Muslims exempt from Obamacare's innsurance mandate?

[sqweels]

From a bulk e-mail I received:

@bulk e-mailer

ObamaCare allows the establishment of Dhimmitude and Sharia muslim diktat in the United States . Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance, and also from the penalty tax for being uninsured. Islam considers insurance to be “gambling”, “risk-taking”, and “usury” and is thus banned. Muslims are specifically granted exemption based on this.

Any truth to this? Why would I only be hearing about it in an e-mail?

[sqweels]

Mods, can you correct the spelling in my thread title?

[John_Mace]

Are they exempt from state laws requiring car insurance to drive? I doubt it.

There is, IIRC, an explicit religious “out” to the HCR mandate, but I don’t think it has to do with usury or insurance, per se.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Semi-true.

The fact is that the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama does not include language which specifically exempts members of any particular religion from health insurance requirements (nor does it use the word “dhimmitude”). The bill contains a general “religious conscience” provision which establishes guidelines under which religious groups which have established conscientious objections to certain forms of insurance may seek exemption from health insurance requirements:

<snip>

The key issue here is the determination of which religious groups’ members might qualify for this exemption, an issue that has not yet been decided (and probably won’t be for some time to come). Such members would have to be adherents of a religion or sect “described in section 1402(g)(1)” of the <A HREF=“http://www.taxalmanac.org/index.php/Sec._1402._Definitions” TARGET=irs>Internal Revenue Code</A>, which governs exemptions from the payment of Social Security and Medicare taxes on self-employment income:
SOURCE: Does 'Dhimmitude' Exempt Muslims from Obamacare Requirements? | Snopes.com

[ITR_champion]

The copy of this that I saw posted on another message board included the claim that the relevant text was on page 108 of the bill. I got a copy of page 108 of the bill, which contains nothing remotely relevant to this, and posted it. We never saw the OP again.

Complete junk, in other words.

[Jenaroph]

@Whack-a-Mole

Semi-true.

Wow, reading the whole article, I wouldn’t even call that semi-true.

Although Islam does have a tradition of barring conventional insurance products because they “involve an element of uncertainty, gambling and the charging of interest, which are prohibited by the Koran,” some Muslim groups make exceptions for insurance which is required by law (such as automobile insurance, and some Muslim groups do not have objections to medical insurance. Most likely, though, Muslims would not qualify for an exemption from U.S. health insurance requirements because U.S. Muslims do not have a tradition of spurning Social Security (which is viewed more as a form of caring for those who are unable to meet their own needs than as something which involves elements of uncertainty, gambling, and interest payments), and no Muslim group has ever qualified for an exemption under the guidelines which define which religious groups would be exempt from the health care law.

Ironically, it sounds like if U.S. Muslims were more fundamentalist like the Amish and Mennonites, and shunned as much of the outside world as those groups do, there might be a case for exemption. It’s only because they’re as integrated as they are that there’s no cause for anyone to be angry about “them” getting better treatment than “us”.

[Duckster]

You can always go to the source and not rely on email —> http://www.healthcare.gov/

[RickJay]

@Jenaroph

Ironically, it sounds like if U.S. Muslims were more fundamentalist like the Amish and Mennonites, and shunned as much of the outside world as those groups do, there might be a case for exemption. It’s only because they’re as integrated as they are that there’s no cause for anyone to be angry about “them” getting better treatment than “us”.

You’d also have to wonder how it is so many Muslims get mortgages, which are interest-paying instruments and necessitate insurance.

I actually asked a Muslim co-worker about this once. She explained that in fact it had come up at a service once, and their pastor’s explanation was that the simple truth was that in a rich, industrialized country, all but the super-rich could only buy a house by getting a mortgage, and so of course God would understand. Seemed like a mature attitude to me.

[Peremensoe]

It’s not actually called “ObamaCare,” so that might be a clue there.

[Magiver]

@RickJay

You’d also have to wonder how it is so many Muslims get mortgages, which are interest-paying instruments and necessitate insurance.

Sharia banking practices are a bit muddled in this respect. It depends on the definition of the word interest.

[Darth_Panda]

In all fairness just because most of the Jewish kids that I hung out with in undergrad would go to work, or to the library, or to a party - i.e., business as usual - on Saturdays, didn’t mean the school (a state school, in NY) could make them take a test. If the student asked for a religious exemption, then they got it - no questions asked. It makes sense from the school’s point of view - there’s no real benefit to making an issue out of it.

I have no idea what’s in the health care regarding religion - I wouldn’t really be bothered one way or the other. But just because most people of a religion don’t do things a certain way, doesn’t mean that some legitimate interpretation of the religion can’t lead to a portion of people doing things that way, or at least wanting to have the option to.

[dracoi]

@RickJay

You’d also have to wonder how it is so many Muslims get mortgages, which are interest-paying instruments and necessitate insurance.

I actually asked a Muslim co-worker about this once. She explained that in fact it had come up at a service once, and their pastor’s explanation was that the simple truth was that in a rich, industrialized country, all but the super-rich could only buy a house by getting a mortgage, and so of course God would understand. Seemed like a mature attitude to me.

At least some Muslim countries do it via a “rent-to-own” plan. In practice, it works exactly like a mortgage - the bank provides the money to buy the house and you have 30 years of payments to the bank. However, the names have been changed to protect the religious.

[UDS]

It doesn’t work exactly like a mortgage.

A mortgage is a pledge of property to secure a loan. If you default on the loan, one of the avenues open to the lender to recover what is owing to him (including interest owing) is to take the property and sell it.

Note, though, that he’s only entitled to do this because you owe him money. And, normatively, if selling the house fails to cover what you owe him, he can still pursue you for what remains outstanding. (But more on this below.)

Contrast a sharia arrangement in which the bank buys the house and then sells it to their customer for an agreed series of payments over a period of time, during which period he gets to live in the house as long as he keeps up the payments. Clear title will pass to the customer when all the payments are made. The customer can stop paying at any time. He loses his right to acquire the house on the agreed terms if he does, but he is not obliged to make any payment to the bank, and can’t be compelled to. Why? Because he doesn’t owe them any money.

The bank, therefore, is taking a risk on the value of the house, and this is what Sharia finance aims to achieve through its prohibition on interest. Sharia likes equity stakes.

Right. I said that, normatively, the lender can pursue the borrower for the amount owed if the sale of the mortgaged property fails to cover the loan. There are, however, “limited recourse” loans in which the lender agrees that, in the event of default, his recourse is limited to taking the mortgaged property, and I believe that these are particularly common in the domestic mortgage market in the US.

Being only slightly mischievous, what this looks like to me, as a non-American, is the American finance industry trying to make its housing finance products as close as they can to Sharia-compliant products, without actually saying that this is what they are doing.

Being less mischievous, this is clearly not what is happening. AFAIK the limited recourse mortgage was common in the US long before anyone took any interest in Sharia finance. Still, it strikes me as ironic that dracoi suggests that sharia-compliant rent-to-own plans work exactly like mortgages, but with the names changed to protect the religious. Rather, from my perspective it’s the US domestic mortgage which has been modified to look like a rent-to-own plan.

[Rand_Rover]

@UDS

It doesn’t work exactly like a mortgage.

. . . except that it does. The Shariah “rent-to-own” plan is economically exactly the same as a nonrecourse (what you call “limited recourse”) mortgage at all stages of the transaction. So, we have two transactions that are exactly the same economically but just with different names–which is exactly what dracoi said.

[jayjay]

Actually, the exemption was put in to accommodate Christian health co-ops like Medi-Share.

[UDS]

@Rand_Rover

. . . except that it does. The Shariah “rent-to-own” plan is economically exactly the same as a nonrecourse (what you call “limited recourse”) mortgage at all stages of the transaction. So, we have two transactions that are exactly the same economically but just with different names–which is exactly what dracoi said.

No. It works, not like a mortgage, but like a particular kind of mortgage that has been tweaked to work like, well, a rent-to-own plan. But it works quite differently from a straight mortgage.

There’s a clue in the language that you and I used. I talked about a limited recourse loan; you talk about a nonrecourse mortgage. In fact the mortage you’re thinking of is not nonrecourse; the mortgagee has exactly the same recourse as any mortgagee has; namely, he has recourse to the mortgaged property. It’s recourse on the loan which is limited (to the recourse to the mortgaged property that mortgage provides). What we have here is a loan which in certain circumstances you don’t have to fully repay. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s a departure from the fundamental concept of “loan”, which is that you have to repay it.

Dracoi’s comment suggested that the sharia-compliant product has the name “changed to protect the religious”. In fact the rent-to-own product does exactly what it says on the can. It’s the loan product which has been tweaked to try to do what the rent-to-buy product does by its nature, and whose name doesn’t disclose this.