transfusions or vaccinations, are you out of luck there?
What if you got HIV while engaging in gay sex and your fundamentalist boss thinks that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality? No anti-retroviral drug coverage for you?
I imagine the answer to those questions would be "yes", assuming we are talking about the same kind of companies that are protected by the current court ruling.
I have to agree with Unionist that the main culprit here is Obamacare. I actually DON'T think a right-wing Catholic employer should have to pay for HIV treatment, or a Scientologist for psychiatry, etc. In a properly ordered welfare-state, those things would be paid for by the government.
That said, I don't really know that Canada has much cause to trumpet its virtues on that score, because as far as I know, most provincial health plans still don't pay for dental care, and don't mandate employer coverage either. Basically, without even having to argue a religious exemption, Canadian employers are totally free to leave dental out of whatever coverage they offer, thus leaving the employee to pay out of pocket.
And if you think dental care is no big deal, do a google on "tooth decay and heart disease".
IF OHIP COVERED dental, I'd be overjoyed and actually see a dentist in Toronto and get my various issues fixed all at once instead of one thing per year which basically means I lose teeth
BTW, it sounds like the judge(s) need to learn a little bit about insurance:
Likewise, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurrence pointing to existing protocols for religious organizations.“[i]n other instances the Government has allowed the same contraception coverage in issue here to be pro- vided to employees of nonprofit religious organizations, as an accommodation to the religious objections of those entities,” Kennedy said. “The accommodation works by requiring insurance companies to cover, without cost sharing, contraception coverage for female employees who wish it. That accommodation equally furthers the Government’s interest but does not impinge on the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.”
Many large companies simply self-insure. That is they don't purchase insurance but simply pay any claims out of pocket - a common way to do this is to have an insurance company administer the claims but payments are made out of an account set up established and funded by the employer - in short, there is no insurance policy any everything is paid directly by the employer. But there is no need to involve an insurer - my first non-academic job (in Canada) included a drug plan and all I had to do was fill out a form, attach the receipt, and turn it over to HR. No insurer of any sort.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/religious-groups-lgbt-hiring-hobby...
The day after the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling, a group of religious leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking that he exempt them from a forthcoming executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT people.
I have to agree with Unionist that the main culprit here is Obamacare.
Just a point of trivia. The requirement to include Contraceptives within any healthcare plan is not part of Obamacare. The ACA as passed by legislators didn't include anything like this. Reality is, the "contraceptive mandate" has nothing to do with law but is, instead, a regulation promulgated by Health and Human Services. Not a law. A regulation.
Business owners now have a new basis for trying to evade anti-discrimination laws and their responsibilities to their employees. Religious liberty is already the rallying cry for conservatives looking for a legal way to discriminate against LGBT Americans; other business owners have tried to use religion to justify opposition to minimum-wage laws and Social Security taxes. Faith groups are already trying to capitalize on the Hobby Lobby decision out of court; on Wednesday, a group of religious leaders asked the Obama administration for an exemption from a forthcoming federal order barring federal contractors from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
According to Alito, courts have no authority to “tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed.” Where, then, are the boundaries? How will courts decide which beliefs are “sincerely held?” Alito asserts that the majority opinion provides “no such shield” for other forms of discrimination, but we have to take his word on it. The language of the ruling may be limited to contraception, but there are no explicit constraints on its underlying logic.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/180509/supreme-court-has-already-expanded-...
I have to agree with Unionist that the main culprit here is Obamacare.Just a point of trivia. The requirement to include Contraceptives within any healthcare plan is not part of Obamacare. The ACA as passed by legislators didn't include anything like this. Reality is, the "contraceptive mandate" has nothing to do with law but is, instead, a regulation promulgated by Health and Human Services. Not a law. A regulation.
That's precisely my point. Society - not insurers, not individuals, not some appointed "regulators" - should (1) determine what are mandatory health care services, and (2) pay for them. Obamacare, as structured, violates both those principles.
I'm sure the good folks at Hobby Lobby will be pleased to know some of us agree with them about the evils of Obamacare, but the impact of this ruling is already moving into areas we can't blame on the president for not going far enough - the exemption from equal hiring practices I mentioned above.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hobby-lobby-religious-leaders-ask-gay-rig...
Though as this article implies, they are certainly trying to turn this into them being the victims of his presumed attacks on religion.
(edit)
Fact is, Obama has the option of fixing that aspect of this with a bandaid, by paying the coverage for those contraceptive methods. The mechanics of health coverage is not the biggest problem here. It just happened to be the one they picked because it served the multiple purpose of pushing religious dogma, asserting corporate power, and attacking Obama.
Im pretty sure the latter reason was the main one
Yeah, me too. Specifically, fighting what they saw as a government attack on businesses and insurers being able to do whatever the hell they want with workers.
The partisan nature of this, the misogyny, and the religious interference are all significant, but looking at the repeated attacks on Obama's healthcare reforms it's pretty clear it scares the hell out of them.
Hell, when the supreme court upheld Obamacare that was the only argument I heard repeated over and over on American radio - that it was an affront to liberty because government was forcing people to do something. Not even an attempt to engage it on the level of cost or efficiency. It was all about people's inalienable right to go bankrupt and die if they wanted to.
Appears that hypocrisy is Hobby Lobby's hobby:
Earlier this year, Mother Jones revealed that Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan had more than $73 million invested in companies that produced emergency contraception pills. It was that same type of birth control that Hobby Lobby said it had an objection to when it took its case against President Barack Obama’s health care reform law to the Supreme Court and won.
“The critics are calling Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) investments hypocrisy at its finest,” Banfield emphasized on Wednesday, adding that CNN had not gotten an explanation from the company after giving it “plenty of time” to respond.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/02/hypocrisy-at-its-finest-cnn-calls-...
Fact is, Obama has the option of fixing that aspect of this with a bandaid, by paying the coverage for those contraceptive methods.
Reality is, he doesn't. First the 'requirement' to provide contraceptives is not part of the law of ACA as passed by the legilators. That's something that was imposed via regulation by Health and Human Services.
Whatever the original reason for the coverage was, they should be able to take action to deal with this and ensure women don't have to pay for coverage out of pocket. That is one of several options Democrats are considering:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/30/white-house-hobby-lobby_n_55442...
And they have taken it even a step further, going back on the claimby Alito the Hobby Lobby decision was a narrow one:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/hobby-lobby-the-s...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/us/politics/supreme-court-order-suspen...
“Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Not so today.”
The court’s action, she added, even “undermines confidence in this institution.”
Whatever the original reason for the coverage was, they should be able to take action to deal with this and ensure women don't have to pay for coverage out of pocket. That is one of several options Democrats are considering:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/30/white-house-hobby-lobby_n_55442...
Hobby Lobby actually pays for contraceptives. Their objection was to 4 out of 20 products (they still cover the remaining 16). The products they object to are things like IUD's and morning after pills which they (incorrectly) regard as abortifacients.
The USSC has now ruled that religious organizations dont even have to tell the state who their employees are so that they can recieve the services through the state. The Xian right in the US wants an end to all secular power and the corrupt courts are willing to help them achieve that end.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that a sectarian college in Illinois, Wheaton College, did not have to fill in a federal form to claim its exemption from regulations providing contraception coverage in its employee insurance programs.
Note that the issue was not a question of whether the college was exempt from the regulation, as in the Hobby Lobby case. As a sectarian institution, it was already exempt. What the college objected to was simply sending a form to the government regarding the exemption. This, they said, would involve them in “a grave moral evil,” because notifying the government would make the college complicit in some other organization providing the contraception coverage. (The law stipulates that if a sectarian employer does not provide the coverage, the government will ensure that it is provided by someone else, usually the insurance company involved or some other third-party administrator of the program.)
Just four days before, the Court majority on the Hobby Lobby case made specific mention of this government form as a justification for exempting commercial enterprises run by sectarians from providing contraception coverage for their employees. The Hobby Lobby decision cited the form as constituting “an alternative that achieves all of the Government’s aims while providing greater respect for religious liberty,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent against Thursday’s decision.
In other words, according to Justice Samuel Alito and his fellow conservatives in the majority, the Hobby Lobby case was a “win-win” all around; sectarian business owners did not have to dirty themselves with concerns about their female employees’ reproductive health, while the government was free to ensure that contraception coverage was provided from another source.
But just four days later, the conservative majority has reversed course, and finds that the alternative they lauded on Monday is no longer good enough. They agree with Wheaton College that the alternative itself violates religious liberty and can be ignored. Sectarian organizations can merely send a letter to the government opting out, without filling out the form — because the form would notify the insurance program’s third-party administrator that the female employee was no longer covered for contraception.
Just a thought - since the SCOTUS ruling would seem to pierce the corporate veil with respect to religious beliefs does that potentially weaken it as a shield for the owners against lawsuits?
Sounds like I'm not the only one that thought about what the Hobby Lobby decision meant for the corporate veil:
Here's one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners' religious objections: It could screw up corporate law.This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you'll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won't be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King:
linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.
That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it's in question. By letting Hobby Lobby's owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.
"If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?" Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/hobby-lobbys-other-problem
