Many years ago when I was an employee benefits manager I added oral contraceptives to our health benefits. The benefit was negotiated, there was a cost involved, it was a conscious decision to add a new benefit. The pill was not previously covered because it was not used to treat an illness or injury; it was not health care. The coverage required the same co-pay applicable to all other prescription drugs. Even though there were conditions where the pill could be used medically, the routine abuse in claiming such use had precluded coverage in the past.
Let’s be honest, using oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy or to abort a pregnancy is not health care any more than a condom is health care.
So when you hear a politician on the left say something like:
“Since the Supreme Court decided it was not going to protect women’s access to health care, I am going to,” Sen. Patty Murray told POLITICO. She’s working on legislation to “protect health care services regardless of occupation” but said she hasn’t settled on a specific approach.
it’s a joke; pure nonsense.
Then we have the White House weighing in:
“The notion that five older men will say that some business can dictate health choices to their employees is a fairly understandable and powerful argument,” said David Plouffe, who managed Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign. “This is a 1950 decision in an America of 2014. For millions of women, this can be a huge issue.”
You know of course this has nothing to do with a business dictating health choices, the choice to use birth control is no different than it was before Obamacare. Rather this is positioning for the next election so Democrats can rally women to their cause.
NYT Editorial June 30, 2014
But the immediate effect, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a powerful dissent, was to deny many thousands of women contraceptive coverage vital to their well-being and reproductive freedom.
From the NYT 7-1-14:
Within hours of the decision, Mr. Obama and his allies criticized it as the latest attempt by conservative men to control private matters that are best left to women and their doctors.
What has paying for a $30 pill to do with private matters between a women and her doctor?” Why does Medicare deny all coverage for acupuncture? Is that discriminatory against Chinese medicine?
This has absolutely nothing to do with health care. It is not health care, it is not preventive health care, no one is blocking women’s access to health care. It has only to do with the political left and who pays for a woman’s birth control pill. If a woman wants to use the pill voluntarily, use it, but don’t expect someone else to pay for it. The pill is not expensive (the Planned Parenthood website says $15-$50 a month), it is not unaffordable to women (financial assistance for poor women has long been available).
What else does a woman or a family spend $15-$50 a month on that is not a necessity; maybe eating out, a trip to the salon, a tattoo (nearly half of women under age 35 have gotten at least one tattoo according to a Fox News poll), getting ones nails manicured? Or maybe some of this spending. Who pays for those purchases? Tell me the difference, money is money and insurance is supposed to pay for unanticipated, unplanned, unaffordable risks.
The absurdity of this discussion is beyond comprehension. It’s not a religious issue, it’s just common sense. Women march in the streets to have their employer and fellow insured citizens pay for their birth control pills, but not a word is heard about co-payments and coinsurance required for the purchase of life-preserving drugs and drugs needed for actual medical treatment. Many plans require a co-pay for medically necessary prescriptions that is equal to or greater than the full cost of a contraceptive and there is silence. Do you really doubt this is a political and not medical issue?
I can’t believe we live in a country that elects politicians who make statements like this. Do we live at a time when if someone else does not pay for what you want, you are “denied” what you want even when a very viable alternative is to pay for it yourself?
Even if we agree that coverage for the pill should be universal (most plans already covered contraceptives before Obamacare), how under any logic do you single out this one voluntary use, low-cost drug and require it to be “free”❓
Are we nuts or simply overwhelmed by a political ideology❓. What is the really scary part and a clear indication of our inability to actually deal with health care costs, is the fact that so many Americans accept the position of the political left. Perhaps it’s just greed and not stupidity … let’s hope‼️
PS. Hobby Lobby actually does pay for most forms of birth control, but you would never know from the ridicules rhetoric from the left.
This protester is 100% correct, it’s not her boss’s business; so don’t expect the boss (and your fellow workers) to pay for it. . Read more on this news item
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Actually, this is not a Christian issue……… It is an issue of being responsible!!!!!
And let me tell you…… if a christian couple choses to abort because they were irreponsible then I would not have any respect for them……. I do not think they could honestly call themselves christian…… Amen?
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Jerry Wilson, your run-on sentence is utterly dazzling. I’ll just have to wait until November to “get it.”
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Ahem, Mr. Wilson, I called Douglas a prophet in an ironic sense. His pronouncements are objects of veneration by the Left. Douglas was known for interpreting the Constitution in “fresh” or “imaginative” or “crazy” ways, depending on your point of view.
To my point: Douglas defended his interpretation of the “right of privacy” with the words I quoted. You may now take note that there is no right of privacy mentioned in the Constitution just as there is no mention of contraceptives in the Bible.
Lastly, the word penumbra had no such meaning as “a body of rights held to be guaranteed by implication in a civil constitution” prior to Douglas’ fatuous use of the term. Of course his many disciples and acolytes will say it was imaginative and fresh. You apparently are among them.
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Good points Vince. You and Dick keep showing Wilson to be the fool.
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John and Vince – you are both right wing ideologues totally out of touch with reality in 2014. You don’t get it yet, but you will in November. Conservatives rolling back civil rights, enacting “minority” voter suppressions, conducting an all out war on women’s rights, attempting to destroy Medicare, supporting the job-destructing TPP, opposing an increase in the minimum wage, opposing any and all forms of gun controls, opposing healthcare for Americans, obstructing the president of the United States on every issue, refusing compensation for the long-term unemployed products from the Bush recession, supporting Issa’s expensive, idiotic and unproductive witch hunts, obstructing Medicaid expansions in 24 states, opposing any immigration reform legislation, opposing SNAP and Head Start, refusing to enact benefits for our veterans, opposing school lunches for children, opposing Meals on Wheels, opposing Pell Grants, attempting to privatize and thereby destroy Social Security, attempting to effectively destroy Medicare with a voucher system, supporting and funding charter schools to prevent low income children from education opportunities, attacking labor unions on all fronts to further subjugate American working people, reducing income taxes for the most wealthy and saddling the American middle class with more of the debt that Republicans created with two unwinnable wars, ending regulations governing the big banks that plunged our nation into a huge recession, ending regulations of huge energy companies that are polluting our environment for profit and who are financing your campaigns to retain your congressional seats, preserving income tax loopholes for the richest and largest and saddling the American middle class with the resulting revenue shortfall, continuing federal subsidies for big oil corporations who are enjoying record profits and starving their employees, refusing to enact equal pay for equal work for women, opposing “big government” involvement in citizens’ lives unless it is to destroy the health choices of women, denying climate change because you are puppets of big oil and big coal whose contributions fund your election campaigns, supporting the gross income inequalities that have transformed our nation into an oligarchy and promoting entrances into more unwinnable wars such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan that only serve to enrich war criminals such as Dick Cheney. That is your sorry and immoral position in our political environment and it is very much shameful.
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Right!!!!!!!! Yeah Hobby Lobby….. You want birth control beyond what your employer will pay for……. pay for it yourself!!!!!!
Hobby Lobby is a Christian business who takes good care of their empyees. They live by their convictions……..I would be proud to work for them….
There is another form of birth control…..called……ABSTINENCE!!!!……???
Old fashion, but it works!!!!!!!!!!
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Thank you, Mr. Thesaurus.
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Commenter Wilson states that because the word “contraceptives” are not included in the Bible therefore any objection to them based on religious belief is a falsehood and sham.
Wilson has apparently forgotten the immortal words of the late prophet, and former Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, who wrote this about the Bill of Rights, “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” (from the Book of Griswold.)
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Furthermore:
The slide towards American theocracy was nudged one more step forward by today’s Supreme Court decision in support of the “freedom” of corporations with “religious” beliefs to restrict the rights of their employees. In essence, religious “beliefs” trump the obligations, rights, and responsibilities that come with being members of the polity and a broader political community.
The NY Times details the logic of the theocrats as:
The 5-to-4 decision, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to challenges from other corporations to many laws that may be said to violate their religious liberty.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court’s five more conservative justices, said a federal religious-freedom law applied to for-profit corporations controlled by religious families. He added that the requirement that the companies provide contraception coverage imposed a substantial burden on the companies’ religious liberty. He said the government could provide the coverage in other ways.
The dissent offers up this chilling observation:
On that point, Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the court’s decision “is bound to have untoward effects” in other settings.
“The court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, “invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.”
The corporateocracy and the 1 percent are using the tricks, smoke, and mirrors of “religious faith” to expand their power and protections from civil authority and the social compact.
The tactic is Orwellian and dystopian.
Alas, if corporations are indeed “people”–an insult to the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution which was put in place to protect the rights of newly freed black slaves–then their behavior is sociopathic. The sociopath will lie, dissemble, and exploit others for his or her own gain because that is their essential nature.
There are many complications that will arise from the Supreme Court’s “Hobby Lobby” decision.
The language of “religious liberty” and “free enterprise” are deified in American political culture and discourse. Those words are blinding and disorienting; therefore, they are also concepts that are not critically interrogated.
For example, “religious liberty” and “free enterprise” were used to justify slavery, as well as Jim and Jane Crow. The move towards privatized schools, “urban academies”, and publicly funded religiously based secondary and primary education are the direct heirs of the “freedom academies” that whites used as a means to resist integration and the Black Freedom Struggle in the South and elsewhere.
[I wonder how many African-Americans and others who support school privatization are aware of that ugly history and the intersection between neoliberalism and white supremacy in the present?]
In practice, the language of religious liberty and free enterprise are in many ways antithetical to a true and expansive view of freedom, liberty, and civil rights.
The Roberts and Scalia court is operating under an assumption that Christianity is the United States’ semi-official religion and that it should be legislated and protected in a way that other faiths are not. This is, of course, a misreading of the Constitution–despite what the deranged members of the Fox News Christian Evangelical Dominionist American public would like to believe.
Unintended consequences may lay bare the hypocrisy of the Right-wing and its agents on the Supreme Court.
How would conservatives and their agents respond if a company with Islamic beliefs (however defined) decided to impose its religious values on white, Christian, American employees?
Sharia hysteria would spread in such a way as to make the present day-to-day Islamophobia of the Right-wing echo chamber appear benign and muted by comparison.
What if a Black cultural nationalist organization such as the Nation of Islam or the Black Israelites claimed that they possessed a “religious freedom” to actively discriminate against white people in the workplace or elsewhere?
The White Right would explode with claims of “reverse discrimination” and “black racism”.
The end game of the Supreme Courts’ surrender to the theocrats and religious plutocrats could be the complete dismantlement of the liberal consensus politics of the post World War 2 era.
Consider the following questions.
Is there a “religious freedom” to practice housing discrimination if you are a member of a white supremacist “Christian” organization that leases or sells property? Does “religious freedom” for corporate entities trump anti-discrimination laws governing gender, sexuality, disability status, or race?
The beautiful thing about religious faith is its malleability and vagueness. “Faith” is a belief which cannot be proven by ordinary or empirical means: this trait makes religion dangerous and disruptive to a functioning democratic-liberal polity.
Religion can be anything to anyone.
The Framers understood this fact. Thus, their shrewd choice to separate church and state in the Constitution.
Movement conservatism is no longer a centrist force, one interested in stability or “tradition”. Its members are radicals who want to fundamentally destroy and transform the standing bargains and norms which have guided American society and politics for decades.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, what was once the United States’ most respected political institution, is soiling itself by surrendering to the American Right’s radical agenda.
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From NYT editorial:
Amid this heated talk, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that this was a statutory case, not a case decided under the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion. The statute in question, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, states that the government “shall not substantially burden” the exercise of religion without satisfying a demanding legal test.
It is worth noting that the act was championed by President Bill Clinton and passed in 1993, with near unanimity, by a Democrat-controlled Congress. The act was drafted in response to a controversial 1990 Supreme Court decision that made it easier — far too easy, according to critics of all political stripes — for the government to burden the exercise of religion.
The decision in Hobby Lobby was no shock to anyone familiar with the heavy weight that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act places on religious accommodation.
Dick
Blog http://www.quinnscommentary.com Twitter @quinnscomments
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Omgggggggg Give it a rest!!!!!!!! This country was founded on Religeon and Christian beliefs……. get back to the Constition and quit already with privatized education and all of the BS talk…..
Hobby Lobby and other Christian business can sort their issues in court too…..One issue at time…..It may be time to start addressing some of the things that is wrong in this country….
But stop inserting other rederic into the issue!!!!!!! One issue at a time…… that is what is wrong now….. too many opinions on other things not relavant to the pending issue……
Hobby Lobby won this round!!!!! The End…..
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Hot air……. everyone is an expert…… too many radicals!!!!!!!! What about what is good for Americans…. we tend to forget that……..:(
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Some of your point are well-taken, Mr. Quinn; however, there is absolutely no mention whatsoever of contraceptives in The Bible, so the Hobby Lobby owners’ assertion that contraception is “against their religion” is a complete falsehood and a sham!
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You miss the point. Hobby Lobby covers many kinds of contraceptives. This case was based on the Plan B pill which in effect is a form of abortion. That’s one pill was the basis for the suit.
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The Plan B pill is “a form of abortion” only if you believe that life begins at conception which has been scientifically proven to be untrue.
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I truly believe that Hobby Lobby’s beliefs are centered on the abortion issues and sex outside of marriage….. Sodem and Gomorah (excue the spelling) comes to mind……. It is a morals thing!!!!! That is Biblical !!!!!
Have sexual relations outside of marriage. and take the morning after pill to errase bad behavior!? What about prevention ???
Naturally all you guys are for this kind of behavior….?…. However, there are some with good morals that will never condone this kind of behavior……. and do not want to pay for it……..However I did not see that Hobby Lobby would fire an employee for excersizing their right to pay for it on their own……..
I support Hobby Lobby on this issue…. I think most Americans do!!!!!
Stop trashing Christians…….. this is not necessarily a Christian issue……. it is a moral issue……and an issue of who should pay for your stupidity !!!!!
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the late prophet, and former Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, who wrote this about the Bill of Rights, “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
A Supreme Court Justice is a prophet?
Definition of PENUMBRA
1 a : a space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse) between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light
b : a shaded region surrounding the dark central portion of a sunspot
2: a surrounding or adjoining region in which something exists in a lesser degree : fringe
3: a body of rights held to be guaranteed by implication in a civil constitution
4: something that covers, surrounds, or obscures : shroud <a penumbra of somber dignity has descended over his reputation
Given that our founding fathers were dedicated to the separation of church and state, what is the relationship between "by implication in a civil constitution" and The Bible?
You scored an "A" in vocabulary and an "F" in logic.
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Give it a rest….. we, everyone of us know what is right and what is wrong…. I must say I have lived a very long time and I have seen the moral decay unfolding before my very eyes……. Flower it with words all that you want….. and trash the Bible all you want……..
But if you would read it once in a while you would see that it is, and holds all of the secrets of a good moral life……. putting your head in the sand is not an excuse… ignorance is no excuse…. I am shaking my head …….:(
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BJ Dale, you need help. 1) It IS NOT only unmarried couples who seek contraception and Plan B pills. 2) Conception does not occur after Sodomy. 3) There was no contraception when The Bible was written. 4) A married Christian couple who cannot afford to support another child are not immoral. 5) Take two classes: one in logic and another in spelling
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Granted I am lost without spell check…….I am glad you do not need it…. apparently I got my point accoss without it tho…..
Nor did I say whether married or unmarried…… Abortion and the morning after pill should not be a way of contraception or birth control!!!!!!! Maried or unmarried… abstinence .. or at least protect against bringing an unwanted child into existence…. and why did Father God bring down Sodom? Imorality!!!!!!! Pure and simple….. They were given a chance to do what was right……that tells me where Father Gods heart is on this subject…..
I know fool that you do not get pregnant by way of sodomy…..You are actually to stupid to even address!!!!!!
Responsible sex is great…… I have no problem with that…..
But birth control is not the morning after pill or abortion…..!!!!!!!! I truly respect Hobby Lobby for standing for what is right…. In 1964 we would not said the word SEX outloud……. 2014 omg only fifty (50) years later anything goes.
Where will we be in 2064?……
So take your trashing me and go to hell…….
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