Was the Supreme Court right to rule that the Affordable Care Act violated the religio
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No - The ruling allows bosses to impose their religious beliefs on their employees. Besides, the Constitution grants religious freedom to individuals, not corporations.
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Yes - The religious beliefs of company owners take precedence over their employees' right to have access to birth control.
Should religious family-owned companies be required to cover contraceptives under their insurance plans? The high court says no.
I'm curious how you nurses feel about this? Please take a second to vote in our quick poll.
This is a highly political topic, I'd rather not turn this into a hot argumentative subject, so please keep your comments civil :) But please feel free to comment. Thanks
In a 5-4 decision Monday, the Supreme Court allowed a key exemption to the health law's contraception coverage requirements when it ruled that closely held for-profit businesses could assert a religious objection to the Obama administration's regulations. What does it mean? Here are some questions and answers about the case.What did the court's ruling do?
The court's majority said that the for-profit companies that filed suit-Hobby Lobby Stores, a nationwide chain of 500 arts and crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a maker of custom cabinets-didn't have to offer female employeesall Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptivesas part of a package of preventive services that must be covered without copays or deductibles under the law. The companies had argued that several types of contraceptivesviolate their owners' religious beliefs. The ruling also covers a Hobby Lobby subsidiary, the Mardel Christian bookstores.
I'm arguing that benefits are not mandatory. Health benefits can be compensation and optional at the same time, just like bonuses.
Benefits and bonus. Payable to the employee. Not mandated or required.
Just because it's not mandatory doesn't mean it's not compensation. I get more more than minimum wage, that doesn't mean only part of my pay is compensation.
There was NO DECISION mandating tax payer involvement.
I'm not an 'either or' thinker- as extremist thinking tends to be all or nothing. I say focus on everything in between, particularly those options that minimize taxpayer exposure.
Specializes in LTC, assisted living, med-surg, psych.
Somewhere along the line, we've forgotten that every business is someone's business.
Publicly traded does not mean public property.
Benefits are benefits, not entitlements.
These fundamental facts have been muddled to the point where people actually believe it's the government and their employer's job to take care of them!
It's disturbing how some people have trouble acknowledging that businesses are comprised of owners who happen to be human beings, who happen to be citizens of this country (usually).
One of the benefits of citizenship is that - barring legal and constitutional guarantees against specific types of discrimination- you can do whatever you want with your own stuff.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
Religious beliefs are to be practiced in all areas of life. Owning a business is only secular to someone who does not operate from a religious viewpoint.
To someone of faith, everything may require consideration of their religious values or edicts, including business decisions.
I get that. Which is why so many of us find the HL ruling so hypocritical. While HL was busy worrying what contraceptives their female employees might have access to within the insurance policy they were happily investing in companies which manufacture the medications and devices that are apparently so offensive to them. Indeed, HL is so focused upon their religious concerns that one might think that they would be self principled enough to refuse to do business in the country famous for mandating abortive procedures for women.
It seems however, that HL's religious conscience only extends into the contraceptive choices of their female employees and not into their profit exercises.
Analogy: A Jewish deli should not be forced to sell pork just because Obama and his friends wants pork. Those who want pork, including employees of the deli, are free to use their federal food stamps to buy pork at another deli.
Better analogy, the deli employees aren't allowed to use their paycheck to purchase pork, they have to use SNAP if they want to be able to eat pork.
Yes, I believe that a privately owned company has the right to mandate what they will and what they will not pay for based on religious beliefs. Just as the employee has the right to choose whether to work for or not work for that privately owned company.
The SCOTUS decision got it right. It basically says: It is worth our freedoms to have the federal government pay for birth control in cases of conscience. This BASIC principle is already in force in a number of ways:
1) Our personal businesses are ours to run how we want. If you don't like how the business is run, don't work for them. You are free to go to the federal government to get what you want.
2) Having sex OBVIOUSLY brings the possibility of pregnancy. If you want to live as such, go to the federal government to pay for the unwanted but OBVIOUS results. If burdening the taxpayer with birth control bothers you, does it bother you enough not to have sex?
"Abortion is not a sign that women are free, but a sign that they are desperate." (Frederica Mathews-Green, contemporary writer and National Public Radio commentator)
This is NOT a woman's health issue. The vast majority of women do not require birth control to maintain good health. It's not mandatory. It's optional.
Unless you have a medical condition for which BC is curative or helps to manage, birth control is not a medical necessity.
With very, very few exceptions, women won't die without BC. They won't get sick without it. Nor will they suffer without it.
'Women's health' is a buzzword with virtually no context related to this case- especially when the only birth control not offered by Hobby Lobby is the kind that terminates pregnancies.
Lots of misnomers, misinformation and empty political rhetoric with NO basis in reality related to the ruling going on!
The vast majority of men don't need treatment for testicular cancer. It's against my religion to treat testicular cancer. Men can just work for someone else if they want treatment for testicular cancer.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
Yes, I believe that a privately owned company has the right to mandate what they will and what they will not pay for based on religious beliefs. Just as the employee has the right to choose whether to work for or not work for that privately owned company.
So you will be okay with a company deciding to convert to Islam and then deciding that the female employees may only visit female doctors using their health insurance? Maybe that Islamic company doesn't think that male children of emplyees should be circumsized, should they be able to dictate that to their employees relative to health insurance coverage? Or the company converts to a religion which does not believe in mental health care and prohibits that sort of coverage within the policy? How about if your secular company suddenly decides that it is now a Scientologist, will you be okay with obtaining your health care according to their religious beliefs?
Are you assuming that when the HL employees accepted their job offers and the health insurance benefit package they were told that there would be religious restrictions placed upon their contraceptive choices?
Pro-choice vs. pro-life: Are they merely different views or is one better than the other?
Is killing a human being simply "different" from saving their life? Pro-choice advocates want the right to dismember and kill unborn human beings for ANY reason and at ANY gestational age prior to birth; pro-life advocates want to protect unborn human beings from such an agonizing fate and to save their lives.
Is lying to women merely "different" from telling them the truth? Pro-choice advocates want to mislead women - by telling them the unborn child is only a lump of tissue; pro-life advocates want to tell women the whole truth - that the unborn child is, in all scientific reality, a small human being.
Is treating women with disrespect merely "different" from treating them with respect? Pro-choice advocates want to stop laws requiring them to give women full disclosure of abortion information; pro-life advocates support laws requiring them to give women full disclosure.
Abortion counselors and doctors often take an active part in coercing pregnant women into having abortions; pro-life advocates support laws against coercion of pregnant women.
The list of differences goes on... Pro-choice values promote killing, lying, and mistreatment of human beings. Pro-life values promote respect for human life, respect for women, and respect for the truth - all of which are not just "different" from pro-choice views...they're better...for both women and society as a whole.
Who is stopping her? We can be big girls and pay for our own bc. Paternalistic is saying that women are too tread upon and victimized to pay their own way! As a woman, nurse and one who pays for her own bc on way less than what you may think, I resent the argument that it is my right to make others take care of me! Where did all the feminists go? We have become a bunch of needy women wanting handouts and victim status.
The women working there ARE paying for their own birth control by working and obtaining health insurance. Now they have to jump through additional hoops. Men don't have to worry about the religious beliefs of their potential employer when they go get a job. Why should women?
I'm a little surprised that a group of nurses is dismissing what the IOM, WHO, HHS, etc believes the benefits of effective family planning to be.
I also don't get the argument that these employees are expecting to get something for "free", the vast majority of employees pay into their employer-sponsored health plan, often to the tune of a few hundred a month, which is hardly "free".
Why should I care what government groups think about the "benefits of effective family planning'? And surely you mean the benefits of contraception, not the benefits of actually planning to have a family. But ok, the fact that I don't personally care what these groups think about the issue may be beside the point. I don't think that "a group of nurses" should have the same opinion about an issue where there can be dissent. Should be really be that homogenous? Should we go ahead and issue the brown shirts now?
The free part refers to the copay. Surely you knew that. There is no other medication with a $0 copay. If so, please let me know.
MunoRN, RN
8,058 Posts
Just because it's not mandatory doesn't mean it's not compensation. I get more more than minimum wage, that doesn't mean only part of my pay is compensation.