Change of Subject: Contraception and insurance

Noah Millman? in the American Conservative offers a provocative take on the birth-control / insurance kerfuffle.

Imagine that we live in a world where the Church of Scientology runs a substantial network of charter schools that do a remarkably good job educating poor students. Imagine that, in this world, employees pretty much have to get their health insurance from their employer (one of the things that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to change, by the way, which is a non-trivial fact). And imagine that the Church of Scientology refuses to provide mental health coverage for employees in these schools. Should that be acceptable?...

By the way: what?s special about the Catholic Church in this regard? Does the strictly Catholic sole proprietor of a national pizza franchise lack a conscience? Why is it okay to coerce him into providing services he deems immoral, but not okay to coerce a Catholic hospital?

Like Millman, I understand and even have sympathy for the position of those employers who feel that a legal requirement that? they facilitate the purchase of products -- in this case contraceptives -- that violate their moral principals amounts to a legal assault on those principles.

This question is complicated a bit in my view by the fact that, while employers negotiate for and arrange for health-insurance coverage, each employee in effect "pays" for his or her own coverage since that coverage is a fully earned benefit of employment.

Perhaps this is a fiction of sorts, but, in theory, an employer never "gives" or "provides" an employee any benefit -- everything from vacation time to retirement plans to health coverage is "earned" as condition of employment, and the cost of these things is baked into the compensation cake.

?My thought is that that moral choice here ought to belong to the individual employee -- that he or she ought to have the opportunity to participate in a health plan that provides free contraception or to decline to participate in such a health plan on any grounds, moral or otherwise.

No government entity ought to be in the position of refereeing moral or religious claims or feelings like this for their validity, popularity or sincerity.? And no employee ought to be denied the right to participate in a risk pool or his or her own choosing simply because of the religious inclinations of his employer.

An employer should have no more right to tell an employee what form of insurance and health care coverage to enroll in than an employer should have the right to tell an employee which legal products he may purchase with the money he earns at work.

Which brings me to the same conclusion Millman reached:

Either you need to give up on the idea that health care is a right, or you need to give up on the idea that health coverage will be provided primarily by private employers. I vote for giving up the second idea.

I have reflexively scoffed at this idea in the past, but this controversy is among the situations that, to me, illustrates its virtues

There are certainly many wrinkles and complications to be puzzled out -- I'll let commenters get a start on that.

Source: http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/02/contraception-and-insurance.html

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