Hobby Lobby Triumphs over its minion workers

[onejayhawk]

The stockholders in Enron lost the money they put into Enron. They did not lose everything. Given that corporations have religion now, perhaps the investors in Enron are risking eternal damnation.

Losing your retirement savings isn't enough?

J

 

[JollyRoger]

Losing your retirement savings isn't enough?

J

As someone who held Enron, I did not lose everything - just my investment in Enron. The magic of an artificial entity that let non-shareholders absorb some of the loss rather than reaching into my portfolio for my true share of the loss.

 

[Farm Boy]

We can clone embryos via skin cells and fertilize them and make human babies if we wanted. But you kill those skin cells whenever you scratch or take a shower, thus killing potential life.

Intent and avoidability. I could dedicate my life and fortune to preserving the Black rhinoceros. I don't. My commercial actions, unintentionally, may do my part in propping up a global economic system that kills them off. I could also buy traditional medicine products that may contain Black rhino horn powder. I could also intentionally buy medicines and decorations featuring Black rhino horn. I might also intentionally put myself in situations where I might need to harm one out of self-interest. Or I could unwillingly find myself in a situation where I need to harm one out of self-interest. These hypotheticals are not morally interchangeable.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Here is an interesting POV by an economist who explains why Hobby Lobby and other employers should have no say in your health insurance coverage on religious grounds, or any other grounds for that matter. Why it is even illogical for this "parental" relationship to even exist:

The Illogic of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

Imagine yourself in a bar where a pickpocket takes money out of your wallet and with it buys you a glass of chardonnay. Although you would have preferred a pinot noir, you decide not to look that gift horse in the mouth and thank the stranger profusely for the kindness, assuming he paid for it. You might feel differently, of course, if you knew that you actually had paid for it yourself.

Persuaded by both theory and empirical research, most economists believe that employer-based health insurance is an analogue of this bar scene.

The argument is that the premiums ostensibly paid by employers to buy health insurance coverage for their employees are actually part of the employee’s total pay package – the price of labor, in economic parlance – and that the cost of that fringe benefit is recovered from employees through commensurate reductions in take-home pay.

Evidently the majority of Supreme Court justices who just ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case do not buy the economists’ theory. These justices seem to believe that the owners of “closely held” business firms buy health insurance for their employees out of the kindness of their hearts and with the owners’ money. On that belief, they accord these owners the right to impose some of their personal preferences – in this case their religious beliefs — on their employee’s health insurance.

Score it 1-0 in “Supremes v. Economists.”

In the ruling, the owner of Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores, gained the right not to include certain contraceptive goods and services in the insurance bought for employees, because use of these services conflicts with the owner’s Christian beliefs. Although the justices argue that their ruling is narrowly confined to contraceptive services, one must wonder what other items other business owners in the future may seek to jettison from benefit packages on the basis of this or that professed religious belief.

The ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance. For many smaller firms, that choice is narrowed to one or two alternatives – not much more choice than that afforded citizens under a single-payer health insurance system.

Furthermore, the arrangement induces employers to intervene in many other ways in their employees’ personal life – for example, in wellness programs that can range from the benign to annoyingly intrusive, depending upon the employers’ wishes.

And what kind of health “insurance” have Americans gotten under this strange arrangement? Once again, uniquely in the industrialized world, it has been ephemeral coverage that is lost with the job or changed at the employer’s whim. Citizens in any other industrialized country have permanent, portable insurance not tied to a particular job in a particular country.

Nor has this coverage been cheap by international standards. American employers can be said to have played a major role in driving up health spending per capita in the United States measured in internationally comparable purchasing power parity dollars, to roughly twice the level found in other industrialized populations. As a recent article in the health policy journal Health Affairs reported, a decade of health care cost growth wiped out real income gains for the average American family during the period from 1999 to 2009.

The Supreme Court’s ruling may prompt Americans to re-examine whether the traditional, employment-based health insurance that they have become accustomed to is really the ideal platform for health insurance coverage in the 21st century. The public health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act are likely to nibble away at this system for small and medium-size business firms, especially those with a mainly low-wage work force.

In the meantime, the case should help puncture the illusion that employer-provided health insurance is an unearned gift bestowed on them by the owners and paid with the owners’ money, giving those owners the moral right to dictate the nature of that gift.

 

[classical_hero]

Does it matter? We're talking about the categories of this debate, and the example helps to establish those categories. Whether or not it is actually likely to occur isn't important.

The point is, there is nothing inevitable about the development of an embryo into a baby. We know this, because if we remove the embryo from a certain set of conditions, it will not develop. Keep it inside the womb, if it's any better, but imagine that the mother does not eat or drink for the course of her pregnancy: that is not an embryo that will come to term. Pregnancy is something that women do, actively, not something that happens to them, so it makes no sense to talk about this as an inevitable process.

When we look at an embryo and picture a baby, we're hypothesising, engaging in act of mental construction. The "baby" is no more or less real than Frodo Baggins, only more plausible. And nobody cried "murder" when a fictional character dies, so why here, if the humanity of the embryo is a characteristic not embryo itself, but of a hypothetical future version of that embryo?

If I take certain conditions away from you needed for life, how would you survive?

 

[KMRblue1027]

Humanity is totally near extinction

 

[classical_hero]

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

 

[KMRblue1027]

I don't know maybe the fact that it's a vital part of woman's health? It's already been covered to death in this forum and thread alone...

 

[Commodore]

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

As it has already been stated earlier in this thread, some forms of birth control are used to regulate a woman's hormone levels.

 

[Ajidica]

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

Birth Control has as much to do with health care drugs such as Ritalin or Concerta (both are drugs used to treat some aspects of Aspergers).
Neither are essential for medical health, but for an individual user are quite important in other respects.

 

[JollyRoger]

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

I am wondering what running a hobby chain has to do with religion.

 

[timtofly]

Here is an interesting POV by an economist who explains why Hobby Lobby and other employers should have no say in your health insurance coverage on religious grounds, or any other grounds for that matter. Why it is even illogical for this "parental" relationship to even exist:

So it is ok to recognize quasi-scientist as gospel? Doing it on religious grounds is not parenting any more than an elementary school teacher teaching science makes them a scientist. The reason involved in denying contraceptives has nothing to do with health issues to begin with. If an employee gets pregnant, is an abortion covered? If the baby is delivered is that covered? Does the company go out of it's way to ensure the mother takes proper care of herself during the pregnancy?

Even if a company treats their employees as family and looks out for their best interest, does that make them monsters? Are you saying that religious people should be forced to not have children, because they are irresponsible for looking out for them according to their religious dogma's? That is the state of affairs though. The government has become the arbitrator of who believes what and how far they can go in that belief. That seems to be what freedom loving people have asked for and what they are going to get, now the door is opened.

 

[illram]

If it was a men's health issue that offended Hobby Lobby's religious scruples, I wonder if the Court's opinion would have been different.

 

[bhsup]

If it was a men's health issue that offended Hobby Lobby's religious scruples, I wonder if the Court's opinion would have been different.

Given the baby being saved from the post-sex abortion pills this ruling was about (not simply "the pill" as some seem to be arguing) and babies can be either male or female, I say it was just as much about male health as it was female health.

 

[Traitorfish]

Actually, all embryos are female until about week nine of the pregnancy.

 

[El_Machinae]

Intent and avoidability. I could dedicate my life and fortune to preserving the Black rhinoceros. I don't. My commercial actions, unintentionally, may do my part in propping up a global economic system that kills them off. I could also buy traditional medicine products that may contain Black rhino horn powder. I could also intentionally buy medicines and decorations featuring Black rhino horn. I might also intentionally put myself in situations where I might need to harm one out of self-interest. Or I could unwillingly find myself in a situation where I need to harm one out of self-interest. These hypotheticals are not morally interchangeable.

But, now you know. Now you know that scratching snuffs out human life. And, honestly, we intentionally scratch sometimes.

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

Really? Does it boggle your mind that doctors write prescriptions for birth control and that pharmacists have these drugs behind their counters?

 

[Farm Boy]

Ignorance wasn't in there to begin with.

 

[El_Machinae]

I know, but now there's both intent and avoidability. Ignorance was a key component to both

 

[Farm Boy]

Not really, no.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I am wondering what does birth control have to do with health care.

It prevents a live-changing, and potentially dangerous and deadly condition from taking hold, the termination of which you presumably regard to be of the highest offense.

However, in addition to the merely contraceptive properties of birth control medications, they also provide a wide variety of treatments for women in other areas, most importantly hormonal regulation for women who struggle with the often debilitating condition of "heavy periods," and even comparatively minute things such as acne.

Birth control regulates and improves upon bodily health and is administered by health care officials and experts. Therefore, it has quite a bit to do with health care, it being unable to be categorized as anything else.