Entered into a discussion on another site {can I like to the article?} about the Obama admin’s decision to not grant religious exemptions to employers concerning insurance coverage fpr contraceptives. Some have been saying it’s violating thier religious freedom by forcing religious employers to pay for procedures they find sinful. Contraceptive Mandate Is Not About Religious Liberty, It’s About Female Liberty
Now, aside from, and not being distracted by whether this is a government over reach , or whether the specific beliefs are stupid or not, I’d like to approach just the idea that the church is using inconsistent reasoning to fuel thier outrage, and they are in no way being asked to fund specific procedures. The easy solution is simply a shift in thier thinking to something more consistent.
here’s my thinking. Right or wrong the church thinks contraceptives is a sin and doesn’t want to buy them for thier employees because doing so is agasint thier religious principles.
They hire professionals not of thier faith knowing that the wages they are paid will likley be used for contraceptives by some. reasoning? Once they give the money to the employee, it’s not longer thier money and thier complicity in violating thier religious principle is assuaged.
They offer insurance as part of the employment package, but in this case they intervene to ask the insurance company to not cover what they might normally cover. When the insurance company is told they have to cover those things the churches organization requests an exemption and is denied at which point they claim thier religious freedoms are being denied because they are being forced to pay for something they consider a sin.
In my thinking, the same reasoning about wages applies to insurance coverage as well. You pay for an insurance package for your employee period. The money is no longer yours and whatever services they decide to use is up to them, and between them and the insurance company. IOW, once they pay for an insurance package thier complicity in violating thier religious principle is assuaged in the same way because the employee chooses which services they will take advantage of.
It might be like a Jewish employer getting thier employees gift cards from grocery stores but telling the store to exclude ham from the cards when they normally don’t. Nobody is forcing the employer to go to the store and buy ham. They’re just saying don’t try and stop the store from offering them, or the shopper from choosing them.
IMO their concept that thier religious freedsom is being violated is a false premise because in wages or benefits the church is not being asked to directly pay for services they object to.
A business or any such type of entity should be allowed to run their business however they see fit, which includes the decision to provide-- or not provide-- whatever benefits and coverage they see fit. If the worker doesn’t like it well… They can go work elsewhere.
Meh. We tax conscientious objectors to pay for the military. Same thing. Now, if they were forcing a Catholic-run hospital to dispense birth control devices and drugs or required them to perform abortions, that really would be a serious violation of church and state. The church is to be kept out of the state, but the state is also to be kept out of the church.
I like the wages argument. When the church pays someone, he might use the money for prostitutes, drugs or donations to American Atheists. When the church pays for insurance, she can use it for holy childbirth or contraception. Insurance companies like contraceptives because it is cheaper than childbirth. (And abortions.)
What the church is actually trying to do is to impose their religious beliefs on their employees by discouraging this.
If they can’t convince their employees to not use contraception, they should give up.
In the document that says I donate my organs after death, I wanted to make a provision that whoever got my kidneys should become either a vegetarian or only eat organic meat. No dice, the organization wouldn’t allow it. And they are my organs and the recipient doesn’t have to accept them, right? But if that isn’t possible, I don’t see why a church gets to say what coverage exeptions their insurance company should have to make.
That’s what I was thinking. Essentially the wages and benefits package amounts to the same money. So if an employee gets 50K wages and 10K worth of benefits why would the church not care how the wages are spent, and then insist on interfering and trying to dictate how the 10K in benefits are spent. It seems inconsistent and rather arbitrary. If their real concern is not violating thier beliefs stop trying to interfere in the relationship between the insurance company and your employees and simply view that money as the other wages you can’t control. Problem solved, religious freedom preserved, no beliefs violated.
This is one of the reasons (though hardly the most important) why I don’t like health coverage being tied to employment. Does it really make sense for your employer to tell you what kind of medical treatments you can receive? And what if you can’t find work elsewhere, or otherwise like your job?
It seems to me that the church is making a special effort to create a policy made just for thier employees, which I guess they have the financial clout to do, but IMO to then argue it’s a matter of relgious freedom for them to do so is fallacious.
They are not directly paying for anything against thier beliefs, by the insurance company including that as a choice to the employee, any more than they are if employees buy contraceptives with their wages.
It seems they are merely exerting control because they can in that area, and they can’t in the other , rather than based on any sincere religious principle. The situation is easliy solved by consistent reasoning on thier part. Since they can’t and shouldn’t control how an employee spends thier wages, they don’t need to control the benefits either. it’s a simple employer and employee arrangement that does nothing to violate thier beliefs.
If the people demand that health care not discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs, and politicians support it, then that’s that. If they don’t like it, they can sell insurance elsewhere.
Most policies also cover vasectomies and other procedures. Will the church also determine what procedures the insurance company will provide for thier employees?
I agree. For the same reason, the government shouldn’t be compelled to use taxes on fuel for fixing roads and taxes on cigarettes for lung cancer treatments. Once money has exchanged hands, its best use is up to its recipient. Nevertheless, any two entities should be free to negotiate the terms of their business arrangement within reason, and what is and isn’t covered seems kind of normal for such a discussion here.
Demanding insurance companies change their offerings just for moral reasons is interesting, though. Wouldn’t this increase rates for the church? If I were an insurance agency and my prospective client suggested it wouldn’t help with birth control, the first thing that would come to my mind would be an increased liability and increased rates to cover it.
Well, I can picture an insurance company preparing and marketing a package free of anything remotely controversial. I have to admit not being familiar with American employer-based health insurance - is it required by law or simply a product of collective bargaining agreements?
Don’t all companies that provide health insurance get to decide what they want to cover? My company provided insurance is fairly crappy. Why single out contraception as something that must be covered?
And as I understand the policy that the administration has created, churches are exempt from it. However, church sponsored or owned institutions (hospitals, schools etc) will be required to provide contraception.
Really? I don’t see how this is even a question worthy of debate.
Health insurance is an issue of medicine why religion should have any say in matters public health is beyond me. This is not even considering the sheer amount of different religious ideologies out with different things they may “sinful”, for the government to cater to 1 religion would mean they have to cater to all. The extra administrative cost would be huge.
Following that logic of catering to all religion, should all Jehovah’s Witnesses be exempt from any medical procedures that would require blood transfusion? To take it further if I am anti-war pro-life Buddhist should I get tax rebates for money used on the military?
Public/population health matters should be discussed in terms of medicine.
Prior to the passage of ObamaCare, insurance companies had the right to decide what sorts of coverage they would offer, subject to reasonable limitations (i.e. they can’t throw a woman and newborn baby out of the hospital for at least 48 hours after birth, and other limits of that sort). President Obama has decided to take away that freedom in the matter of birth control, and has instead ruled that insurance companies must offer only policies that pay for birth control. Ergo, President Obama has reduced the freedom of insurance companies and their customers.
You seem to assume there’s necessarily a distinction between “the church” and the insurance company, and that no insurance company of its own initiative would want to offer a policy that didn’t cover birth control. There’s no reason for either assumption. Some insurance companies exist solely to serve religious clientele, and some are a de facto part of a religious organization.
In any case, those who advocated for this takeaway of rights are being absurd. Even before Obamacare, there was no one in the United States who had any trouble getting birth control. It’s available for free in many places and for pocket change in any drug store or public bathroom. A cynic might suspect that Obama made this decision merely to give the middle finger to conservatives.
