Lets try for some clarity, here. Your employer cannot deny you any medical service or procedure directly, but your insurance bought through your employer-sponsored plan may not cover those things that an employer objects to. This means effectively pricing some people out of certain treatments or services. Part of the SCOTUS ruling was to direct lower courts that had heard cases of businesses seeking religious exemption to revisit those cases in light of this new ruling , so more exemptions than just 4 types of contraception will certainly follow.In extremis,if your employer believes in faith healing and is exempted from providing any coverage at all, you would have to purchase your own insurance coverage on the exchange if you did not qualify for Medicaid and if you live in a state that did not accept the Medicaid expansion you could wind up uninsured.............By the way, next time some parrot defends this ruling by sayin that it only excluded 4 forms and left 16 available ask them if they support limiting magazine sizes for guns.Of course they dont- and 10 is to 15 as 4 is to 20- limiting freedom of legal choices without serving a larger public interest is not constitutionally sound....and limiting choices that a consumer has paid for already through their share of premiums and which the insurance companies WANT to cover as preventive care is really dicey...it would be like buying a 15 round magazine then finding it only had 10 rounds in it, technically you got the magazine, just not the ammo.....corporations as legal entities were created to protect the stockholders and owners of businesses. Corporaitons exist as legal entities separate from their constituent members for tax purposes and civil and criminal liability purposes. This shields people from loosing their shirts and allows a corporate entity to persist even when the owners/sotckholders have shuffled off the mortal coil. This serves the society in that it encourages business venture in that there is some degree of protection of personal assets, gives economic continuity and so on. The legal distinction between the owners as private citizens and their business entity is called the corporate veil. those who willingly engage in commerce in the public sphere agree to a social contract that , here to fore, has prohibited personal religious exemption to prevailing law in order to prevent unfair business advantage. This court, in allowing exemption for closely held corporations on the basis of sincerely held beliefs tore that veil. First, both the Greens in their suit and the court in its majority opinion stipulated to the fact that the Greens belief that IUDs and emergency contraception prevented implantation was not medically sound.GET THIS: THEY BOTH ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE BELIEF IS WRONG. Their argument is that it is faith based, hence protected. The argument against was that the state (the citizens, that is) has a compelling interest in providing access to preventative care in the form of contraception.Prevailing law, per the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, stated that all 20 forms of contraception had to be covered by insurance in employer- sponsored plans. Since there are medical reasons that may prevent someone from using one form as opposed to the next, or since other disorders can be treated with hormonal contraceptives, it was deemed discriminatory to not offer the coverage for the full contingent. This court applied strict scrutiny- the most stringent standard- in determining what the least restrictive means of furthering state interest would be and minimizing the burden on the Greens religious conscience. They decided, narrowly, that absolving them from covering the 4 named types and shifting the cost of that coverage on to the ins. co.s themselves or to the government was an adequate remedy. What galls me here is that the court did not seem to even note that any burden to their conscience was self imposed by their unwillingness to accept demonstrable facts in favor of their fetid fantasy that woman were casually snuffing out human lives with IUDs and emergency contraception. You would think that if someone genuinely distressed by the idea that babies were being killed was informed to a scientific certainty that it was not in fact occurring they would be relieved and recalibrate their thinking. The court also did not offer or even suggest any mechanism by which the sincerity of belief would be gauged in order to prevent cynical invocation of this ruling for business advantage or bigotry. If they had, the Greens would have to explain why they object to emergency contraception (Plan B) but not the Pill- they are in fact the same thing, plan b is just a high dose, they both suppress ovulation, neither prevents implantation.. .start to ponder the implications this ruling, not just in its outcome, but reasoning process, has for businesses that want exemption on the basis of their beliefs, even their demonstrably false beliefs, for discrimination laws, environmental laws, occupational safety laws, labor laws ( the court also gravely weakened the footing of labor unions in this session) . This could resonate in many questionable ways ways.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 01:49:03 +0000
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