I didn’t want to turn this into a debate on our health care system. MsWhatsit, your inability to find coverage for maternity was, I assume, based on the fact that you were already pregnant, since the free market has countless policies to cover individuals that include maternity coverage. At that point, you didn’t need insurance, you needed someone to pay your medical bills. I’m not trivializing it, but I am pointing out that you’re creating an incorrect impression and missing the point I was making in response to Lightnin’.
septimus, I am not ignoring that. But likewise is it disingenuous to proclaim that employers dictate my health coverage (not that you did). But that’s not the point. I don’t want to debate our health care system, I am asking why contraception out of all the categories of excluded coverage should be mandated in defiance of first amendment rights.
Gorsnak, what’s insulting to the casual reader is the insinuation that employees, who are free to accept or reject a job offer, are handcuffed completely because an employer doesn’t offer exactly what they’d like. Perhaps you’ll answer the question that Lightnin’ has thus far ignored? Do you understand how group insurance works? Should employees get to dictate exactly what coverage they’d like? How will that work exactly?
It seems to me that a good start is to not deny coverage of specific healthcare items based on religious exceptions. Nobody’s saying that they (the insurers) have to cover everything- we’re just saying it’s a bad idea for your employer to pick and choose what, exactly, they want to cover. When I take a new job, I don’t want part of my selection process to be to scour the healthcare package to see what, exactly, my potential new employer doesn’t want me to have access to.
Which is exactly the argument for universal health care. The larger the pool, the more efficient the coverage can be. And this is why allowing your employer to decide what healthcare you get is a bad idea.
Incorrect. My insurance broker was unable to find policies with a maternity rider, period. I obviously can’t speak to all states but at least in 2004 in Ohio, insurance providers were not willing to provide maternity coverage to individual purchasers. And at any rate my larger point is that you cannot simply decide “oh, my employer-provided insurance doesn’t pay for X. I’ll simply go find individual insurance that does pay for X.” Depending on what X is, you may be able to find an individual policy covering it or you may not. Individual policies are expensive, relatively uncommon, and tend to provide less coverage than group policies as a general rule. There is no cafeteria-style healthcare market where you can readily just go buy insurance for the things you specifically want.
And none of them are basic, common preventative medicine. Which is what contraceptives are. Recall that the vast majority of women in this country will use medical contraceptives of one sort or another at some point in their lives. Comparing contraceptives to private nursing, artificial insemination or orthotics only shows that we’re off the rails in lala land here.
Insurance plans are mandated to cover contraceptives in 28 of 50 states. That’s more than half. And in 11 of those states, there is no exemption for religious organizations at all. None. Zip zero zilch nada. If you have employees and you provide insurance, it will cover contraceptives, period. Even the Catholics know that.
I’m not sure where exactly someone is supposed to go when the only local hospital is Catholic and a hospital is the only place where their role is performed. There’s not a huge random job market, especially in rural areas, for anesthesia technologists or surgeons or labor and delivery nurses, you know? This concept of “just go somewhere else” is also pretty facile when we’re just a few months from double digit joblessness and in a recovery that hasn’t expanded the job market worth a damn.
There isn’t one, the “it’s morally wrong to use birth control.” argument is essentially natural law. In fact, it’s the only consistent argument there is against homosexuality: non-generative sex is completely off the table*. Of course, this is the part where almost every Catholic says that whether or not they’ve lusted after a women in their own heart or whatever is between them and their priest and yet continues to vote against gay rights as contrary to the Gospels.
I occasionally check Catholic org or whatever it’s called in much the same way as I sometimes consult Stormfront for their position on matters. Apparently manual stimulation of one’s wife following copulation may be theologically allowed if she doesn’t orgasm during coitus and nocturnal emissions aren’t actually sinful, so there is some evidence of adopting progressive principles on intercourse.