LOL! Leave it to you, Rick, to try to pull one of your false analogies by comparing employees to mobsters on a television show.
Tell you what, if the Catholic Church finds anyone sitting on lawn chairs instead of doing the job they’re being compensated for doing, I suggest they fire them.
Wow. What a country!
<snort>
Earned is not the same as paid for. That’s where your argument falls apart.
You wouldn’t seriously argue that you, not your employer, pay your salary, would you? The same thing goes for your insurance.
And exactly the same labor that gets me the pension, vacation and no health insurance gets me the pension, the vacation and health insurance. I have performed no extra labor for the insurance coverage, and I gave up no salary,vacation or pension contributions in return for it.
It’s not really a semantic problem. As Martin Hyde said earlier, the issue is differing points of view. I won’t convert you to mine, and you won’t convert me to yours. And you can talk about how you pay for your insurance with your labor until the cows come home , but it’s a waste of time if you believe you will change the point of view of the religious groups who feel they are being forced to pay for something that is immoral.Because it’s not happening.
And I don’t think it should be so difficult for you to see that there is not an objective truth regarding which point of view is correct.
Given how much money insurance companies save as a result of contraceptive use, how much noticeably cheaper for employers are policies that exclude contraceptive coverage?
We can go back and forth on whether or not it is semantics, but basically doreen framed my point pretty much exactly how I feel it is.
It really matters not at all if you’ve “earned” your health insurance benefit or your employer pays it to you as a supplement to your wage. The Catholics feel they are being forced to pay for something they find immoral, and the people on the other side feel the Catholics are trying to deny women something they are entitled to as part of their compensation. This isn’t something that gets resolved by the sort of point the OP is making. This isn’t about facts, but how people feel.
One thing I will mention, is that traditionally benefits would not be considered earned because unless spelled out in an employment contract, you were not entitled to them as part of your compensation. If you work 40 hours I can’t not pay you for it without breaking the law, because you have earned that wage. However before the introduction of various laws I could decide to end your health care benefit, your pension benefit, 401k matching and etc. The laws are too complex now with Obamacare and even other laws, but generally speaking an employer still has the option (standard caveat about various different situations and State laws) of just deciding to end providing that benefit entirely and you would have no grounds to say they are withholding wages or compensation and would have no case before the Dept. of Labor or your State Board of Wage & Hour. Obamacare actually doesn’t mandate an employer provide insurance at all, it simply requires employers to pay a fine if they don’t provide it and they don’t meet one of Obamacare’s exemptions.
I don’t think you mean this.
That is, if anyone were fired because they used their insurance to buy contraceptives, something… some instinct… tells me you would object.
But it would be fair to call it that for any new people taking on those jobs, wouldn’t it? Given that it would then be part of that free negotiation?
The argument that someone has earned, by definition, anything that is mandated that someone else pays, is ridiculous on its face. It’s a benefit not currently offered or required, that was not a condition set by the employee in accepting the job, and that the government is saying must be paid by someone other than the employee by fiat. It’s not even a semantic quibble to dismiss this argument, unless someone is arguing that anyone who works has earned the right to contraception the moment they accept the job. Period. It’s silly.
If Obamacare demanded that insurance provide $1M per person a year as a mental health preventive care benefit, would the same logic work? Is anything that is included by fiat under the umbrella of “insurance coverage” magically “earned”? Why is contraception different?"
Churches, hospitals and universities are not taxpayers.
And even if they were, taxpayers pay for all sorts of things that individual taxpayers object to. Some people objected to the swar in Iraq, does teh fact that their tax dollars pay for the war in iraq mean they can take stands against the war in Iraq?
Benefits are somewhat different from cash because cash is fungible while benefits are not. To be sure the employee’s employment contract frequently ensures some sort of health insurance but a you are in fact forcing these institutions to pay people in the form of birth control. And to some people that is the same thing as paying people in the form of condoms. Sure some people won’t use it but making it a covered item means that every employee’s salary (in the form of insurance premiums) pays for birth control, so the Jesuit priest is subsidizing the birth control pills of his prostitute slut female students, of course the prostitute slut female students are subsidizing the Jesuit priest’s heart medicine and his 65 year old secular colleague’s viagra.
With all that said, I do not think this requirement is an impermissible restraint on freedom of religion.
This is not negotiable in many cases. My wife recently started a new job and my insurance is better than anything her new employer is likely to offer. She asked if they would increase her salary by HALF the cost savings of not covering her with insurance and they said no. They do not alter salary based on differences in cost of insurance between employees, they don’t pay the folks with families less and single people more because of the differences in the cost of insurance coverage. Its just a policy. A policy that a lot of employers have and for good reason. I am frankly surprised to hear that you were able to affect your pay by declining insruance as part of your pay package.
Anything is possible in negotiations, but that doesn’t mean anything is going to happen in all negotiations. Many larger companies or government employers simply do not have bureaucratic flexibility on issues like that, so the idea of negotiating it is farcical.
Some companies do have a standard policy of paying you more if you take no health insurance. One that I’m familiar with in this area gives you a $100/month credit if you refuse any health benefit from the company (typical for married persons who are covered by a superior plan offered to their spouse.)
Well, it would be known to both up front, but it wouldn’t be part of the free negotiation, since the employer still has no choice but to offer it.
The construction company I described was well aware that, in order to successfully complete a job, they had to appease the organized crime family that controlled the area. They were of course free to decide to not undertake such jobs, but even though they choice to do the job under those conditions, their decision to pay people for doing nothing was not freely-made.
The reason – if it’s not apparent – is that even though they knew in advance this would happen, they should be entitled to rely on the fact that people won’t commit crimes. When someone extracts a negotiated wage concession by threat of criminal reprisal, that concession cannot be said to be freely given.
In similar fashion, when someone extracts a negotiated wage concession by government mandate, it cannot be said to be freely given.
NOONE is arguing that it isn’t compensation but you seem to be saying that youa re entitled to a specific form of compensation from your employer that your employer does not want to provide.
So lets say the law says you must be paid in part in the form of condoms, is that as clear cut to you? Lets say you and your employer agreed that you would be paid in the form of cash and all the babanas you can eat (you would like them to also pay you in the form of allthe beer you can drink and all the fur you can wear but your employer objects to people drinking beer or wearing fur so they say no and you just end up buying your beer and furs on your own), let say a law came along that said your employer also had to provide you with all the beer you can drink and all the fur you can wear. Sure that beer and fur is part of your compensation but can you REALLY not understand why your employer might object to being forced to provide you with beer and fur?
Health insurance isn’t fungible. For example, my health insurance partially covers gym membership and massages (if I get a prescription from my doctor that massages will help my sore muscles from working out at the gym (which can be located in a country club, come to think of it so can the masseuse)). Are you entitled to this sort of coverage as well. There are clear health benefits from gym membership and I would argue massages as well.
You are being paid in kind and they are being told that the in kind payment must take a form that they object to.
About $16/day per insured man woman and child. Turns out that not covering contraception doesn’t noticably increase birth rates, it simply means that people have to buy it on their own. It should be covered because it is a basic health service, its a bit like having health insurance that doesn’t cover annual check-ups or cholesteral medicine.
I was under the impression that we couldn’t distinguish salary between employees based on the cost of health care coverage. Its probably more nuanced than that, the only way to really do it was to contribute a fixed dollar amount towards health insurance rather than cover a percentage so that you would deduct more from the guy with a family than the single guy because teh permiums for the single guy would be lower but I couldn’t pay 70% of insurance premiums for both and then bump the single guy’s pay by a few bucks to make up for the fact taht he was costing me less.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t have a problem with the requirement because I think it is an acceptable limitation on freedom of religion. It is not facially disciminatory and serves a legitimate state purpose. Birth control is so basic to health care that I think the state can mandate that it be part of every health insurance contract.
In fact several states have mandated this sort of thing for DECADES and they are just as subject to the first amendment as the federal government and yet noone seems to think they could rely on the first amendment to object to the state laws. This is a purely political position taken during an election year by an increasingly politicized catholic clergy and Republican establishment that thinks that wedge politics would work in their favor on this issue as it has on every wedge issue since Roe v Wade.
Its one thing to object to third trimester abortions (perhaps as a stalking horse for all abortions) but the stalking horse is gone now and they are clearly overreaching.
This isn’t remotely true. Do you seriously think that your employer can no longer restrict your options for insurance? Perhaps you mean your employer can no longer restrict your options for insurance for this one particular item. There are plenty of things that employers can still pick and choose whether to have covered or not and plenty of those things have a moral component to them.
Also, there is no clear definition for “full coverage”. This is something that clearly changes with the zeitgeist.
Once again I’m happy to see this debate rage on because it brings us closer to the point where we, as a society, will be forced to admit that employer-sponsored healthcare is unsustainable as well as unwise.
Enjoy,
Steven
Here’s how simple this is. People who don’t want to be parents are probably right, they shouldn’t be. People who want to be parents but can’t afford it right now should be able to postpone. It is in our best interests that those people be assisted in this effort. These people should not be prevented from fucking for making the right choice. Because fucking is good for you, it builds character. Or at least it makes it less likely that you well get all stabby at the Mall. No, I can’t prove that, and no, I don’t care.
The difference between the mobsters and the possible future employees in this case, however (or at least, one of them), is that the employees would be doing work to earn pay. The construction company have no means at their disposal to “take back” what they’re paying those mobsters; employers faced with employees who do earn some percentage of what they are paid can take whatever mandated additional charge out of that, negating that extraction - in a sense, the cost is passed on, and in a way that allows for free negotiation to exist.
IOW, let’s say that Revenant and Co. are looking to hire some new employees. As CEO I consider a worthy wage for the position to be $10 an hour. The government mandates that I must purchase additional insurance, which costs me an extra $0.10. So I could simply take that out of what I believe the job is worth to me, and offer to pay $9.90 an hour, thus retaining my ability to pay what I believe the work is worth and of course to which a new employee may choose to accept or reject. Something that would also apply to renegotiation of pay for current employees.
I think an argument could also be made that an employer might well consider government-mandated additional costs to be themselves a readjustment of how much they believe an employee’s work is worth. If Revenant and Co. are paying $10 an hour because that’s the amount I believe allows purchasing power to the level I believe is appropriate for the role, but the government then declares that in fact for whatever reason my evaluation of that power is inaccurate, then quite possibly i’d be happy to alter my wage system. The problem with the mobster analogy in that case is that the sole reason that the construction company would have to keep them on the books is the threat of retaliation. If those mobsters were, let’s say, the sons of a good friend, perhaps I might give them that pay for reasons other than that threat.
This is “earned” in the same sense that a workplace free from recognized hazards as required by OSHA is “earned”–which is to say, not at all. It is now table stakes, a non-negotiable. We can say a hazard-free workplace is good public policy. and you may feel the same way about contraception insurance coverage. But that is a subjective opinion in either case, and it provides no basis for dismissing someone else’s opinion to the contrary.
Negotiable benefits are earned compensation, however difficult that negotiation might be. Employers offer a compensation package (which includes benefits) and the employee is free to take it, leave it, or try to negotiate a better deal. If he accepts, fulfills the terms of his contract, it is meaningful to say he earned the compensation in question. But he has done nothing to earn (nor could he do anything to be denied) anything that the government mandates. Such items have no meaning relative to a discussion of what one earns. That doesn’t make them good or bad.
On a related note, can anyone cite me to the Catholic teachings saying that a person commits a sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church when he is involuntarily forced to take an action that may or may not contribute to the sin of another, depending on the actions of the other person?
Because it seems to me that the whole involuntariness/voluntariness debate happening here is also relevant to whether this controversy has been contrived by the Bishops for political rather than theological reasons.
In most moral systems, agency is a pretty important factor. But I don’t really know how it works in Catholic doctrine. Enlighten me?
Anything truly involuntary can’t be sinful. But that’s not what we have here. In fact, some bishops are suggesting civil disobedience will be in order if this is not resolved.
If the RCC is successful and this is repealed, surely you’d say their actions mean they have not volunteered, and in fact have refused, to take part in funding an act that is sinful from their perspective. So I’m not seeing your point.