Today Five Members of the U.S. Supreme Court Moved Us Closer to a Theocracy

Today the Supreme Court ruled that private, family-owned businesses--in this case, Hobby Lobby--could opt out of paying for contraceptives if their objections to them are based on the owners' religious beliefs.

The case came to the attention of the Supremes when the Affordable Care Act included this mandate:

Birth control benefits:

Plans in the Health Insurance Marketplace must cover contraceptive methods and counseling for all women, as prescribed by a health care provider.
These plans must cover the services without charging a copayment, coinsurance, or deductible when they are provided by an in-network provider.

Covered contraceptive methods:

All Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods prescribed by a woman’s doctor are covered, including:

• Barrier methods (used during intercourse), like diaphragms and sponges
• Hormonal methods, like birth control pills and vaginal rings
• Implanted devices, like intrauterine devices (IUDs)
• Emergency contraception, like Plan B® and ella®
• Sterilization procedures
• Patient education and counseling

Plans aren’t required to cover:

• Drugs to induce abortions
• Services related to a man’s reproductive capacity, like vasectomies

Hobby Lobby argues that they don't want to pay for any services that might cause the end of life.  They consider FDA-approved morning-after pills--like Plan B--abortion pills, even though the pills have to be used within 72 hours after intercourse.  Within three days.  They consider certain IUDs as obstacles in the path of fertilized eggs.  (Fertilized eggs are apparently babies in their eyes.)

If the owners of Hobby Lobby want to believe that life begins at conception, let them.  It's a free country.  They can believe anything they want to believe, religious or otherwise.  What they can't do--or shouldn't be able to do--is to push their religious beliefs on their employees.  One of the benefits of the newly minted Affordable Care Act was a mandate to provide free contraceptive care for women who need it.  Hobby Lobby balked and decided they shouldn't have to pay for something that might keep women from having babies. 

When the Right Wing came up with the loony notion that life begins at conception, they opened the doors to misusing religion to force women to give up the ability to forestall pregnancies. There is no legitimate religious basis for denying women the right to free contraception.  None at all.

Contraception isn't, by definition, abortion, except in the minds of those looking for any excuse to involve themselves in deciding for women when they should have children.   When contraception is the obvious and most humane solution to unwanted pregnancies, there is no humane reason not to make it available and free. 

So what I'm seeing from those five men on the Supreme Court is yet another example of ideology as law.  ("Corporations are people" being the most jaw-dropping and the most precedent-forming.  Hobby Lobby couldn't have won without it.)  They're treading on dangerous territory.  They're giving judicial approval to religious solutions for societal issues, and, as the judicial branch of a secular government, they're knowingly abusing their authority.

But worse, they're telling women that when it comes to reproductive protections, religious theory trumps their right not to be burdened by the worry of unintended pregnancies.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in her dissent, said this:

Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.

Indeed, by law, no religion-based criterion can restrict the work force of for-profit corporations...The distinction between a community made up of believers in the same religion and one embracing persons of diverse beliefs, clear as it is, constantly escapes the Court’s attention. One can only wonder why the Court shuts this key difference from sight.

We are a country made up of diverse cultures and religions.  We welcome them, we encourage them, we give them the freedom to live within their own cultures and worship within their own religions.  At the same time, we expect the freedom not to have to follow along.

But this Supreme Court, in the name of free speech, just forced us to give in to specific religious beliefs.  There was a time when that would have been inconceivable. 

Lord knows, we were safer then.


(Cross-posted at dagblog and Alan Colmes' Liberaland)

The Obamacare Rollout was Bad. The Fallout is Even Worse. But the Plan Just Might Work.

 The ACA rollout is a mess.  I mean, really--only six people were able to sign up on the website the very first day?  Insane. 

But what did we expect?  They're saying the website doormen woefully underestimated the numbers of drive-bys and joiners on that first day.  It's rumored they only planned for 250,000 visitors.   After all the fuss about Obamacare, they actually thought a mere quarter-million curiosity-seekers would line up to get inside?  On any given day on YouTube the antics of a single adorable kitten can get more than 250,000 hits.

This is Obamacare, O ye gentle incompetents over there at HHS.  What were you thinking?  You've got a few million people out there breathlessly awaiting the day you admit defeat and shut the whole thing down.  Many of those same people are in positions of power.  The spotlight is on them every time you screw up.  They get to call you names and then, if you fail or even falter, they get to say "Told you so."

They're already saying you're pushing a plan that will never work, that it's a scam, that it's the devil's work.  To their minds it's settled, then.  Obamacare is a scourge and it needs to be eradicated from the face of the earth.

The hitch in all this is that they're not obligated to come up with something else to take its place.  Nobody expects that.  Their one and only role is to find the nearest public stage and read from their "Eviscerate Obamacare!" scripts.  And where are you in all this?  You're in the wings setting up their scenes and feeding them their lines.

Republicans, to a person, worked overtime for years to stop any hint of a public health care plan.  Even one as watered down as Obamacare is a danger to them and their monied interests.  But in spite of their hopes and plans for interference-free health care practices and profits, the unimaginable has happened: The Affordable Care Act, a frail shadow of its original promise but a threat nonetheless, is now the law of the land.  Now all these frantic losers are left with is a chance to work overtime to make sure it doesn't succeed.

The U.S Supreme Court gifted the opposition with yet another roadblock:  Individual states now have a choice and can opt out of portions of Obamacare--including the Medicaid options.  They'll have the extra advantage of letting the Fed (that's us) pay for anything they don't want to be a part of.  Talk about a prescription for failure.  I'm guessing they're ecstatic about it.

The Essential Wendell Potter, former CIGNA CEO turned whistleblower, makes it no secret that what we need in this country is universal health care.  He's not happy with the ACA rollout disaster, for several reasons, including this one:

"HHS wasted valuable time trying to persuade more states to operate their own exchanges. Officials apparently deluded themselves into thinking that even some of the red states could be persuaded that it would be in their best interests to have a state-run exchange than one run by the federal government. In hindsight, those officials wasted months in which time and resources could have been devoted to making sure the federal exchange would work on Oct. 1. HHS officials should have realized from the beginning that Republican governors and state legislators had no incentive for Obamacare to work. There wasn't a chance that they would operate their own exchanges if doing so might enhance the chances that Obamacare would be perceived as a success. "

 No kidding. Texas, anyone?  Potter has been on this since the beginning, exploring the depths to which the opposition will go in order to kill the dreaded Obamacare.  It's not a pretty picture.  (More from him here and here.)

We have to keep reminding ourselves that this is just the beginning.  Universal health care is in the infant stages; there will be falls and failures all over the place until we get it right.  Outside of Medicare and military care, we've never been anywhere close to the kind of public options we're heading for now.  Some of it will work, but some won't.  We'll adjust.  And we'll never want to go back.

The powers opposing this first step won't ever adjust, either.  They'll fight this to the end and beyond.  (They can't help it; it's in their DNA.) We have to make sure they'll lose.  But first we have to make sure we have the weapons to fight them.  That would mean--you ready for this?--a health insurance program that works the way it was promised.

Nobody ever won a battle by handing ammunition to the enemy.

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Also posted at Alan Colmes' Liberaland.

Medicare and Obamacare: Same Old Story

Note:  Thanks to Alan Colmes, I am now a regular contributor on his website, Liberaland.  He posted this piece this morning, so if you're interested in reading the complete piece it continues over there.  Thanks.
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In the next town over from us the recycling station is in a huge semi-trailer.  You have to climb six narrow metal steps to get up into it, but there is an aisle you can walk down and there are huge open boxes in which to throw your stuff.

The beauty of it is that while I’m dropping off my own recyclables, I can dig through the newspaper and magazine bins to see what’s there for the taking.  Through the years we’ve found some fascinating reading, some of it as current as yesterday, but last week we found a treasure trove:  Seventeen Consumer Reports magazines, ranging from1965 to 1980.

What struck me as I read through them was how much actual watchdogging went on within those pages; and what lengths they went to explain their findings. Page after page of small print, as if they actually anticipated that their readers would want to take the time to read it all. (No internet, no cable. I get it. But still. . .people read this stuff.  They read it.)

Back in June, 1966, their headline story was about the new Medicare law taking effect in July. The law was complicated.  Every aspect of health insurance, hospitalizations, physician and pharmacy services, and medical goods had to be considered.  Nothing like it had ever been done on such a large scale before. The Government was poring an estimated $3 billion plus into it during the first year alone. Who would pay for what?  Who would gain the most?  Who would lose the most?  (Sound familiar?)

(Continue here. . .)