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US Justice Blocks Implementation of ACA Contraceptive Mandate
theodp writes "First approved for contraceptive use in the U.S. in 1960, 'The Pill' is currently used by more than 100 million women worldwide and by almost 12 million women in the U.S. But just hours before the Affordable Care Act was to go into effect, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a stay temporarily blocking a mandate requiring health insurance coverage of birth control, and gave the Obama administration until Friday to respond to the Supreme Court on the matter. Sotomayor's order applies to a group of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and other Roman Catholic nonprofit groups that use the same health plan, known as the Christian Brothers Employee Benefit Trust (PDF). The group is one of many challenging the federal requirement for contraceptive coverage, but a decision on the merits of that case by the full Supreme Court could have broader implications. One imagines Melinda Gates is none too pleased. So, will U.S. health care require a Department of Personal Belief Exemptions that are dictated by employers (PDF, 'The Trustees of CBEBT and the management of Christian Brothers Services are dedicated to protecting the employers participating in the CBEBT from having to face the choice of violating their faith or violating the law')?"
They need to quit acting like spoiled brats when they're told to get the fuck in line with an ethical society.
You either have healthcare or you don't. No picking and choosing what procedures or medications fit your chosen lifestyle.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Whatever happened to "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"?
If I wanted to read stuff like this, I'd wander over to NBC News. Now please stick to what you're good at, delivering me fresh nerd porn.
Religious people can't simply leave it well enough alone, and just say "Well if you think contraception is wrong, just don't buy it." Instead, they have to dictate to others what they may or may not do. "We can't allow you to get contraception through our health plan!"
This kind of thinking is wrong and needs to be abolished. Let each person decide what they think is best for themselves. If someone wants to believe a person will "go to hell" if they do something, that's fine. That someone can simply not do it. But don't try to legislate or make it more difficult for others to do what they like to do, provided they're not hurting others.
Sotomayor is generally considered one of the most liberal Supreme Court Justices, but here she is issuing a ruling that will make conservatives very happy. In other words, she made the decision based on legal principles instead of her personal ideology. Don't hold your breath waiting for, say, Thomas or Alito to do the same, ever.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
By that logic you should also exempt organ transplants, blood transfusions and any other medical procedure that any group, religious or otherwise, objects to. In other words, you might as well give the fuck up and stop providing any coverage at all.
Please confine non-technology related articles to other venues.
Just like if one's personal faith entails, say, pacifism (of the no support for institutional violence variety), that does not mean that one gets to opt out of, say, taxes that support the military, the police, or the prison system. Not sure how mandating that birth control is part of a federally stipulated health care package and religious (yet Sisyphean) objections to heterosexual sex are going to change that reality.
As an insurance, covering contraception makes no sense as insurance covers risks (and mainly risks you cannot cover yourself) and close to 100% of women below the age of 50 need contraception, so it becomes either pay for the pills themselves or pay to the insurer whatever the pills would have cost in the first place + administrative fees. Now, it makes sense as a redistribution policy to 1) have men pay for women's contraception, 2) subsidize contraception for poor women. However, since socialism is a dirty word in the USA, everyone pretends health coverage is private insurance even though covering something that is 100% certain to occur does not make any sense for an insurance contract.
Part of the problem is if they don't get a cutout on this then they won't get a cutout on say Abortion Coverage (which many Christians considered Murder). Plus there is the nasty trick of the Morning After Pill which is considered a contraceptive but is in reality an Abortion Pill.
There needs to be cutouts for a great many things (like pregnancy coverage for MALES and Prostate Coverage for FEMALES).
oh btw i stand as somebody that has FAILED to get coverage under ACA (i can't afford insurance and don't qualify in my state for medicare).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
... Viagra coverage for men, too. Only seems fair. If you can't get it up, it must be part of His plan.
Frankly, I've never understood the Church's fanaticism about birth control and sex without conception. I guess their `thinking' is along the lines of what comedian Chris Rush said when he joked (paraphrasing): "Don't you know that when you masturbate you're murdering millions of potential Christians?"
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Couldn't resist the chance for the dig, could you?
Granting cert on the case in question required more than Sotomayor's concurrence. One imagines the decision to issue an injunction also resulted from consultation with other justices. You have no idea who she talked to, nor what the content of the justices' discussions are.
Nonetheless, let's rip on the conservatives, because you don't like what they think. This pretty much defines "being an asshole". Which you are.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If the supreme court allows for profit corporations to deny health care insurance for religious reasons only the worker will suffer. If you work for a Jehovah's witness employer they may demand that blood transfusions be covered. If you work for a Christian Science believer they may demand only broken bones be covered by health insurance. A Christian faith healer may demand that they not be required to offer any health insurance and that those sick workers should pray the disease or injuries away with the grace of Jesus. The employee earns their health care insurance with their labor. It is no different then being paid wages. Just like the government can mandate wages and work conditions they are able to mandate health care insurance coverage for workers. This is under the general welfare and commerce clause of the constitution. A religious exemption allowance would allow the Racist Church of the Creator members not to hire non-whites based on their beliefs. In other words, if SCOTUS allows a religious exemption for employers compensating employees chaos will rein for workers across America as every religious belief will have to by law be accommodated by the government and the employee will have no recourse.
You're absolutely right. So many of us come here for content relating to computers, software, science and technology that just isn't covered properly by the mainstream press. Yet we get presented with totally irrelevant crap like this.
The godawful beta site is just making things worse. Not only is the content rubbish, but the presentation is rubbish, too.
Clearly the current approach is not working. The trend is toward driving existing users away, without drawing away new readers.
I sincerely hope that whoever is in charge at Slashdot or Dice tunes into what's happening here. Slashdot should not strive to be reddit or Digg or whatever the flavor-of-the-month social news site is. Slashdot should return to providing apolitical discussion concerning science and technology. Slashdot should drop this half-assed beta that everybody hates.
Those running Slashdot need to look no further than the GNOME 3 project to see how stupid decisions can totally destroy and ruin what were once vibrant communities. Please don't let that happen here!
The past success of Slashdot wasn't due to chasing the latest shitty web design trends or spewing out politically-charged articles. It was due to that sort of junk being avoided!
You definitely missed something. In the case of Catholicism (not saying I agree or disagree) facilitating a "moral evil" is also a "moral evil". In this case, the provision of insurance which makes contraception (a Catholic "moral evil") more easily obtained by eliminating co-pays is seen as facilitation and, consequently a "moral evil". Enforced under the threat of fines totaling almost $40,000 per Employee per year represents a substantial burden. In short, if Catholics adhere to Their faith, They are bankrupted; THAT is the issue in question.
Non-tech articles like this don't belong on a tech news site. There are plenty of outlets for non-tech news, Slashdot isn't one of them.
Since when it is an issue obeying the law on the basis of "religious beliefs"? If there were a religious organization that believes in human sacrifice do they get an exemption of obeying the law of homicide?
There are many laws that can be dismissed on the basis of "religious beliefs": sacrifice, torture, divorce, adoption, medical care, anti-racist laws, equality laws, holidays, and the list goes on. If the Little Sisters of the Poor have issues with the law of the land they are free to go to other countries that are more compatible with their."religious beliefs".
What hypocrites the Little Sisters of the Poor are. Birth control health coverage would firstly help those poor woman that the non-profit group says they care about. It would help to get those woman an education and some chances of escaping their status.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Any retail store and anybody you work for ALWAYS have quirks. We are going to have to live with that. There are gotcha problems every which way you go (even where you step).
Ask any avid brick & mortar shopper. You want something? You'll have to learn who offers what.
As long as all customers/employees are treated the same when they come through the door you should be happy.
You don't like what they offer? Don't go there. Don't seek employment there. Move to a different place... look there.
That was Zen, this is Tao
Technically, you are free to work for any employer or no employer at all. You are also free to buy contraception (or organ transplants on your own). You are free to buy your own insurance as well. The problem is that you disagree with your employer on a benefit that they are paying for. Just like any other employer policy, if you do not like it, you are free to leave (or in this case buy your own). If the religious convictions of your employer bothers you, whether they are right or wrong, technically no one is holding a gun to your head to work there.
Please, please, for the love of debate, never again accuse somebody of committing the "straw man fallacy" when in fact they have not.
You have committed what is now called the Straw Man Fallacy Fallacy. That's when you commit a fallacy by accusing a fellow debater of having engaged in straw man fallacy when they have not.
And please refrain from ad hominem attacks upon other people here. Please do not call other people here "assholes", for instance, just because they advocate an idea that you personally disagree with. That is very poor debating style.
This is not reddit. We engage in intelligent discourse here, like mature adults. Please apologize, refrain from engaging in immature behavior in the future, and we can then all move on to more important discussion.
The next step is for CEO of BIGCOMPANY to decide that cancer is something decided by God, and that paying for their employees to get treatment to cancer violates their religious beliefs.
Plus there is the nasty trick of the Morning After Pill which is considered a contraceptive but is in reality an Abortion Pill.
Wrong (almost certainly). The best evidence is that "morning after pill" works by preventing fertilisation, not by inducing abortion, as you'd know if you'd read the RA (though of course this is /, so there wasn't much chance of that).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Doesn't refer to seating arrangments. If you holy-rollers don't agree with contraception, then don't fucking use is. Simple. Every religion since always has tried to conform the world their their viewpoints and it's the main reason why society can't have nice things. If you want to live your life nailed to a cross, go ahead but stop thinking you need to force your belief system on everyone else. Same goes for atheists. sick of hearing you whiners too. Believe what you want and let others believe what they want. That's a hell of a lot closer to the peace and tolerance that every religion claims to be about but never gets it right.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The MA pill usually acts as a contraceptive, but it can prevent implantation as an alternate method of action less commonly. Depends on timing.
News for nerds -- as if politics isn't bad enough, of what need have nerds for things which keep women from getting pregnant?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you are a male, then you cannot get pregnant, insurance should account for that, correct. Except you COULD find yourself in a relationship or somehow responsible for part of a pregnancy bill... It happens sometimes, YOOU could be one-in -a-billion, that's why is still called INSURANCE.
Insurance companies know exactly what those rates per capita are for men and price accordingly... They are just gaming the system or POLITICAL points because their business is about to become "services based" rather than "tricky contract based".
Yet we get presented with totally irrelevant crap like this.
This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. Below it is a 'tech' story that's nearly six hours old that has under 40. Seems to me this topic is of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and the Slashdot overlords are doing their job.
Why isn't a vasectomy or condoms covered by Obamacare? There's nothing in the law that specifies contraception coverage is female-only.
Some religions still consider the morning after pill "abortion" since it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo. Since they consider a fertilized embryo a human life, and the fertilized embryo has been killed by prevention of implantation, it is considered abortion for them. The fact that a fertilized embryo may have otherwise not implanted successfully is considered irrelevant.
If religion gets into private business then they have to abide by standard business rules. Their choice. The law doesn't apply to the nuns - only to the people they hire. It's against my beliefs to hire anyone that is stupid enough to believe that the earth isn't billions of years old, evolution, or science in general. But I can't legally not hire them as long as they get their specific job done. 2 sides of the same coin.
This entire argument is completely skewed, it shouldn't be blocked due to religious considerations, it should be blocked based on the fact that government is dictating to the employers and employees as to how employers pay their employees! Where is the freedom? Where is the freedom to associate, freedom of contract? Where is freedom to run private property as one sees fit? Why are you all accepting as a fact that government can dictate to employers and employees must be paid in contraceptives rather than in cash?
The second valid argument is of-course the fact that government is dictating that insurance cannot BE insurance but instead must be some form of prepaid health management system.
What do contraceptives have to do with catastrophic events that insurance is supposed to cover? Why are contraceptives any more special than food or clothing or machine oil or fuel or housing for that matter?
Insurance is a bet that some event will take place and actuary science is used to calculate the probability of events based on individual participant's and then the bets are placed. What does it have to do with events that are of near 100% probability (that women will have sex?) Insurance is not there to provide you with every day items, in fact insurance shouldn't even cover child birth - it's an EXPECTED event, not an unexpected one, it's an event that people must prepare for and they even know with almost complete certainty when exactly this will happen and they must plan for it.
Medical complications during child birth might be covered by insurance but child birth itself is simply an expected procedure that should be paid OUT OF POCKET just like most doctor visits and most other things, like birth control.
The real issue is that it is a question of individual freedom, not a question of religious prejudice.
You can't handle the truth.
This is the very essence that said democratic process may vote unconstitutional laws, and be struck down by federal courts. Obamacare has many challenges ahead, some judicial in nature.
Our healthcare system (in the States) is a fluke of history.
FDR during WWII put caps on wages in an attempt to keep inflation down (so much for wars being good for economies!).
Henry Kaiser (Kaiser Permanente Kaiser) thought "well, if I can't offer higher pay, I'll offer perks; like healthcare."
So, other employers followed suit and tada! we have our current fucked up system.
I agree with the parent.
Catholics pay taxes.. The government does all kinds of terrible non-catholic things with the catholic taxpayer's money.
Just like taxes, the EMPLOYERS pay money into the "healthcare" pot, and the government decides what services are needed for EMPLOYEES and DEPENDENTS to be covered from that pot.
Freedom of religion applies to EMPLOYEES and DEPENDENTS not "corporate" entities. Not even with the Church as your employer should you have to give up a RIGHT the Government says applies to ALL PEOPLE.
I bet that 99% of them violate their faith in some way on a daily basis. Let's not kid ourselves here.
or kill job based health insurance other then some kind of add on system for high risk jobs / extended workers comp system.
Making nuns provide other people's contraception is like requiring orthodox jewish to provide bacon or forcing atheists to pay for the gideons and their bibles. It's just wrong.
The government is forcing someone to buy the pills. The summary makes it sound like it's all nuns and priests, but there are secretaries and accountants working for these organizations. And if one of them is on the health plan, and wants the pill, then the health plan will be paying for the pills, so, the argument is that, by proxy, the priests and nuns are paying for the pills through their premiums.
In practice, people work where they believe, if there are strong divisions, so I'd guess the number of members of CBEBT who are on the pill to be small. But there have been no numbers released for that, so we can't know. Probably because the only people who could release the numbers would have their arguments harmed by the release of them.
Learn to love Alaska
The beauty of a liberal society is that you are free to be as conservative as you want. Wear a funny hat. Pray. Don't get drunk. Whatever. No one cares.
They should cover basic contraceptives and stop being assholes. If their members don't want to use contraceptives, then they don't have to. Tellingly, although contraceptives are a "no no" for Catholics, most STILL USE THEM. That decision should be up to the individual, not their employer.
Ah, and the ugliness of a conservative society is that you're STILL as free to be as conservative as you want. :D you WILL wear a funny hat, pray, no drinking or having fun... And EVERYONE cares.
Now I think the Government will do a better job these days i.e NO DISCRIMINATION!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find torture morally disgusting. Yet, I still have to pay my taxes, part of which goes to waterboarding and god knows what else. If personal morals are going to be factored into what laws we are suppose to follow, can I form a religion where all taxes are morally wrong? That would be awesome.
Once we have universal healthcare provided by our government, this problem goes away. Perhaps in my children's lifetime.
Many of those comments you mention are in this very thread of discussion, where we're talking about how irrelevant this article is, rather than the topic that the article covers.
Many of the rest of the comments are in similar threads to this one, where the topic of discussion is again how irrelevant this article is.
Best statement of the problem. Kudos.
My faith requires human sacrifice, therefore my HCP is required to facilitate this.
The current ACA has serious problems, although some parts are improvements. The mandate has a lot of problems. For some in my family, ACA+FDA would be a literal killer.
He is an unorthodox slashdot user!
This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. [...] Seems to me this topic is of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and the Slashdot overlords are doing their job.
That's because the story itself is flamebait and a flame war has predictably ensued. There is little quality discussion going on here. This is the cancer that is killing Slashdot.
I get the sense that a majority of the Slashdot crowd doesn't actually take birth control. But, these medications do have other uses, such as stopping, delaying, or lightening bleeding. It's not crazy in my mind to imagine a woman who's already celibate choosing to take extended-cycle birth control for just that reason, especially if prone to very heavy or painful periods.
Similarly, if a person were to have awful back pain for a week out of every month, we would consider prescriptions that manage that as medically necessary, and say that they are now a more productive member of society. It's important that decisions like this are made between a doctor and a patient, not in a court room.
News for Nerds =/= News for Everyone
Also, I find it disturbing this is portrayed as if forbidding access when nobody is forbidding access to anything. Or that somehow "modern sensibilities" authorize overriding the first amendment.
They don't for free speech and they shouldn't for religion. "Congress shall pass no law" is wording carefully crafted to forbid obfuscated, pleading violations as well as brutish ones.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
seeing how in the past places like McDonald's had health insurance plans that did not cover much and they made quite a bit off of the places can lead to places trying to pull BS like wait for some to get realty sick / have a high cost thing happen and then look for some religious thing maybe even border line BS to get out paying for it.
Then please join us here in the 21st.
My response to them would be:
"If this were a matter of the employers chosing for themselves, plaintiffs would have a valid point. If this were a matter of plans churches were offering to their clergy, plaintiffs would have a valid point. But this is a case where the employers in question are not making personal choices and are not acting as a church, but are acting as ordinary employers offering coverage to employees who don't necessarily follow the same beliefs as their employer. And an employer does not have the right to dictate to their employees based on the employer's religious beliefs. Plaintiffs aren't asking merely to be allowed to follow their own beliefs. They are asking to be allowed, as an ordinary employer, to say that because they don't believe in X that their employees are not allowed access to X either. If plaintiffs arguments are valid, then it would be acceptable for a business run by a Jehova's Witness to offer coverage that forbade treatments involving blood transfusion simply because the business owner followed that belief system. And we don't permit that. We don't allow a business owner to force his employees to follow his beliefs just because they work for him. We don't allow him to say "Profess to follow my beliefs or you won't be allowed access to health insurance.". To allow that wouldn't be freedom of religion, it would be the antithesis of freedom of religion."
Religious people can't simply leave it well enough alone, and just say "Well if you think contraception is wrong, just don't buy it." Instead, they have to dictate to others what they may or may not do. "We can't allow you to get contraception through our health plan!"
This is ironic. It is in fact the religious folks in this instance who are being told "what they may or may not do", specifically "what they [must]" do.
Let each person decide what they think is best for themselves.
Which is what these folks are in fact asking: they they be able to decide for themselves what should be offered as part of their plans.
Catholics in general are the first ones to say that people should be free for themselves to choose their own path: that is the entire point of free will.
1782 Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. "He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters."
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a6.htm
If its taboo in your religion you can choose not to take it and see it as helping to cover the less fortunate as your religious duty. Like men required to take pregnancy coverage.
#CBEBT, try to remember that YOUR faith is not your EMPLOYEES' faith. You cannot impose your beliefs on others just cuz you're the 'boss'.
'The Trustees of CBEBT and the management of Christian Brothers Services are dedicated to protecting the employers participating in the CBEBT from having to face the choice of violating their faith or violating the law'
I think they must misunderstand. The ACA does not require people who have a religious opposition to birth control to take the pill. Similarly, I'm sure the ACA does not require Jehova's Witnesses to accept blood transfusions, but an insurance company operated by Jehova's Witnesses and catering to them would still have to cover transfusions.
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"Women have a right to have control over their own bodies."
Really? Forcing other people (including other women) to pay for birth control for other women doesn't sound like you want women to control "their own bodies" to me.
You are a fucking retard.
BTW, forcing me to pay for your cancer meds when I do not have cancer and never will get cancer is not ethical. You fucking Christ-fags are everything which is wrong with America. Do as I say, not as I do. Hate they neighbor if he is not like me. You are a piece of shit.
A panel of experts, including Doctors, determined that contraceptive should be part of a rational medical insurance plan.
Sadly, reality is much more pathetic than that. It was included in the plan because of the efforts of Senator Barbara Mikulski to get them included. Her efforts were mainly aimed at helping women, which is why vasectomies aren't covered.
By now you should not expect the ACA to be reasonable and well planned.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A) This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events. Contraception is none of those, being completely knowable, 100% predictable, and inexpensive.
While I agree that loose morals are behind most sex experiences, don't sweep it under a 100% when rape causes pregancies too. And it is unplanned.
$35 to $60 dollars a pop
This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events.
True and a baby very much fits that description.
In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover.
For most people no you could not. Most people get their insurance through their work and the type of insurance was chosen by someone else, probably for cost reasons. You did not get to chose most of the specifics of the coverage available to you.
The insurance provider is required by law to provide coverage for contraception, but it's still free to charge what it wants for that coverage based on risk. Why don't they create a plan which they offer only to specific groups people where that plan still provides coverage for contraception/maternity/etc, based on a vastly reduced risk factor. The risk of a nun wanting contraception is very small, but not non-existent I'm guessing. The risks of a nun needing maternity care are slightly higher (e.g. in cases of rape, where the nun would never choose to abort or prevent pregnancy with a morning after pill). The point being, because the risks are low, the insurance provider can say: Hey, on our plan, you won't pay for cover of contraceptives, maternity, family planning etc, but we will still provide the cover if it happens, because the risk is so low the cover can be paid for out of a little bit of the general risk pool. Every insurance provider manages has a general risk pool, where they aggregate all the possible events that occur so infrequently as to be entirely stochastic over the time periods in question, for example, a year, 5 years etc. They just can't plan for covering the expenses down that level of risk detail, because the stats don't work at such low frequencies. I'm sure there will be cases, but very rarely, in which maternity care and even possibly contraception might be medically necessary for someone who hasn't acted against their faith. Again, the case of rape springs to mind, but there's also the use of oral contraceptives to deal with disease related hormonal imbalances, and probably others.
There are sensible ways to do this where faith doesn't need to be compromised, so yeah, this is about a certain group of people trying to enforce their own way on other people. Cristian Scientists refuse a wide variety of modern medical procedures becasue it goes against their faith. Will they get to challenge mandatory health care in it's entirety?
In a small number of cases, The Pill is prescribed for reasons that have nothing to do with contraception.
If a licensed doctor prescribes a medication, no-one other than another doctor should be questioning it. Not the pharmacist, who is only authorized to advise about drug interactions, not an insurer, and certainly not the employer.
The government should say "OK, Christian employers can refuse what they find objectionable from their health coverage. But Muslim employers can also demand all disputes on the workplace be solved by Sharia Law." And so on, for all the other crazy religious extra-legal mumbo-jumbo other major religions may cough up.
Methinks somehow the American public would have a different reaction to that, no? (Not that it's right, just pointing out the hypocrisy).
This is how insurance works, if a group of people have lower risk factors for certain things then the premiums come down. So if these particular employers want the premiums to not include birth control then they should tell their employees not to have sex or whatever. That way if the employees end up costing the insurance companies less in terms of birth control then the premiums will adjust accordingly (though they would probably will go up due to increased demand for pregnancy care and terminations). Campaigning to have their employees treated as a distinct category for actuarial purposes would be mildly logical and certainly better than campaigning to give their employees worse healthcare.
Just because something isn't covered by insurance doesn't mean it is denied to them.
Actually in many cases it means exactly that, specifically for people who are poor. The cost of contraceptive medicine might not sound like much to you but for many people it is prohibitively expensive. By allowing institutions to deny coverage for this item they are effectively denying that medicine to those who might want it. These institutions cannot possibly speak for the moral values of every one of their employees.
Religion should never be used to justify / stifle science or medical advancements. If you don't want The Pill covered then fine, just don't buy it, personally i like knowing that when I sleep with my girl friend she is protected. Religion hurts the world, it blocks logic and demands stupidity, personally I think we should block religion from being practice.
Except that's not how self-insured plans work. In a self-insured plan, the organization hires an insurance company to administer the plan, but pays the bills (and takes the risk) itself. They will often pay for reinsurance with a very large deductible (the Obama admin is trying to use the ACA to outlaw these), but they actually pay the bills for their employers themselves.
It should also be pointed out that the ACA as voted on doesn't require contraceptive coverage. Instead the law empowers the administration to write minimum coverage requirements and it is the administration itself that wrote this requirement.
Sotomayor may have granted cert because she is in favor of the law and realized that if the ACA empowers the federal government to force individuals to violate their religious conscience then it is unconstitutional. Combining this arguement with the observation that 6/9 justices are catholic leads me to predict that this administrative rule will be overturned.
Service industry....
I have a hard time naming an industry that isn't ultimately 'service based'.
Sure we can look at say IT... it's a service industry and everyone (even co-workers) are 'customers'. But then look at HR - are they not the same? They provide mediation, insurance, record keeping and disciplinary service to other departments and to the staff and to the company as a whole just like IT does. Accounting - same thing - they provide number crunching, payroll, billing, ap/ar services to the rest of the company. If you outsource payroll to ADP, payroll doesn't become a service all of a sudden, it always was a service.
Insurance is a service as well - sold as a product but still a service. If you buy the product, service is provided. Steel making - some would think it's manufacturing but you are providing the service of making steel and selling that service - it's only that the final product is tangible.
Lawyers provide legal SERVICES. Doctors provide medical SERVICES. CEOs provide 'lets consult the magic 8 ball' services. Our Congress provides marionette services. Etc.,...
The reason nobody wants to be considered a 'service' is because 'service' has a stigma - it's not important - it's only like a maid or a gardener or a server at a restaurant.
...shut down your business. Seriously, if these convictions are truly heartfelt, then the rational thing to do is to sell/get out of the business. (I'm thinking about the Hobby Lobby case here, more than anything else.)
I personally know a Quaker or two who intentionally keep their earnings below the taxable level, so they won't have to pay federal income taxes - and therefore indirectly support war. This causes them a great deal of personal hardship, but... hey, havin' principles isn't always easy.
Freedom of religion applies to EMPLOYEES and DEPENDENTS not "corporate" entities. Not even with the Church as your employer should you have to give up a RIGHT the Government says applies to ALL PEOPLE.
... Didn't you hear? Corporations ARE people.
Did you know? Catholic teaching states condoms are immoral, as they prevent fertilization. The more you know!
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
Why subsidize birth control? It's cheap. Buy it if you want it. One problem with Obamacare is insurance policies are no longer insurance, not with the enormous deductibles. It is a mash of prepaid (subsidized) everyday services. He's an idea for our indolent citizens. Pay your doctor.
an ill wind that blows no good
Do not forget that it was not communism that caused the Soviet Union to fall, communism was never tried in the Soviet Union.
What caused the Soviet Union to fall was centralized planning. Centralized planning will always result in a misallocation of resources. First because a central plan can rarely know all the twists and turns of how that plan will be implemented and even if they do such plans are easily subject to corruption.
I was at a funeral and after the people were around talking and I heard someone say that they were "going to take a cab downtown" and people started laughing and there was a shout of "you go girl". I did not ask my friend what was going on until I was giving her a ride home. Turns out that "taking a cab downtown" meant that the person was going to call 911 and get an ambulance, go into the emergency room and just walk out. Once they were done downtown they would take a bus home.
Anything that is "free" will be abused.
Just watch.
Looking from the outside, your separation of church and state in the U.S. is a joke. The fact that issues like abortion and contraception are issues of state/federal policy and not individual conscience is only the most obvious indicator of this. Then there's the disproportional political clout of the bible belt in your politics. Yes, while technically the U.S. is a secular state with freedom of religion, the electoral system links the church and state in non-explicit ways. Practically speaking, the U.S. is a Christian nation which tolerates (very impressively in most cases) the practice and observance of other religions, but for the most part it's laws are drafted from a Christian moral background, and generally benefit Christians above others.
In general religions can be organised according to their permissiveness, and Christianity is fairly permissive. But when it comes to politics, we don't like to talk about permisiveness. We prefer to call it liberty. Some religions believe in some incrediblby harsh punishements for minor social/religious infractions. But no, in a modern democracy, where some people (i.e. 'Us Christains') don't believe those infractions are infractions at all, or merit such punishments, we call it 'liberty' and say people can't be punished that way. I agree with this, personally. Up a level, some religions don't allow the eating of pork. But some people like pork and eat it (i.e. 'Us Christians' again), so we can't ban prok products outright becasue that would infringe on my liberty. You are free not to eat pork products, but you can't stop me from having them. That's called 'liberty' buddy! Some religions don't like people having casual sex (generally women are judged more harshly in this than men, but I'll ignore that for the moment). But some people do like fucking around, so we can't interfere with their practices ... well actually, fine! we can't BAN it, but we can make it difficult, i.e. interfere with their actions, for those people to have access to the medical care that supports their choices. Because that's 'liberty' buddy, I'm free to do as much as I (a modern Christian) want to do, but anything I don't like... well that's different.
No, because the you end up with politicking over what is and is not a "high risk job" as employers seek to avoid having to pay into that system, much like the current debates over "part-time" versus "full-time" and "employee" versus "independent contractor."
Single-payer is the only way to Get Shit Done.
Take choice away from businesses so they can't invoke superstition to avoid paying their due.
If there is a superstitious (equals political) exemption for birth control why not any and all other medical care? A Christian Scientist business could save a mint!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
By forcing "believers" to provide something they oppose, Congress is "prohibiting the free exercise" of their religion.
Baloney. We prohibit lots of looney things that people claim as part of their religion. They can believe whatever they want but as soon as it infringes on someone elses beliefs or needs (like by denying them medicine based on someone else's morals) then their freedom of religion should end. Your right to religious freedom ends where it meets mine.
well then make some kind of extended workers comp system / give OSHA more rights to fine for unsafe stuff. Why should taxpayers be on hook for some who get's hurt on the job due to unsafe deadlines / lack of proper safety gear.
aca Cadillac tax does have an high risk out of the tax.
It's astonishing that this organisation is treated with respect at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_Christian_Brothers#Controversies
wrong.
this is about religious organizations with employees with the same religious values. here's a pro-tip, don't work for a religious organization if you don't hold their beliefs.
Nope. This is about medical care providers who are actively being Borg-ed by religious organizations http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020875885_catholichealthxml.html who then want to impose their religious dogma on all the non-religious employees AND on all the non-religious customers who no longer have the choice to get care from a non-religious controlled hospital
this is about religious organizations with employees with the same religious values.
No, it's about money and control. Furthermore the point of insurance is to create a risk pool that everyone participates in, i.e. everyone pays. I have to pay for things all the time that I don't agree with and so do you. Personally I resent having to contribute to a health insurance pool for people who sponge off society (i.e. nuns) while contributing limited discernible value back to it but I do it anyway and mostly keep my mouth shut.
here's a pro-tip, don't work for a religious organization if you don't hold their beliefs.
Here's another pro-tip. Sometimes you have to take employment where you can get it.
For some strange reason, the ACA did not fix this problem.
Actually it mostly did fix it, albeit imperfectly. Now if I lose my employment I can still get health insurance coverage of reasonable quality for a reasonable price and I cannot be denied coverage just because I got sick previously. While I won't argue that the system is ideal (far from it), it is a MUCH better situation.
We need to decouple health care and employers by eliminating the tax break that employers get.
Actually it's not a tax break that employers get. It's a tax break that employees get. The monies that your employer pays for health insurance are a direct benefit to you but they're not taxed as regular income. Additionally, any contribution that you must make towards the premium comes from pre-tax dollars. Go out and buy an individual policy and you'll be compelled to pay for it with post-tax dollars, meaning it effectively costs more than group coverage even if the policies are the same price on paper.
Personally, I would go the other way, make individual policies tax deductible rather than taxing group policies. This seems more fair to me -- why should people pay taxes on something as essential as healthcare -- and it's actually politically possible. Yanking away the tax benefit of group policies would add thousands of dollars to the taxable income of countless millions of Americans, with predictable consequences at the ballot box for any politician that tried to make it happen.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So now my plan is gone, I'd have to pay more than four times the amount for a bronze plans that does all sorts stuff I won't use to subsides others. Sorry no fucking thank you.
You seem to be hugely mistaken about how insurance works. We ALL pay into a pool and share the risk so that we individually won't be crushed by the financial burden of an illness. Insurance (even catastrophic coverage) cannot work unless everyone pays for stuff they probably wont need.
I have voluntarily gone uninsured because, the penalties are cheaper and I can always buy a plan for the first time after I have a condition.
You cannot buy a plan after the fact because they do not kick in immediately. Most plans even through the health exchanges take at least 2 weeks (usually more) to take effect and cannot be purchased at any time. In all likelihood you will incur a huge amount of medical bills in the event of an accident or serious illness prior to receiving coverage.
Of course now a catastrophic event might bankrupt me leaving everyone else to pay the costs; something I would have previously felt bad about but now, I see it as hey society tried to pick my pocket first; so screw'em.
You aren't screwing anyone but yourself by being cheap. But enjoy your bankruptcy. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun.
Repost? Stupid mobile site... In this case, the law was blocks because going through the process of opting out of contraceptive coverage for a group of nuns was against their religion. The nuns essentially claimed they could not comply with the government's view of due process. This due process seems well within recognized limits to the church-state separation. I doubt it will be upheld. If the argument is that your religion compels you to not do paperwork, you're probably being ridiculous. And all these Sebilius cases represent a pretty terribad slippery slope. The next logical exception for religious institutions could be for their health coverage to not cover pregnant single mothers, because the church views pregnant single mothers as amoral. The whole thing sounds like a heap of administrative weight that will just drive health costs up for everyone. Individual members of a church pay sales tax, which can be theoretically funneled into state contraceptive programs. Religious institutions that pay taxes may have their taxes put to similar use. Since SCOTUS has already decided the Individual Mandate is a tax, the compulsory terms of health insurance should/could be regarded in the same way. If this is allowed to stand, as a cultural Christian with a fierce hatred of the way health insurance was administered prior to the ACA (and who is currently not impressed with the progress of implementing the ACA), I hope that there is an opt-out fee that is equal to or greater than the fee for contraceptive coverage.
Yep. The problem with pre-ppaca health care was that the tax environment encouraged the situation where it made sense that you would get your health coverage from your employer.
post-ppaca, the tax environment still encourages you to get your health coverage from your employer, with the added caveat that even if you are self-employed or otherwise choose to get it on your own, you still can't choose your coverage a la carte, under the assumption that you are not competent to make that decision for yourself, like a child or dementia sufferer.
We're turning health coverage into a utility instead of a healthy, competitive marketplace. Utility prices don't adjust to the market the same way that competitive markets do, as billionaire Warren Buffet can attest (he loves investing in utilities. Also, he is a big supporter of ppaca...).
The consumer doesn't see savings as processes improve efficiency, because the utility has no incentive to bother even researching efficiency - it charges the prices it is allowed to charge and puts its effort into meeting regulatory standards and lobbying for price increases. Sometimes cleverly combining the two.
If you don't like the fact that employers have so much power in your health care, you probably shouldn't be supporting a system that doubles down on that paradigm.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Since the tagline is "Stuff that matters", not being news for nerds is still passing the tagline requirements.
And why is it not news for nerds?
If you provide a health plan, it has to provide bare minimum coverage. Bare minimum coverage that is set by the state. The only possible exception to this is if it's run on a not-for-profit basis, and I can just see insurance company rushing to become non-profits...
But then with single payer, they'll complain that their taxes are being used by support baby killing...
"Advocate" Chief Justice the "Obama's Hammer" has betrayed the one human who made her employment and healthcare (she's a diabetic and alcoholic) and retirement possible, President Barak Obama.
Bet Barak is smashing coconuts on the beach thinking that he's smashing Sotomayor's head against Iraq.
Barak should lay off the Vodka, Pot Bong and cocaine enemas for at least a few hours.
> Personal Belief Exemptions that are dictated by employers
The poster certainly does not understand what effect a Papal Bull of Interdictum or Ex-communication could have on the USA as a nation, considering the high number of her irish and hispanic citizens, who are 99% roman catholic. (No sacred marriages, no funerals, no confessions heard, no sacrament for the dying, etc.) That would lead to riots. Maybe the nation would even fall apart to countries like Texarkana, Alta California, Utah, etc.
The Pope may not have many battalions, but the 2000 year old Church of Rome has immense weight and they are in possession of almost all of Jesus' relics. Over a billion people listen to Rome worldwide, including over 100 million in the USA.
right
"Why would I pay for a service I dont want nor will use?"
You are not.
However, if you use the service, you will pay for it.
If someone else wants to use the service, why should you mandate that they cannot?
THIS.
We should have single payer health coverage. We all deserve to share the benifits of modern medicine just as we all share the benifits of the safety of modern road construction.
We are supposed to be a fucking society after all. Why, then, is anything labeled socialist automatically dismissed or attacked outright?
Stupid motherfuckers. The government should say "Oh, really? You don't like the provisions in the law of the land? How about you abide BY THE FUCKING LAW or we throw your superstitious and ignorant ass in jail?"
Personal beliefs should not dictate law. PERIOD.
The pill isn't just used for contraceptive reasons, but also for hormone regulation, particularly for women with exceptionally painful menstrual cramping. That Christians would rather exacerbate these people' suffering simply because the pill has other uses doesn't sound very Christian.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.
I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.
All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.
Muslims believe that during the month of Ramadan people should not even drink water between sunrise and sunset. . So Muslim employers should be able to petition OSHA to allow them to remove water coolers during day time during the month of Ramadan.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Birth control pills are cheap compared to the cost of deliver, pre and post-natal care. It is quite possible for the insurance companies to charge more to withhold pills.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No, if car insurance worked like health insurance, it would cover mechanical problems, like engine blow ups, tire failures, transmission slippage, suspension wear. In that case it makes sense for the insurer to pay for oil changes, new tires, etc as it is less expensive than paying for a new engine, accident caused by blow-out, and the like. Car insurance as we know it is more similar to Accidental Death and Dismemberment coverage. If you die or lose limbs, like in an accident, they pay. Much cheaper, not even close to health insurance.
LRN 2 SWM
NOT! Slashdot has gone downhill in the last few years.
Sotomayer is Catholic, and this suit was brought by Catholic organizations.
Americans have got to be the stupidest people on the planet. Everyone screams about abortion but at the same do every thing thy can to make it harder for people to access contraception something that has been shown in study after study as reducing not only abortions but also health and social services costs.. Then again almost 50% of them think the Bible is a science text book so I guess that explains it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
What will have to happen is - once you turn 18, they will need to show you a copy of the constitution and the bill of rights. You simply read them and cross off with red ink anything you don't think applies to you. Then you get a copy and you have to live with it.
Contrary to common belief, Insurance is *not* healthcare. It's a way of distributing risk. For example, your car insurance will not cover oil changes, or regular maintenance. H*ck, even extended warranties will not cover those. This is because the cost structure is very well known (so and so much every 6 months).
Thus -- ignoring what these churches ask -- the only reason for including contraception would be reducing future risk. I.e.: the cost of these pills are well known, and the insurance would normally prefer not to cover them, as they do not cover aspirin, or baby diapers. However by including cheap contraception pill they mitigate a more costly future risk (a "cheap" delivery will cost 10K+ these days, and God forbid if there is anything wrong probably in the 100ks). So for insurance it makes sense to include these pills (still no aspirin).
However the church -- or whatever organization that does not want to provide these, just needs to have a separate pool of insurants, so that the cost of delivering a baby is only distributed among them. (I'm assuming they would also like to have more babies in general, but this might not necessarily be true for all religions).
You have no actual rights
Our (U.S.) founders said that each person gets his rights from God, and then lends some of those to government (a reverse of the traditional God->King->individual path) and that, as a side-effect, nobody but God has the right to arbitrarily take those basic rights away. This is what lead to many of the rights and freedoms Americans have always enjoyed, and it limited government because logically government had no more rights than what the people collectively gave it. Sadly, progressives in both the Democrat and Republican parties (both elected, and appointed) have been relentlessly attacking this for many decades.
Progressives have recently been trying to say that some rights (particularly religious, but these are in the same 1st amendment with speech and press rights) are a little too suspicious and inconvenient and can be suppressed by government, even to the extent of being restricted to only very small places. Your freedom of religion, they say, only applies in your home (for now) or in your church or temple or synagogue or mosque. Your right to bear arms, they say, only applies within your house or on a firing range, and only with certain guns and only if registered and licensed. Now we are told that if you engage in business, you lose your 1st amendment religious and free speech rights. It's inconvenient for progressive plans for healthcare control, so your rights are invalidated; the ends justify the means.
If a political party can determine that your basic rights are extinguished when they conflict with that party's political goals.... you have no actual rights at all. Progressives/liberals would have been apoplectic if Bush had ordered all Americans to buy something (all of Glenn Beck's books and videos?) and clobbered them with government penalties if they did not. The outrage would have been sky-high if Bush had said that he was making it illegal for people to cling to their liberal beliefs if they were in business. Should it be illegal for anybody in business to support gay marriage? Should it be illegal for anybody in business to express belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming? If this Obamacare precedent is allowed to stand, some future president will be able to pass laws requiring liberals to suppress all their beliefs and principles if they want to earn a living. Will you progressive like this if some future politician requires you to provide insurance to your employees that covers gay-to-straight conversion therapy?
When you let one set of politicians make your rights into conditional privileges, you open the door to other politicians changing both the privileges and the conditions and NOBODY has any rights anymore. We are better off when we are all left with our rights and our consciences intact and we can each, as individuals, decide who to interact with and which businesses to patronize based on our own personal values.
First, your support of drones is NOT in any way the same as the Obamacare mandate. You pay taxes into a large pool of money for the collective defense. That collective defense defends every citizen (including you) equally and it does not specifically include drones (it did not in the past, and might not in the future). You also have no role in the drones other than paying taxes into the national treasury; it's quite probable that not a single penny of your tax dollars went to any drone (the pentagon gets fewer tax dollars than the nation's social programs get and the drone programs of the pentagon are a sliver of that portion of the budget)
Second, Obamacare REQUIRES employers to provide a very specific set of things they object to to specific people. Many employers in the U.S., for example, self-insure. Any such employer would be required by Obamacare to actually buy the thing they believe is evil and give it to a person who WILL use it for what the employer believes is an evil purpose (killing an absolutely innocent and defenseless human being).
Current tax law does NOT make you, PopeRatzo, go to Northrop Grumman and buy a drone, then hand it to Dick Cheney with the certainty that he will use it to intentionally target and murder innocent children on a playground.
There are horrible costs to the individual, the country and the planet for anyone to have children they don't want are not able to support. Contraception should be offered for free and by default to everyone reaching the age of about 14. If we fail at voluntary measures and financial support, we are looking at misery, sick planet and China-style forced single child policies in a decade or two.
It is worth noting that recent studies indicate that "morning after pills" work by preventing ovulation, rather than by preventing implantation, in which case the assertion they cause abortion is without basis.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/22/172595689/morning-after-pills-dont-cause-abortion-studies-say
As also stated in the above article, Catholic bishops in Germany have approved the use of these contraceptives in certain circumstances. Thus it cannot be claimed as a universal
Catholic teaching.
Third, several Catholic dioceses, including that of Cardinal Dolan himself (though reportedly not his conscious decision), have been found to have offered this benefit to their employees for years without question. For some reason, this only comes up when Obama's health care program is involved. Funny, eh?
that you think one group of people have the RIGHT to make another group of people buy them something. As long as none of us believes he can force the other to buy him something, this conflict does not exist. The fact that I might desperately feel the need to read Ann Coulter's newest book simply does NOT translate into the need for YOU to have to buy it for me. In the world YOU inhabit, however, it is apparently a normal idea that if a particular woman wants to abort her kid then I must be forced at gun point to pay for it for her. Make no mistake: if I resist paying taxes (and the Supreme Court has ruled that Obamacare "fees" are in fact a tax) in order to not support this, the government WILL come after me with guns.
IF you think one group of people have a RIGHT to something and that this right makes them entitled to have the government force other people to pay for it.... then you have created a fake conflict between one person's "rights" to "free stuff" and another person's right to control the output of his own labor and exercise his free conscience. This is a wacky and mutated view of "rights" that creates an endless pile of unresolvable conflicts.
With a small government that stays out of most human activity, we can all be free (as in "speech" rather than "beer") to believe as we wish and not support things we believe to be evil. With a huge government that dips its fingers into everything, none of us is truly free - whoever is in power will force his opponents and their supporters to violate their beliefs/principles for convenience or even as a malicious act. Note: Our founders ran the nation on tariffs on international trade, so the way they setup the nation, people who objected to paying for machines of war could not do so by choosing not to buy imported goods - everybody had freedom of conscience. Big government "progressives" (of BOTH parties) changed this because it did not provide the extra money needed to fund all their utopian dreams (and their big corporate and banking supporters wanted to not pay taxes) - so now we fund much of the government by stealing money right out of the paychecks of middle class Americans before they even get those checks and make them fund things they object to while we let huge corporations (like G.E. which is in bed with Obama) pay zero taxes on billions of dollars....
Because religions are always the best to know what is best for everyone. The earth is the center of creation and if you oppose that you will be punished. And birth control.... seriously, they still have a thing about birth control? Stopping the sperm and egg combining? Really?
what antiques.
Since when did this ass hole US department exit?
In that case, I believe that the thing calling itself as 'Barak Hussein Obama' is an ass hole and I therefore require a personal belief exemption!
Ha.
Ass wipes shit heads.
Ahahahaha! You are the funny man, aren't you? Tell me, was the filibuster a 'loophole' when the Dems used it mercilessly during the Reagan administration? When you put a 90+ year old man out there to talk about his life growing up in West Virginia (conveniently leaving out details of his time in the KKK), until his senility overcame him?
No, it was placed there to prevent the tyranny of the majority. We put up with it then, and in times past. God help you Democrats if the Republicans win the House and Senate. Don't think using the 'nuclear option' isn't going to come back and bite you in the ass - big time.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The law does not FORCE you to use contraception. Provide the damn coverage, and shame everyone in your church that actually uses it. Problem solved.
Where I come from (or perhaps it may be better to say 'when') nuns were a relatively high risk group for pregnancy.
Far more orphans were "found" every year than there were even pregnant women in our town. Those big grey robes did wonders for hiding the second trimester, and then a sister was but a short 'spiritual retreat' away from returning with a little boy or girl she'd 'found so heartlessly abandoned at the other mission'.
Or as my mother might say "yeah and god was so moved by her selflessness he let her lose all that weight that she'd put on and lactate while he's at it"
It never ceases to amaze me that religious people - Christians - seem to be so almost universally against contraception. Is it really better to be born into a lifetime of guaranteed, hopeless poverty and suffering, than simply not being brought into existence at all? I wonder what those 'blessed' with that existence would say, if the faith-mongers would care enough listen? Religion is not necessarily evil, but when your personal opinion gets to be called 'faith' and becomes more important that real life and real people, then it is hard to think of any other word for it.
You used to be able to get private insurance considerably cheaper than now with the ACA, so the situation has become much worse.
Demonstrably untrue for most people, especially once you take the tax credits into account as long as you are comparing similar plans. If you are comparing a high deductible catastrophic coverage plan to a more conventional plan then your comparison is bogus. I'm relatively young and healthy and I've had to purchase individual insurance in the past when I consulted on my own. I could not get rates that even came close to what one could get through group rates. I had to purchase catastrophic coverage with a $5000 deductible because that was the only economical option.
I run a company with less than 50 employees and we sent all our employees to the exchanges, myself included, because the cost was a big improvement. I've spent a LOT of time looking at health insurance in the last six months. Almost every one of our employees has been able to get equivalent or better coverage for equivalent or less money. Even better while the employee's out of pocket hasn't gone up the company no longer has to kick in anything so the total cost of the insurance is about half of what it was previously once you take the full cost (company share plus employee share) into account.
Of course, what you can do now is simply not bother to get coverage until you get sick
You are dangerously misinformed. You cannot just wait until you are sick to get coverage. Coverage does NOT kick in immediately. There is at minimum a 2 to 6 week wait during open enrollment and outside of open enrollment you cannot sign up at all unless you meet some strict criteria. The law is NOT written in a way that allows you to sign up after you get sick. Insurance companies aren't so stupid as to allow people to sign up once they are sick and the ACA was written with this in mind. The economic term for this is adverse selection. If people could just sign up only when sick, insurance could not work because only sick people would sign up. Economically it only works if you have a pool of healthy and sick people.
Seriously, if you really believe this you are playing with fire. You CANNOT sign up after the fact. If you are in an accident you will take an enormous financial hit.
So what does contraception have to do with this?
Paying for contraception is a LOT cheaper than paying for prenatal or pediatric care. Having contraceptive coverage will save you and everyone else in the insurance pool money in the long run.
I doubt it would help people who can't be bothered to buy and use cheap contraceptives, for example.
What you consider to be "cheap" contraceptives are still beyond the means of many people if they had to pay the full price themselves. Good luck affording contraceptives on Walmart wages when you have to pay for rent, transportation and food.
Are you serious? There's a lot of expensive health problems that can be put off for two weeks.
It's only 2-6 weeks during open enrollment which ends in March. After that you have to wait until the next open enrollment period which can be 9 months away. You CANNOT sign up after the fact in most cases. Insurance cannot work if everyone could sign up after the fact. (The economics term for this is adverse selection and insurance companies are WELL aware of it.) Furthermore most of the most likely expensive health problems are unexpected ones like hospital stays. Get in a car accident (no your auto insurance will not cover you for medical expenses) and you could easily rack up many tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs literally overnight. Have a fast moving sickness or a heart attack and you'll owe a LOT of money very quickly. Are you seriously going to argue that you can put off a visit to the ER for weeks if not months? If so then you are a either deluded or a fool.
And in the rare situation where it does, then go with bankruptcy and move on.
That my naive young friend is economic insanity. You clearly do not understand the consequences of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy does NOT wipe your leger clear. You still owe most of the money. At best you'll be able to negotiate a payment plan and maybe reduce a bit here and there. You cannot get a loan of any kind for less than absurd rates if you can get one at all. Want to buy a car or a house? Tough luck. Credit card? Hah! Want a cell phone? Going to be pre-paid. Want a job? Lots of employers look at credit history and will pass you buy if you have a bankruptcy. You seriously are playing with fire if you really think declaring bankruptcy is anything but a terrible option.
And once again religion stands in the way of everything that is good. Can we pleeeeeease leave religion behind and advance as a species? Pretty please?
Simplest solution is to pay people more for doing a high risk job, then they can afford the more expensive insurance needed for their job.
Don't people with high risk jobs get paid more anyway?
There are no such things as apolitical discussions. Even if the topic was apolitical (and the only way it could be if it was utterly meaningless to anyone) before, the second you have a discussion politics enter the picture in the form of power games and status. Catholic church's contraceptives ban is an excellent example of just that.
For that matter, if religious institutions can claim being persecuted just because they're required to follow the same laws as everyone else, that does have some implications to science too.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Separation of church and state and state, please!!! If you don't like alcohol, don't buy it. If you don't like birth control, don't buy it. If you like a certain religion, join it. If you don't, go to another temple or church... or don't go at all. But the tail should not wag the dog.
This is exactly right. What's next? They decide that they don't have to cover prescriptions for AIDS victims because they think Homosexuality is a sin and AIDS is God's punishment?
The religious should certainly be able to preach, but never dictate.
It's curious to me that about the only thing "off the table" in the healthcare debate is actuarial science...the fundamental rating mechanism. I remind the reader that faulty assessments of the forward effects of complex predictive models (think credit default swaps and other derivitives) were instrumental in the recent mortgage crisis. The insurance industry has been playing a series of these shell games with projections (actuarials without lipstick) since its inception...leveraging effectively guaranteed returns (does that sound reasonable?) to drive up costs to build balance sheet empires (too powerful to regulate?). Does any of this sound familiar? We should be paying more attention to potentially flawed underlying assumptions we receive from rent seekers.
Look at tower climbers or some other things where they uses contractors / subcontractors and safety takes a back seat. It's not just higher pay we also need more on the workers comp system / OSHA side of stuff in the high risk areas or more unions.
ACA: Proof, once again, that when democrats (facists, socialists, communists, etc.) are in power, they prove why they should NOT be in power!!! I invite all democrats (facists, socialists, communists, humanists, etc.) to give up their citizenship and move to the nearest facists, socialist, or communists country of their choice, where they should be happy - since they hate the United States soo much!!!
I think this story was posted simply to get people to rant against people with religious convictions. Allow me to counter rant --
Having an insurance plan that pays for contraception on demand is like making the contraception directly available. This conflicts with Roman Catholic beliefs and probably some others. But Catholics are the easy target since we don't tend to riot in the streets or blow up car bombs if someone slightly disagrees with us. Don't give me the Northern Ireland crap - that's political not religious.
And then there was Obama's "compromise" that only a lawyer could love. Saying the religious groups would not have contraception in their plans but plan holders would get the coverage for free was pure BS. The insurance companies would build that into their premium costs anyway.
Those who say if you don't like contraception don't buy it. One might as well say if you don't like the Catholics belief, don't work for them.
I dunno about yours, but where I lived in SoCal all the power crews were contractors, and I talked to 'em a few times when they had newbies on the crew. The n00bs weren't allowed to do anything without extreme supervision, because of liability and insurance concerns.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
they shouldn't be allowed to refuse to pay for blood transfusions either...
The Christian Brothers, who run this "not for profit" are desperate for the income it brings them. Their church no longer permits them to work at their profession of teaching because they were so enthusiastically involved in the pedophilia scandals, and cannot be trusted near children. They lost most of their wealth in law suits because of the abysmal performance of their leadership in addressing the claims of the abused. Now most of them are growing old and fat in an idle retirement, and the few who can still earn money are working very hard trying to support them. I could almost feel sorry for them, but no, because they were the very worst of the abusers: even running a child slave labor camp at Bundoon in Western Australia that kept orphan kids in a hard labor camp prison where many of the boys were also sexual slaves. http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-can-still-hear-the-kids-screams-20110611-1fyap.html So now they want to impose their abhorrent sexual ethics on those who they have to employ to do the work that they should be doing. If ever there was a case for retrospective abortion, it would be for these guys.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
gosgog:
It seems to me the U.S., has some of the most STUPID PEOPLE on the face of the earth! Primal example is many of those voted into Congress!
However, it seems to me that if you want to buy contraceptives in the U.S., (we give 'em away free in many developing countries), you go to a pharmacy and pay for 'em. IF YOU ARE AGAINST CONTRACEPTION, THEN DON'T GO THE STORE FOR 'EM, HOWEVER, ITS NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS IF SOMEONE ELSE BUYS & USES 'EM. So what's the point of wasting time & money for "Obummers" opinion, let alone the SUPREME COURT...they have better things to do. No wonder the country's all fucked up! As to NUNS, they're supposed to be all VIRGINS, where else do those Stupid Muslims suicide Bombers expect to find Virgins? There aren't any Virgins left in the U.S. today...Ha! Ha!
That's why they are against contraception, it impacts God's supply of contraceptives. If priests don't have an adequate supply of small children what would jesus do - probably stick his dick in the mouth of an apostle. Before peeps complain, it's in the liturgy, you have to eat jesus' meat once a week if your a catholic.
the morning after pill works by preventing implantation. For those that believe that life begins at conception, prevention of implantation = abortion.
i wonder how much more contraceptive costs a plan rather than simply going to your corner drug store.
This story is less than an hour old and has 100+ comments. Below it is a 'tech' story that's nearly six hours old that has under 40.
I don't think that's relevant. There is nothing, NOTHING wrong with a more focused site rather than a generalist.
What we're looking at is the website equivalent of Network Decay
, where a site which used to serve a specific purpose tries to get a larger audience by posting topics that have little or nothing to do with the original site's mission. Eventually, the websites all become the same, the original audience becomes disgruntled, and you get complaints like the sort you're responding to.
Is that what the religious hierarchy is afraid off? That some of their members might request the pill. Perhaps they'd rather nuns who get pregnant throw the offspring down wells like they've always done.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Being forced to pay excessive rates for bullshit coverage most pepole don't need is exactly what makes the current system much more expensive than what we had before.
EVERYONE deserves to be able to get healthcare without going bankrupt. If that costs a little more in the end, then so be it. This is a moral issue and a civilized society takes care of their people. Do you think it is ethical to have 40 million people without health insurance in the wealthiest country on earth? You think there is no cost to having 40 million people with no health insurance? Do you think it is ethical to have someone lose all affordable access to health insurance just because they lost their job?
That said, since this whole thing just got started I'm curious what evidence from the future you have that this is more expensive than before. Or are you just bitching because *your* insurance went up? Fact is that we don't know yet whether this will be more expensive or not. Might be, but if it means that everyone has reasonable access to health insurance then that is a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make. Buy a few less bombers for the military if you need to find some extra cash to pay for it.
Is there any other area of life in which someone who made this claim wouldn't be laughed out of court and put on psychotropic medications? But because it's such a *popular* mass delusion we have to tolerate this idiocy. All the way to the Supreme Court.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Contraceptives are a lifestyle choice, they do not treat disease. Women being fertile are not sick. Does the "panel of experts" include drug industry representatives?
I have no idea how your comment relates to my post. Did you mean to respond to someone else?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."