I’ve been pondering ways that people who work for employers who stop providing certain types of health coverage in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision to be made whole and get what they need without facing any adverse impact by their employers’ decisions (whatever you may think of them). And I had a thought:
What about amending the ACA to allow people who have access to employer-based insurance that doesn’t cover all FDA-approved, ACA-required forms of contraception to access the ACA exchanges on the same basis as people who do not have access to employer-based coverage, subsidies and all. And maybe require the employer to provide additional cash compensation in the amount that they subsidize other employees’ insurance. On a pretax basis, and allow employees to purchase private health coverage using that money. That way the employer isn’t directly purchasing anything they consider objectionable, and the employee isn’t being screwed out of something they need.
One possibility could be to increase the minimum wage for people who work for a non-health-care-compliant company. E.g. make Hobby Lobby pay workers at least $15 an hour. Then the workers can take that extra money and use it toward whatever they want - contraception, abortions, video games, whiskey, car accessories, whatever.
Well the easiest thing would be to amend either ACA or Religious Freedom Restoration Act to say ACA is not subject to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
That only helps low-income people (at least if you’re talking about something analogous to the food stamp program). Why should anyone at all be economically disadvantaged by their employer’s “religious” beliefs?
One way would be to extend the compromise extended to religious non-profits to religious for-profits, where the contraception would be covered by insurance, but with no involvement by the employer.
There are a variety of cases working their way through Circuit and District Courts regarding the non-profit compromise. But if the Supremes hold that it’s not a substantial burden on the employer, then I don’t see a legal barrier to doing it.
The advantage this course of action would have is that it doesn’t need to go through Congress - it’s actually more of an administrative fix than a legislative one, but I thought it would be relevant to the thread anyway. In the current Congress, contraceptive mandates won’t go anywhere; neither will exemptions for ACA from RFRA. Doubtless some will be introduced, because it’s an election year and the Democrats see this as a useful issue for them in the midterms, but they won’t go anywhere with 234 Republicans in the House.
Considering the number of people that take jobs at companies with no insurance at all I don’t think a company that doesn’t cover a small fraction of available birth control methods is going to have any problems.
From the stuff I’ve read, this is exactly what the Justices recommended. It is in fact the exception they made for religious non-profits that indicated that there was no need to force Hobby Lobby to cover it. You are only allowed to violate a person’s religious freedom if it passes three tests. It must be a compelling governmental interest. It must be narrowly tailored to only deal with that interest. And–this is the important one–it must be the least restrictive means to accomplish that goal.
If the government has the option of covering birth control without making Hobby Lobby cover it, then that’s what the government must do. Since they already can do it for non-profit religious organizations, that is considered proof they can do it for for-profit religious organizations.
The interesting thing is that this plan actually has the government pay for birth control. It’s government funded health care.