[Vision2020] FW: Corporations and Religious Beliefs

Fri Jul 4 12:25:31 PDT 2014

Paul writes:
<On the plus side, Hobby Lobby starts their employees out at $14/hr, so 
it's at least possible that they could afford a Plan B pill at $50 at 
Walgreens.>

On the downside, an insurer flexing its purchasing power would only pay one-fifth (maybe less) for this same pill.  If we're going to force women to pay for certain types of birth control out of their own pocket, they should at least be offered the rock bottom prices that insurance companies themselves would only be willing to pay.

From: sunilramalingam at hotmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 11:25:04 -0700
Subject: [Vision2020] FW:  Corporations and Religious Beliefs

I intended to send this to the listservs. With Paul's permission I'm sending my email and Paul's response now.

Sunil

Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 09:39:40 -0700
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Corporations and Religious Beliefs
From: paul.rumelhart at gmail.com
To: sunilramalingam at hotmail.com

Did you intend for this to go to the list?

I don't see a problem with a company determining what benefits package they want when they contract with a health care company to provide benefits to their employees.  Until just recently, that's how it used to work.

Why does this always have to be turned around on to me?  Can't we just talk about these things without getting personal?  So let me apologize to the world once again for being born into what the rest of the world would consider a wealthy lifestyle (and not immediately moving to a third-world slum somewhere), learning a useful skill, spending untold hours at work and at home honing that skill, and managing to have been lucky enough to have a skill that was considered necessary when the economy started to go bad.  I know that not everyone out there is living the life of Riley like I apparently am.  I have lent a lot of money to an old friend with a teenage daughter at home who is not as lucky as I was, so even in my crystalline halls with floors of gold filigree I have some personal contact with the unwashed masses.

It does suck for the female employees at Hobby Lobby who were planning on using Plan B or one of the other birth control methods.  On the plus side, Hobby Lobby starts their employees out at $14/hr, so it's at least possible that they could afford a Plan B pill at $50 at Walgreens.  Failing that, they could buy a box of condoms for, what, $10?  That's assuming the "don't insert tab A into slot B" method of birth control isn't one they want to try.  Planned Parenthood may also be able to help them.  If none of that works, then, yes, they are stuck having to pay for it out of their own pocket or do without like the myriad of other things their plan doesn't cover.

Paul

P.S. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some hobby programming to do so that I can keep my axe sharp.

On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Sunil <sunilramalingam at hotmail.com> wrote:

Paul,

Does a corporation have a right to stop an employee from purchasing a product with their salary? I think you will say No to this; I hope you don't surprise me.

Do you agree that medical insurance benefits are part of an employee's compensation package? I think the answer is Yes. Why should an employer be able to restrict what that gets spent on? Why should we say that now the employer's opposition to contraception, or types of it, rises to a protected constitutional right?

That's what the majority in HL chose to do. It wasn't such a right before they declared it to be one, and that decision is rooted in politics. 

Your last paragraph: You are imagining a world in which people have resources to go buy medical procedures and products easily, outside of their medical coverage. You may live in that world, but most people do not. Moving this outside the medical coverage excludes these people from access to the procedures or products they want or need. It will stop them, and your saying it does not is just hot air, a meaningless argument. Most people don't live in your world.

Sunil

Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 21:29:46 -0700
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Corporations and Religious Beliefs
From: paul.rumelhart at gmail.com

To: sunilramalingam at hotmail.com
CC: vision2020 at moscow.com

Sunil, I don't know, actually.  Some rights make sense to me.  If you have defined your corporation as one which has complete transparency (as an example), you shouldn't be forced to give information to the government about your customers without their consent or knowledge.  If your corporation has no rights, then they have no way to object to this otherwise and their bylaws are just pretty pieces of poetry.

Other rights don't make much sense.  Corporations shouldn't be able to vote in elections, for instance.  Others I have no idea about.

As an aside, I keep seeing this Hobby Lobby thing being framed as "limiting the reproductive rights of female employees" or something similar like you have done in your post.  Is there a right to have your favourite contraceptive be covered on your employer-provided health care plan?  You realize that this ruling in no way stops Hobby Lobby's employees from using whatever contraceptives they want to use, right?  They just aren't covered.  If there is such a thing as a "reproductive right" (and I'm not saying there isn't), they still have it.

Paul

=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet,
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
======================================================= 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20140704/6982a1b0/attachment.html>