On Hobby Lobby

If anyone had told me the Supreme Court--and likely one man--will be deciding on whether or not a person's boss will be free to impose his religious beliefs on employees, I never would have believed it. Yet here we are with the Hobby Lobby case. The craft stores are owned by the religious and conservative Green family, which is offended by IUD's and the morning-after pill. They don't want employee insurance covering them.

Side note no one's talking about: The birth control methods Hobby Lobby objects to are not considered to be abortifacients by the medical community. That a woman with an IUD inside her body is constantly performing abortions on herself is nothing more than the Green family's fictional opinion with no basis in science or medicine. Hence, if they decide your heart pills can cause a miscarriage, don't be surprised if they decide not to cover them either. 

Folks, the question of whether or not corporations are religious entities would never have been entertained by any court unless the Right didn't see it as a way to lift one tiny corner of Obamacare in hopes of peeling off the whole thing.

Ironic side note: People incorporate in order to put a legal separation between themselves and their business, thereby protecting their personal assets. So Hobby Lobby and friends want a secular relationship with their company when it comes to liability, but a religious one when it comes to what sort of birth control their insurance plan can offer their female employees. Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too?  

In the grand scheme of things, the contraception argument is just a delivery mechanism. Big Money riles up the base by talking about abortion and calling women near-hysterical sluts. They do not care about picking up the $500 to $1000 tab of an IUD insertion. Birth control is chump change (unless of course you're a clerk at a craft store). The costs Big Money really doesn't want to cover are for your cancer treatments, your heart disease and your type II diabetes. If they can get the courts to say you don't have to cover an IUD, they'll just keep chipping away until they don't have to cover anything.

Trust me, most employers in America would love to drop employee health care insurance and have been doing everything they can to lessen the burden: dropping retirees, setting up "wellness" programs, and mandating dependents use their own coverage or pay an extra premium. All of it was going on long before the ACA was born. Take away the Obamacare employee mandate and pretty soon, it's not just going to be minimum wage employees seeing their coverage disappear.

It's going to be you too.

Another note no one wants to own up to: health care costs aren't going up because of Obamacare. They're going up because we're getting fatter and sicker. Think how rare cancer and type II diabetes used to be. As for our waistlines, take a walk around Disney World. Stroll through a state fair. Go to the mall. I won't even talk about the growing greed of the health care industry.

An yet another side note since we're here: remember when Michelle Obama had the audacity to suggest that people drink a glass of water instead of a bucket of carbonated and diluted high fructose corn syrup (aka soda pop)? The Right went ballistic.

As for Hobby Lobby, I have no idea which way the case will go (but I suspect we'll see an unprecedented level of hypocrisy from Scalia who no-likey religious rights when it comes to peyote). If it passes, make no mistake, the next thing the zealots will be asking for is the "right" to have their employees sign a paper swearing they will not use their paycheck to pay for a same sex marriage, an IUD or anything else that offends them. After all, if you give them the right to determine how you can use one earned benefit (your insurance), they'll ask for control of how you use other earned benefits (your paycheck).

"Sorry Miss Smith, but our surveillance records indicate you've terminated a pregnancy and therefore, we'll have to terminate  you."

Now then, some forty percent of Dearborn, Michigan residents are Arab American, many of them are Muslim and many are small business owners. Imagine what they might require of employees given this new religious freedom.

"Women must have their heads covered at all times while on the premises."

That's what the Hobby Lobby case is really about, good pilgrims, the right for your boss to inflict his religious beliefs on you, be they Muslim or Christian or Scientologist. That's what they're willing to trade in in order to weaken Obamacare.

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The Obamacare post

What a miserable mess.

My friend Derf summed it up nicely in this strip, but no worries. I will enumerate my complaints herein.

I am disgusted at Obama and his administration for:

1) the dismal lack of communication/education regarding the ACA and the subsequent confusion that has plagued the law from the onset.

2) the abject technical failure of the roll out.
 
The discourse regarding these failures often includes a reference to the three luxurious years Obama had to avoid them. Three whole years! 

Really?

In those three years a couple of tiny details hindered the ACA. Okay, maybe they weren't so tiny. First, there was Supreme Court decision in June 2012 which spilled into the presidential election. Both events were extended dramas we painfully endured until the threatening does the ACA live or die! toggle switch was flipped.

It's easy to say neither spectacle should have affected development of the ACA, but does anyone believe that the entire program didn't suffer while those sorts of razor-sharp pendulums swung above it?

As a backdrop to the battles of 2012, we've had the GOP's war on health care reform from the onset. It included an impressive monolithic opposition, a slew of red states refusing to set up their own exchanges and myriad local efforts to hinder outreach. The list goes on and on.

A few years ago a pundit nailed it. Although I can't recall the details, essentially he said that for a program as big and complex as the ACA to succeed, the entire country would have to work together, including every level of government from state capitols to Pennsylvania Avenue. We have not and (for now) the ACA is floundering. Badly. And whether you like the present health care reform or not, you will pay the price if it fails. This debacle belongs to the entire country no matter which side of the aisle you're on, just like the Iraq War did.

We're all Americans.

Had the conservatives not waged war, but instead rolled up their sleeves as they did with Medicare in 1965 (after fighting its inception and conceding defeat), and worked for the last three years improving the law, things would look a lot different today. The result would not have been perfect, but it would have been better (see: Romneycare). Of course, that's not how it played.

When the Right's euphoria over the troubled ACA subsides, conservatives are going to be left with the not-so-little problem of offering up a health care reform plan of their own. Why have they failed to formulate said plan? After all, they've had three whole luxurious years to do so. The reason is simple: the ACA is conservative health care reform and always has been.

That's correct: conservatives have spent the last three years battling to topple their own solution to health care reform. The proof is the yawning absence of an alternative. Folks, if they had a good idea, we'd have heard it by now. They don't. They never did. Think back on how quickly those enthusiastic chants of Repeal and Replace! were truncated to ... erm ... um ... Repeal!

The only real alternative now is the expansion of a single payer program, which is all I ever wanted. As it stands, one third of the country is already enjoying a big fat GOV socialized health care program by way of Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare. Ironically, the GOP's fervent opposition to reform may lead the country to the one option conservatives hate more than Obamacare.

Holy hospitals, Batman!

A lot of folks are upset over policy cancellations. What a stunning change of heart. I don't remember many in that group being up-in-arms about people losing their coverage before the ACA. Methinks those indignant Righties don't care much about the actual cancellations, although they do like them. Those cancelled policies represent yet another opportunity to attack Obama because he said they wouldn't happen.

You lie!

Truth: the cancelled policy debacle is one of the things that should have been sorted out over the past three years, and likely would have been (along with a host of other problems) if not for the GOP's airtight opposition.

For better or worse, Obama and his signature legislation have sustained some pretty significant wounds in this war. His call for insurers to extend those cancelled policies last week is part of the bleeding.

Yeah, yeah.

A couple of months ago, the big crisis was chemical weapons in Syria. Last month it was the GOV shutdown. Now we have this mess. Maybe it will fade in a couple of months, maybe not. But while it's not my reform of choice (which is single payer for one and for all), I'm still holding out hope for the ACA.

I don't know what will happen, but turning back is not an option. People are no longer going to accept denial of coverage based on a preexisting condition. They are not going to accept the deletion of their otherwise uninsured adult children from their policy. States like Ohio are not going to give back the Medicaid money. Insurance companies are not going to throw out the work of the last three years without legal hellfire. The list gets longer every day. People may not be signing up in droves, but they are signing up.

Dear GOP, please put down your guns. The more you stab at the ACA, the bloodier we're all going to get. It's time to make this goddamn thing work.

Talk about your wishful thinking.

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