The Hobby Lobby case.
It’s finally happened. The conservative Catholic gang have found a case where they could drop their pretense of legal objectivity in favor of (male) bosses’ supposed “religious rights” to interfere with female employees’ personal healthcare.
Note that there is no pretense whatsoever that this decision is fair and equal with respect to its effect on both men and women. On the contrary, the 5-judge majority make it clear that only women are allowed to be victims of their employers’ religious prejudice under this decision. The Court wrote that it intends this decision to apply only to forms of contraception specifically for females (which would have been covered by the employees’ insurance under the ACA) and NOT to apply to any other employer “religious” objections such as those against transfusions or vaccines, which might affect both male and female equally. Hobby Lobby’s paid health insurance will still cover vasectomies. And erectile-disfunction prescriptions.
In addition, the Court rationalizes its destruction of women’s rights of equal access to health care by pretending that this decision affects only a tiny segment of the USAian corporate economy. This is not even close to true. It applies to IRS-defined “closely-held” corporations (where 50 percent of the stock is held by no more than 5 individuals; the remaining stock may be publicly traded, or not.) These closely-held corporations constitute more than 90 percent of the total number of businesses in the US, and employ more than 50 percent of the total labor force.
SInce there cannot be any test for “sincerity of beliefs”, every small partnership/corporation can now declare that it has “religious” objections to complying with the contraceptive provisions of the ACA, which were supposed to protect all citizens equally.
It’s going to be one hell of a mess. Suddenly, every woman in the nation has her personal health at risk (at least potentially at risk, depending on their being lucky or unlucky with a rational or irrational employer) because of the perversion of five men in the US Supreme Court.
This particular group of Supreme Court justices will go down in history as one of the worst ever, perhaps even worse than the Dred Scott court. Short of hoping for better replacement justices (and then hoping for a speedy overturn of this biased decision) there doesn’t seem to be any rational course of action to restore secularism and respect for the principle of equal treatment under law.
Well I broke no law and threatened no one other than myself. At the time I had been on the phone for three hours and was about to be disconnected. My employer (who was and is sympathetic) was standing behind me saying that unless I got the error corrected that day, he would have to send my entire paycheck to the IRS, and do so until the problem was resolved.
A little background is in order. I had just spent several thousand dollars of my children’s money on lawyers trying to get a payment agreement. The first lawyer took two thousand dollars and promptly went bankrupt without doing anything or notifying me. The second lawyer successfully negotiated a payment agreement, and that was what the IRS fucked up. They demanded monthly payments without cancelling garnishment. Prior to the agreement I was allowed $300 a week to live on and pay my mortgage.
Now, the truth is I made bad financial decisions. I was laid off at age 60 and chose to do consulting. I had two kids in college and needed surgery. I did not pay the IRS for about five years. My bad, but it is not illegal. I have property for sale that would cover my taxes. It has been on the market for eight years. The market collapsed the month before it went on sale.
I expected I would be able to negotiate a payment agreement, but was unable to do so without a lawyer. I had no money for a lawyer. This whole thing is foreign to me. I am nearly 70 years old and have never defaulted on a loan and never been unemployed for more than a couple of months. I just don’t know how to game the system and don’t care to learn.
I find it ironic that government regulations are supposedly in place to protect naive consumers from predatory sellers and lenders. I’ve had some bad experiences in the marketplace, but I’ve never before encountered a creditor who was completely above the law and free of oversight, and which had the police on call to deal with anyone who demanded that life destroying errors be corrected.
I do not vote Republican and am only libertarian in my fantasy life. But I am not eager to see the feds have a monopoly on health care. Sorry.
walto:
petrushka:
The fact that rich people sometimes opt out of public healthcare does not make public healthcare a bad idea, just as the fact that rich people may choose to fly on private jets does not make airlines a bad idea. Ditto for cars and public transportation.
I don’t object to Medicare, and I wouldn’t object to an extension to Medicare financed by an increase in FICA. What we got is a mess “designed” by the insurance industry. I suppose someday it will work, but I predict at least ten years of chaos.
That does not change my preference for medical savings to pay for routine things, and subsidized care for catastrophes and chronic conditions.
SeverskyP35,
First, the methods in question are abortifacient by Hobby Lobby’s definition, but not by the generally accepted scientific and medical definition.
Second, you’re still not addressing my point regarding compensation. How do the following two scenarios differ?
1. Hobby Lobby, as part of its compensation package, pays health insurance premiums for its employees. An employee can use this coverage to obtain an IUD, or she can refrain. The decision is between her and her doctor.
2. Hobby Lobby, as part of its compensation package, pays wages to its employees. An employee can use this money to obtain an IUD, or she can refrain. The decision is between her and her doctor.
How does #1 make Hobby Lobby “complicit in the provision of abortion” if #2 does not? The employee owns her health coverage — it’s part of her compensation, after all — just as she owns her wages. She chooses how to deploy both, and in both cases the moral responsibility rests with her alone.
I’m not sure I follow that. If I pay someone wages and he spends the money on kiddie porn, I think that’s different from providing him with a cable service that features kiddie porn.
Wages are fungible. What people do with their money cannot be controlled by the wage payer. The problem I see is trying to control what people spend their money for.
petrushka,
Child pornography on cable TV is a terrible analogy, for reasons that I hope are obvious.
Regarding your second point, insurance coverage is fungible too. Some women will choose diaphragms, others birth control pills, still others IUDs. Others may refrain from using contraceptives at all. Every employee will use his or her coverage in a distinct way.
The situations are analogous: Hobby Lobby is providing something of value to its employees — wages in one case, insurance coverage in the other. That value, whether in the form of wages or insurance coverage, is fungible — it can be used to procure a variety of products and services. An IUD is one of the things that can be obtained, if and only if the employee chooses to do so. In both cases the choice, and the moral responsibility, lie 100% with her, which is how it should be.
Whether through wages or insurance coverage, Hobby Lobby is providing resources in exchange for the employee’s labor. In both cases the employee chooses how to deploy those resources. How is Hobby Lobby “complicit in the provision of abortion” (as SeverskyP35 put it) in one case but not the other? Why should Hobby Lobby prevent the employee from using her compensation as she chooses (and as the law allows)?
petrushka,
If your state and Federal agencies aren’t protecting you from predatory lenders (and lawyers), they’re doing a bad job, but stopping them from attempting to do so isn’t going to make those bad guys go away: they’ll just get worse. You don’t want the gov’t baddies to run your health care (though you have no problem with Medicare, for some reason), but you’re content to let predatory healthcare providers, insurance companies and lawyers do whatever they want to you.
If the IRS fucked up, you need a better IRS. And I repeat, if your surgery had been free to you, none of that massive shit that fell on your head ever would have been there in the first place. Making health care in the U.S. more expensive and probably worse (by maybe allowing patent medicine cures for cancer again!) wouldn’t have helped you, I don’t think, just made more shit.
Nothing is free. That really isn’t an option. When no one pays out of pocket, care will be rationed.
I paid 15 percent of my income for forty years to be returned ans Medicare and Social Security. If Medicare is expanded to become a single payer system, taxes will go up to cover it. That would be better than what we have.
I agree wholeheartedly. The insurance lobby prevented that result.
The problem that I see is that reality always trumps wishes. I consider myself a utilitarian realist in the realm of politics. I don’t spend a lot of time supporting politicians and causes, because I consider them all corrupt.
If they are not yet corrupt, they will be by the time they rise to the threshold of success. If I have any coherent point of view on this topic, it is that giving government the power to make detailed decisions about what we have and don’t have is a bad idea. I could see government providing a medical safety net, but i do not wish to see it determining where we go for routine care.
When I had employer provided healthcare, I always chose the option with higher co-pays and fewer restrictions.
Perhaps off topic, but when I have been able to compare the cost of services paid out of pocket with the cost submitted to insurance providers, the bill to the insurance company has been about ten times the figure quoted for cash up front. Oddly, the insurance companies pay about ten cents on the dollar billed.
This happens whether the insurer is private or is medicare. The whole system is insane.
Walto, I would like to know your take on the current (and unresolved) VA mess.
Unless I read the news incorrectly, medical records were destroyed (appointment requests deleted) and statistics falsified to make the system look better. Workers were given bonuses base on falsified statistics.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has been fired, demoted or prosecuted for falsifying medical records. I would ask, how can they be, since the same entity they work for also controls the police.
We used to have the idea that monopolies are bad because they avoid the feedback that would be provided by choice. Somehow we now have the idea that monopolies are good if the monopoly is the government.
I have described myself as an evilutionist in all things. One of the reasons is that I think complex systems cannot be designed, except incrementally, through trial and selection. I worry about systems that lack feedback. I think elections are a rather poor kind of feedback when the system is as complex as medical insurance.
As I say, I have no ideological opposition to subsidies for the poor. I do not trust monopoly power.
petrushka,
I don’t know much about it, except that the VA has pretty muc always been a corrupt, inefficient underfunded, den of hacks. Re monopolies, I think I’m a bit more of a ‘utilitarian realist’ than you are. E.g. I agree with Sidgwick that certain services should be monopolized. Police, e.g. Maybe certain utlis like railway in remote areas. I’m ideological about the geoism of Henry George, and the denial of ‘natural rights’. Not too much else. I think it’s the estimation of the probable utilities that is generally what matters most, and I wish economists and others were better at it.
I do agree though that big powerful entities–whether public or private– can be prone to inefficiency and corruption. The question then is: which ones are doing what they’re designed to do when they steal from the helpless and which are acting contrary to their mission? One you can at least try to reform.
I think most of us here share similar utopian ideals. Getting to utopia is a bit different than wishing for it.
I think we tend to form our emotional trusts and distrusts at an early age. My childhood experience with government includes things like Jim Crow laws. Later I and lots of my contemporaries were drafted. I noted that most states defined anything other than missionary position sex as a felony.
I think things have changed without getting better. Jim Crow is gone, but a typical black person can expect to spend time in jail. Police confiscate property and beat down doors without knocking. If they invade the wrong home they are not held accountable. Every smart phone has back door methods that make it accessible by the police.
Pardon me if I am neither shocked nor surprised if the government is still meddling in people’s sex lives.
It’s not so much that I fantasize about no government as I do about having a balance and having a minimum of interference with personal choices.
I like the idea of liberty too, petrushka. I just think that its implementation has suffered from its conception as a negative ideal-an absence of constraints. That’s a 17th century picture that only benefits the rich and powerful today. Most of the rest of us aren’t really free in any meaningful sense anymore without contributions from others. It’s a cliche but even your health care kerfluffle shows that it takes a village. Talk about freedom in the ghetto is empty republican rhetoric.
That’s not what I asked you though. Your position was that the distinction was that Hobby Lobby was being coerced to pay for health insurance, and therefore that becomes the government entanglement. I suggested that minimum wage laws could be considered entanglement on the part of the wages and asked if that didn’t make the two situations equivalent again. If the one is valid, it seems that the other should be as well and the Supreme Court might as well have effectively given all religious believers a get out of paying minimum wage free card.
I didn’t at all ask whether minimum wage was a good idea.
As to nationalized health care, I don’t see how that changes anything. I envision the true believers livid with rage that their taxes go towards supporting abortion and demanding that they be excused from paying for the health system. Instead of an employer being above the law we’d get hundreds of thousands of employees who each demand the right to be excused from the law.