Let Freedom Ring!

John I think you are right, so the arena of contention will move to the new formulation of Foxified slanguage, to make uneducated women believe that this is not a big deal.

Let the Propaganda-Mills Ring!

Well I think its time for the girls to take charge, frankly. The conduct of Western civilization by the males has been a shameful, frightening cock-up, to borrow a fun phrase from the Brits.

The thing to do it to get ’em out to vote in the next election. Luckily this decision is four months in advance, the usual timespan required for an idea to sink into the sodden noggins of the ill-informed and harried. Thus to counteract it, a propaganda firefight from the Right is on the sudden horizon. But I fear that as usual, the lazy Democratic left (such as it is) will not be up to the challenge.

John Holbo, I think your post is, or should be, a preliminary excursion into the issue at hand. This really isn’t just about women’s rights: it’s about religious liberty claims. The Court’s Wheaton College order signals that it’s willing to entertain the notion that a religious objection to some law or other is enough to exempt from the law not just the religious objector, but also anyone who might take that objector’s place.

“the spirit in which these decisions are being celebrated”

Couple ways to interpret that phrase, innit?
Years of watching non-believers insist that believers are just chocolate to their vanilla, yet somehow the believers just won’t go along with that, seeing it as a moral binary with no middle ground. It’s frustrating to see the constant recursive of logical superiority foundering on the rocks of delusional certainty. Like waves of common sense washing up on the beach of absurdity.
Divide and conquer’s the name of the overall strategy, with some preparation for serious meltdown, and consequent security issues at the compound perimeter.
P.R. sophisticates laying to a delusional base impervious to reason, and reasonable arguments end up stuck to the fence like plastic bags, fluttering in the winds of change.
People who sincerely believe in Judeo-Christian hierarchies are being played, and the people who don’t believe are being played against them.
There is no outcome of that conflict that works for the human good. Though in my magnanimity I’ll extend a kind of mutant humanity to the puppet-masters that are directing this End Times dog and pony show.
My heart to Sotomayor and Ginsburg, but seriously, every bit of news that the world is effectively catching on fire goes right to the foundations of apocalyptic confidence. Which proceeds from patriarchal misogyny and racxial chauvinism. And goes right back into the Bible. If you attack that you’re at best a dupe of evil.
And the idea that patience, anticipating a public wake-up call at the inadequacies of conservative world-views and policies, is what’s called for?
Dudes, Obama didn’t deliver, can’t, won’t, and Congress is on its knees. Nobody else in that system’s got a chance now to do anything but sacrifice themselves, publicly, like a rat drawing arrows on the walls of the laboratory maze, before it’s plucked out and dissected. To improve the algorithms of control.
–
Independence Day’s celebrated by most Americans as the achievement of their freedom, but of course it isn’t that.
It’s a celebration of the declaration, the beginning of the struggle not the end of it.
The “Fuck You!” to England that began the War of Independence, which was long and horrifically bloody, and its outcome in doubt right up to the British surrender.
Pleas to the Parliament, petitions of redress, yeah okay, tried that. But it was fighting that got us independence, not politics.

SCOTUS Calvinball. Kind of like Bush v. Gore.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…or at least that’s how a majority of the Supreme Court is hoping that women will understand it.

This is all about “religious liberty” in precisely the same way that the Civil War was about “states’ rights.”

Article lead-in on cnn.com right now: The decision to give an evangelical college a temporary pass on providing contraception insurance under Obamacare set off unusually strident dissent.

Gee, what adjective would have replaced “strident” if the dissenters had been male?

Sadly, it is hard to see what the obvious victims of these disgusting decisions can do about it. They are certainly being rooked at the ballot box – most of the conservative judges could have been blocked the way the GOP blocks judges, by the panoply of obstructionist steps given senators to do such things, but unfortunately, the Dems only care during election years about the composition of the court. Besides Thomas, you have Scalia – unanimously confirmed by the Senate – you have Roberts – confirmed 78-22 – you have Kennedy 97-0 and so on.
I don’t doubt that the Senate will flip Republican this election, unless they really really fuck up, and the House will remain Republican. Essentially, if there is a vacancy, we will see what a riled up majority that means it does to a presidential nomination it objects to ideologically. The dems will decry it, and – if there is another Republican president, which I have a hard time seeing – will make their words acts by seeking compromises and soothing statements from the nominee to be.

At root, the problem is the power that the supreme court has period. I would love to see some constitutional amendment that would simply get them out of the business of telling us what is and is not constitutional – this was, to be all originalist about it, never the intent. Other countries have constitutional committees that rule on legislation as it is being considered, and that is that. We need a court that is simply a court of last appeal, not a third wheel on the gov.

“…religious liberty claims by corporations.” Wow. I mean, I don’t go to church myself, but those of you that do — how many corporations have you seen filling up the pews? What was that saying — “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”? On the other hand, it does seem like they’re the only ones get all their prayers answered.

> It is narrow in exactly the same way Hobby Lobby is narrow

One thing is one thing. Two things is a set, a pattern. How big a set? We don’t know, but not a-priori two, you see. It can’t be narrow in “exactly the same way” as hobby lobby is narrow, in the same way that Gus Grissom can’t be “the first american in space in exactly the same way Alan Shepard was.”

John (if I may) isn’t the point that the MSCOTUS (M-ale) now assert that religious freedom should be interpreted as holding that any deep-felt belief trumps what have been taken till-now to be reasonable assessments of what constututes a substantial burden against the exercise of that freedom? Doesn’t the ruling here expand what a substantial burden is? If that’s right, it’s frightening.

“Gee, what adjective would have replaced ‘strident’ if the dissenters had been male?”

Google indicates that Scalia’s dissents are often called “strident”. What are you looking for here?

come on, you don’t know him? Hector’s probably pretty happy about all of this.

“The decision to give an evangelical college a temporary pass on providing contraception insurance under Obamacare set off unusually strident dissent.”

First of all, CNN is dreadful.

Second, it is my understanding that SCOTUS is letting Wheaton take a pass, not just on providing contraception, but providing paperwork that indicates their religious orientation, thus enabling the gov’t-workaround. What Wheaton is saying, if I understand it correctly, is that they don’t even want to have their employees have access to the workaround – i.e. no birth control at all for those who work at Wheaton. SCOTUS is moving us ever closer to a religious state. Mind-boggling.

Happy 4th of July. Have fun celebrating those freedoms people have died for. Looks like those freedoms are being now strangled to death.

Damn, Hector, you’re getting smoked! Smoked, I say!

Time to bring the psychedelic religion into the open. Anecdotally it sounds like more and more people are rejecting the suppression of Being via prescribed anti-depressants, and going the positive spiritual route with entheogen therapy. It is only a matter of time. Or timelessness. I think there is a substantial burden being placed upon religion by forcing this stuff underground. Bring it out into the open, and nobody will ever vote Republican again!

“I make a point of explicitly separating my main point from all such legal details. Drum’s point about the PR tactic is also separate from the question of whether the Wheaton injunction will have a large practical effect.”

Kevin Drum sounds like his real complaint lies with the fact that the American judiciary decides one case at a time, instead of announcing all at once the result of one case and the next five on similar questions. Hobby Lobby does not decide the question at issue in the Wheaton case because that question was not at issue in Hobby Lobby. That is not a “PR tactic” designed to deceptively suggest narrowness.

Your main point, it seems to me, founders somewhat if in fact the end result here is that the employees of these companies get cost-free contraceptive coverage. Symbolism matters, to be sure, but this is not even a symbolic difference on the consumer end. This is not like being able to enter the same building as everyone else, but through the back door, or getting the same rights as everyone else, but through a civil union. The difference is just in the allocation of responsibilities at the back-end. The boss does not manage to interfere with contraceptive coverage in any material way.

Hobby Lobby takes place against a backdrop of disagreement about religious accommodation. The key question is: when, if ever, can a religious objection excuse upsetting the legal entitlements of specific third parties? What worried many people, myself among them, about Hobby Lobby was that it posed a real potential of giving a very bad answer to that question. The Court could have held that the contraceptive mandate did not serve a compelling interest for RFRA purposes, or that enacting a mini single-payer system for contraceptive coverage qualifies as a less restrictive means of accomplishing the government’s purpose, either of which would have been huge victories for the ability of religious employers to burden their employees according to whatever subjective convictions they happen to have. Neither of these things happened. Instead, Justice Kennedy’s concurrence strongly signals that there are five votes on the Court for upholding a version of the contraceptive mandate that continues to protect the legal entitlement to contraceptive coverage while minimizing, as far as practicable, the involvement of the employer. In other words, while the Court will force the government to accommodate the employer where it thinks the government can do so without too much trouble, in the end the rights of the employees are likely to win out. Nothing about the Wheaton injunction should make us think otherwise.

“Kevin Drum sounds like his real complaint lies with the fact that the American judiciary decides one case at a time, instead of announcing all at once the result of one case and the next five on similar questions.”

The Court hears cases, decides them, and then there is some delay while decisions are written. Clearly both Hobby Lobby and Wheaton were decided before the Hobby Lobby opinion was announced. The majority in Hobby argued that the government should have offered Hobby Lobby the accommodation made available to organizations like Wheaton; while they knew they would argue in Wheaton that the government couldn’t compel Wheaton to conform to that accommodation. Surely that deserves some criticism.

@7

“John Roberts is a deep-cover Naderite-Leninist disruptionist, heightening the contradictions to usher in the New Socialist Utopia. Good work, tovarishch. Good work.”

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke as well. “I don’t see a bubble in housing. The prices reflect a new era.” Then the government is forced to bail out the entire financial sector.

But just as women would hardly appreciate having an employer stick a post-it on their desk, reading ‘your ass is mine’,

Women presumably includes managers’ wives. One assumes “women want 50 shades of grey” means “women want single me to look after them,” and he’s okay with that because his religion tells him he should find a woman and look after her [1]. When he’s been married ten years and wants to stay married, and he’s a supervisor who’s forced to worry about the feelings of his subordinates, his inability to see women in any other way than “subordinate, and subordinate means available, and available means sexually,” that’ll change.

OT though. The rest of the points in the OP remain.

[1] If he’d been told since boyhood that girls would try to trick him into impregnating them to get a free ride through life, his eventual attitude would be very different.

” It’s really not realistic to suppose women will be more immune to the symbolism of the drama than conservatives themselves, however it plays out in terms of provision of birth control to women who need it.”

Actually, yes, they almost certainly will get away with energizing their base with the symbolism, while not energizing our base with the symbolism.

The other side makes an effort to tie ideology, with its drama and symbolism, to practical politics. Their voters understand, as a result of this effort, that if they want these victories for their side to continue, they need to show up at the polls in November to vote for R Senators to insure that their party will continue to control the court into the indefinite future. An R majority Senate will keep Obama, or any D who makes it into the WH in 2016, from appointing a Kennedy or RBG replacement, and it will keep the Ds in the Senate from blocking an R president’s replacement for either of these two.

Had our side been equally attentive to the need to connect politics with ideology, the same practical political considerations would motivate voters who don’t want these Federalist Society/Opus Dei victories to continue, to show up at the polls in November to vote for D Senators, so that no successor to Kennedy or RBG would make it past a D majority, and no R majority in the Senate could block a D president nominee from becoming the fifth vote that would overturn these victories for the other side. Unfortunately, the more attentive the voter inclined to vote for our side is, the more clearly he or she will understand that voting for a D Senator this November will not in any way affect the composition of the court. We don’t believe in litmus tests, and our Senators will absolutely not vote to keep a nominee off the bench just because of a prior record of being Opus Dei or Federalist Society.

I understand that people on our side have noble reasons for not wanting to politicize the courts. We tend to believe in this ideal of courts that are insulated from the political pressure the other branches are subject to, and are therefore more free to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But precisely the deference this ideal has generated has, by making it taboo for our side to even consider limiting the courts, made SCOTUS the one unchecked, unlimited center of raw political power in our system. Of course the other side made it a generation-long project to take over that commanding height of current US politics.

The other side controls the court. They, correctly, see this in terms of power politics. However correct and intellectually devastating the critique we might devise of their recent decisions in terms of legal and logical argumentation, such critiques miss the point that the less intellectually defensible their decisions, the clearer the assertion of power. We’re not going to bring any of the junta that controls SCOTUS over to sense and reason by the power of superior argumentation.

Worse, much worse, we’re not going to get people to the polls in November, by fighting the easy battle, out arguing people who aren’t very bright anyway, but aren’t even trying, since they know perfectly well that they are in power and don’t have to justify their decisions.

If our side wants voters on our side to come out this November and vote for our politicos, we need to be able to tell them how their votes will give us the power to fight the power that the other side is exerting through their control of SCOTUS. I’m not even going to try to suggest that our side should come out for impeaching Scalito, or limiting SCOTUS jurisdiction by law. Baby steps. But can we at least talk about litmus tests, please? Can we even talk about allowing our side to vote against nominees who belong to organizations overtly committed to overturning big chunks of settled law in general, and, in particular, the availability of contraception? Can we start a discussion from litmus tests over the availability of contraception that makes it very clear, by creating a controversy, that the continued availability of contraception is under threat unless people show up in November to vote for Senators who will impose that very litmus test?

For once, can our side choreograph the symbolism and drama to help make the point that our politicos need to be given some power this November? That point won’t make itself, because the key element lacking is not that our side isn’t right on the issue, it’s that our side is not willing to use the power the Senate has to block nominees.

I think what we have here is a Dred Scott decision for the 20th century. May all those on the Supreme Court who voted for these rulings be as fondly remembered as Roger Taney.

John Holbo: Maybe our difference of opinion here is just this. There are conservatives who are saying “this isn’t a deprivation of rights, just a withholding of optional benefits.” But they did not win Monday; they did not win on the legal rationale, which did not reject the compelling interest claim, and they (probably) did not win on the practical effect, which is that women’s right to cost-free contraceptive coverage remains fully intact. To the extent they think they won, they do not understand the decision. The view that the contraceptive mandate is as a whole distasteful, because women should pay for their own “recreational” sex and the mandate cabins the discretionary power of employers, did not win anything from the Hobby Lobby decision.

The conservative religious believers who genuinely won from the Hobby Lobby ruling may (probably do) share that view, but what they won are two other things: first, a symbolic kind of affirmation from the Supreme Court of their own sense of themselves as a mistreated, marginalized minority, and, second, a practical result that will probably enable some of them to avoid violating their sincere religious convictions. These are not zero-sum.

“The view that the contraceptive mandate is as a whole distasteful, because women should pay for their own “recreational” sex and the mandate cabins the discretionary power of employers, did not win anything from the Hobby Lobby decision.”

This is surely wrong. The Court ruled that minimum standards for employer-subsidized health insurance cannot be enforced if they conflict with the employer’s religious views, but only with respect to contraception. If your religious views hold that medical intervention of any kind is a sin, too bad. If you have a religious objection to blood transfusions, tough luck. Vaccines? You’re out of luck. The Court has singled out contraception as a special class of medical service which is trumped by strong religious feelings; and they did so by first on Monday pretending they were only talking about some kinds of contraception, and then on Tuesday clarifying that they mean ALL contraception.

“The Court ruled that minimum standards for employer-subsidized health insurance cannot be enforced if they conflict with the employer’s religious views, but only with respect to contraception.”

Yes, I think this is right too, and that’s an important caveat to what I said. Though there is nothing about the Hobby Lobby holding that depends explicitly on the fact that this is contraception rather than some other health service, the majority in Hobby Lobby is doing something to the contraceptive mandate that they most likely would not do to other kinds of preventive care covered by ACA. So in that sense you’re right, one of the things that is going on in Hobby Lobby is the Supreme Court implicitly not seeing contraception as having fully equal status to other health services.

But my point is that, even so, the Court does not take this very far. If people are disturbed by women getting cost-free contraceptive coverage, they should still be disturbed, because women will still get cost-free contraceptive coverage. And the fact that they will still get cost-free contraceptive coverage isn’t an accident of the ruling, but necessary to it; the government can’t apply the direct mandate only because it has another way of accomplishing the purpose of providing women with cost-free contraceptive coverage.

“And the fact that they will still get cost-free contraceptive coverage isn’t an accident of the ruling, but necessary to it; the government can’t apply the direct mandate only because it has another way of accomplishing the purpose of providing women with cost-free contraceptive coverage.”

Yes, this was the spin they put on it Monday, before they revealed on Thursday that they’re not entirely sure about whether that ‘other way of accomplishing it’ stands up to scrutiny.

Tell me: Do you concur with the majority view in Hobby Lobby, that while the mandate meets the compelling interest standard, it fails the substantial burden standard?

” The ones they object to are the murder weapons – like the IUD.”

I can call a seat belt a murder weapon if I want, and assert an RFRA objection to Federal seat belt standards. Even though the Court believes my opinion on seat belts to be factually wrong, apparently if it’s sincere they’ll uphold my objection. No, wait, it has to be about contraception, so I’ll have to believe that seat belts cause abortions. No problem, I’m sure I can get sincere about that.

Phooey.

Layman @40. Interesting question. Since my daughter is now clerking, I have a fellow layman’s sense (and I am very “laity” here) of how all this might work. I can imagine that thoroughgoing disconnect is entirely possible. Also possible, elaborate maneuvering by clerks, justices, and permanent clerks (or whatever they’re actually called — I didn’t even know they existed till recently, but now I wonder if more shouldn’t be studied about these long-termers, who stay forever with their justice and don’t ever go on to “great things”.)

7.5.14 10.18 “Can you guys stop talking about women as a monolith, and as if we’re not here? ”

7.6.14 9.24 “What’s the alternative? A general strike? It’s far more likely that a statuesque woman will lay hands upon you and insist you make love to her. That happened to me. What some of you imagine is an impossible fantasy.”

7.6.14 11.17 “Sometimes it’s hard to tell how other people think. It’s possible that a woman who yells “Woohoo! I’m drunk and I feel hot!” might have a vague intuition that good things will come of it, without expecting any particular reaction from anybody. Or she might think of it as a mating call, and hope to attract men who will treat her the ways she wants to be treated.”

John Holbo: That’s Alito, who at certain points in the majority opinion reads like he’s chomping at the bit to go further. I’m sure he doesn’t think there is a compelling interest in guaranteeing contraceptive coverage to women, and the passage you quote is one of the many instances where he seems to tip his hat to that effect. But compare the language choices of Justice Kennedy, concurring:

“Among the reasons the United States is so open, so tolerant, and so free is that no person may be restricted or demeaned by government in exercising his or her religion. Yet neither may that same exercise unduly restrict other persons, such as employees, in protecting their own interests, interests the law deems compelling.”

“There’s a tension there, insofar as women don’t have a right to contraception provided by employers, only a right to contraceptive coverage. ”

Isn’t that basically right, though?

ACA is effectively a scheme that intends to transform health insurance, and health insurance that includes a certain specified package of benefits (including cost-free contraceptive care), into a statutory right. (It does so partially and imperfectly, especially given the huge hole the Roberts Court carved into the Medicaid expansion, and it could be and ought to be strengthened in its capacity to pursue that goal, but that’s another discussion.) It follows, I think, quite directly that cost-free contraceptive care (among other things) is now a statutory entitlement to which women can meaningfully claim a right, and employer interference with the ability of women to lay claim to that right cannot be excused by a felt sense of religious obligation any more than such a sense could excuse wage theft.

But that does not establish that the central role of employers in the administration of ACA’s health insurance scheme is or ought to be essential rather than contingent. This part is different in kind from wage theft. If your employer owes you some sum of money in remuneration for the work you performed, it’s important that this is owed to you by your employer rather than by, say, society or the government. But it is not important to the project of universal health care that the package of health benefits you are entitled to comes entirely from your employer, rather than entirely from a government program, or rather than partially from your employer and partially from the insurer or plan administrator who contracts with your employer. None of those schemes mean that women have contraceptive coverage “only by the good graces of their employers”; they have contraceptive coverage by law, period, and they do whatever their employer thinks, and insofar as ACA works properly, they should even if they switch jobs or leave the workforce entirely. That seems pretty nearly the opposite of “feudal” to me.

I think that John has the right of it here. To argue the law with Alito’s court in this instance — as in many others — is to wear their cap and bells. If lefties with the appropriate legal qualifications want to engage Alito et al. on their own ground in defense of the integrity of the profession, I say fine, go right ahead, but the more important duty is to remind the conservative cheerleaders for the Court that using the law as a crowbar has its dangers, especially when your concept of the common good is as narrow as theirs is.

Well there is also the question of why employees cannot exercise their own religion while working for another, i.e. what is the legal basis of the idea that corporations, as persons, get to extend their religious beliefs OVER employees, as persons. Not to mention that the Court has put itself into the spiritual position of adjudicating what is a burden upon the exercise of religion, and what is not. This will not be going well, for Mr Justice Knucklehead!

There is no particular reason why businesses should be allowed to provide health coverage to their employees. It’s causing various sorts of disruption that would go away if they quit doing it.

When the votes are there, likely Congress will forbid businesses to give away health insurance to their employees. (Oh please, Breh’r Fox, do anything you want to me but don’t throw me in that there briar patch!) And we will get a new business tax to help pay the cost of ACA.

J Thomas @ 76

I sometimes remind my easily confused friends that the first step in any serious reform of health care would be to make for-profit health insurance a felony.

I am alarmed by this decision for several reasons – the idea that certain forms of birth control are identified as abortion, the idea the for-profit corporations have religious ideals (!!!) that must be protected under the 1993 RFRA.

Here’s a quote from Alito’s opinion that I also find alarming: “According to HHS and the dissent, these corporations are not protected by RFRA because they cannot exercise religion. Neither HHS nor the dissent, however, provides any persuasive explanation for this conclusion.”

I find it alarming that the burden of proof is on HHS to prove private corporations cannot exercise religion. What does it mean “to exercise a religion?” How does a corporation pray? How does a corporation go to church?

Here’s another startling quote from Alito’s opinion:

“The Hahns and Greens believe that providing the coverage demanded by the HHS regulations is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage. This belief implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.”

The idea that including the IUD is in someway facilitating an “immoral act by another” – and that the Hobby Lobby entity is somehow encouraging immorality should they be forced to cover the IUD and morning after birth control options is a stretch. These products are not “abortions.” And abortions are in fact legal in the US (though I think this court will change that soon.)

‘The idea that including the IUD is in someway facilitating an “immoral act by another” – and that the Hobby Lobby entity is somehow encouraging immorality should they be forced to cover the IUD and morning after birth control options is a stretch.’

Of course. If providing them with insurance they can use to get IUDs is facilitation of immorality, then paying them wages they can use to get IUDs is also facilitation of immorality. How not?

Regarding the argument about the breadth of the decision-

Court cases set precedent on different levels. On the most strict, you have the decision as it applies to the parties to the case. But beneath that you have the legal reasoning which led to the decision.

The conservative bench has a habit of declaring that their legal reasoning is specific to just the case they’re evaluating, and shouldn’t be precedent for other cases. But you can’t actually do that. You can say it, but it means nothing. See, e.g., lower courts citing the legal reasoning from Bush v. Gore in spite of the Supreme Court’s request that they not do so. It’s what they SHOULD do; it’s literally their job.

Imagine if the Court ruled that all red blings are blongs, via the logic that all blings are blongs, and then appended a clause stating that they were DEFINITELY, DEFINITELY NOT setting precedent about blue blongs, just red ones. Well, they can say that all they want. But the lower courts aren’t going to care. They’re still going to get the message that if they rule that a blue bling isn’t a blong, the Supreme Court will reverse them. And that’s what makes a decision precedent.

Personally, I know how I’d argue the inevitable blood transfusion case- I’d distinguish it based on the connection between blood transfusions and emergency care. I’d argue that not providing full emergency care in one’s health insurance will lead to disastrous incidences where people with employer provided health insurance go to the emergency room assuming they’re insured for basic emergency care only to find out that they aren’t. By contrast, someone who’s employer doesn’t provide birth control will generally have time to consider the issue and plan for how to deal with it in a way that isn’t possible in an ambulance. I’d argue that this makes requiring coverage for blood transfusions a narrowly tailored, least restrictive method in a way that requiring birth control coverage was not.

It’s a weak difference given that emergency birth control is also a thing, but the Supreme Court doesn’t know much about lady parts so I think I could get it by them. What are they going to do, write in their decision that they interfered with women’s emergency care, so my distinction is illusory? Nah, they’ll just pretend that everything in the Hobby Lobby case was hunky dory and no one was or will be harmed. It will give them the hook they need to rule in favor of Catholic moral values while snubbing religious minorities.

Patrick: “By contrast, someone who’s employer doesn’t provide birth control will generally have time to consider the issue and plan for how to deal with it in a way that isn’t possible in an ambulance. I’d argue that this makes requiring coverage for blood transfusions a narrowly tailored, least restrictive method in a way that requiring birth control coverage was not.”

There used to be a ‘Negro Motorists’ Guide’ to help certain people plan on how they’d deal with travel issues, due to other people’s ‘religious freedom’.

“There used to be a ‘Negro Motorists’ Guide’ to help certain people plan on how they’d deal with travel issues, due to other people’s ‘religious freedom’.”

And we have a winner!

Wonks Anonymous 07.04.14 at 7:07 pm

What I find odd is that Breyer signed on to the decision, even though he dissented in Hobby Lobby.

Perhaps Breyer still follows the doctrine of stare decisis, something that The Roberts Court appears to have neglected.

@91

Echidna of the Snakes posted a better response to your comment than I ever could. So I am just going to post hers.

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-ur-slut-and-pay-for-your-own.html#

“The case for including contraception in the package of care which comes without out-of-pocket costs is that it’s ultimately good for the health and well-being of both the woman, her future children (because pregnancies are planned and thus the parents can try to be in the best state of health before conception) and her whole family. It’s even good for everybody else, given that planned pregnancies and births are less likely to have high health care costs and high later government subsidies for the children.”

Part of the problem is that we don’t think of health care as maintaining health so much as dealing with sickness. “America has the best health care in the world” is only true in the sense that our hospitals can do some amazing things; we don’t do a good job of keeping the average person well.

Health insurance is an odd thing. Even in this country it’s actually expected to keep people well; it’s as though auto insurance was expected to cover maintenance. A key reason for the difference is that we expect cars to be replaced eventually, but the alternative to keeping ourselves going is dreadful.

One of the goals of healthcare, and hence of health insurance, is to reduce the need for treatment. Things like family planning and reproductive health care do that.

It’s grimly amusing to hear from market fundamentalists on this subject, since they claim to be rigorously analytical, but are clearly ignorant of decades of experimental data. Of all the wealthy nations, when it comes to health care we have the highest costs and the worst outcomes. “At least we’re not France!” is a rather perverse boast.

“A program that provides contraceptives to low-income women…

…contributed to a 40-percent drop in Colorado’s teen birth rate over five years, according to state officials. The… Colorado Family Planning Initiative, provides intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants at little to no cost for low-income women at 68 family planning clinics…. The teen abortion rate dropped by 35 percent from 2009 to 2012 in counties served by the program…. Young women served by the family planning clinics also accounted for about three-fourths of the overall decline in Colorado’s teen birth rate during the same time period. And the infant caseload for Colorado WIC, a nutrition program for low-income women and their babies, fell by 23 percent from 2008 to 2013…”

http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/07/08/morning-must-read-german-lopez-colorado-offered-free-birth-control-teen-births-fell-40-percent/

If conservatives really gave a damn about abortion they would be handing out free birth control like Pez. The fact that they are not suggests they have other motives.

Mainstreet Muse: “Please note: Hobby Lobby provides coverage for SOME contraception. The ones they object to are the murder weapons – like the IUD. SCOTUS extended the ruling to ALL contraception later, but Hobby Lobby wanted to isolate just a few. ”

Those methods are legally not murder weapons, or abortion methods. SCOTUS broke new ground by declaring that (for birth control only), if a party believes that A is B, the court must act as if it were.

Now, some day, SCOTUS might extend that to other things. But for now, that’s the way it stands.

YES to J. Thomas @95:

“You as a single customer can’t negotiate at all. ‘Oh, your arm is broken? I’ll fix that. You want to know how much it costs? I don’t know, that isn’t my department. You’ll have to talk to accounting, but they won’t know how much until after they find out just what I had to do. We’ll figure out the cost afterward and you can arrange financing.'”

This is how it actually works. You don’t find out at the emergency room that your insurance doesn’t cover the treatment you need, because nurses and doctors can’t swipe your insurance card like a credit card and see whether it runs. You find out a couple months later, when you get billed for it. What about “maintenance?” Shouldn’t you be able to figure all of that out in advance? It’d be nice! But if you’re at a more routine appointment, and you’ve done your research to find out that the appointment itself will be covered, you still may not find out in advance (for example) that a basic blood test your doctor always draws will get sent to an out-of-network lab for analysis, where it won’t be covered.

Yes, it would be nice if we all had plenty of money lying around for random unexpected “maintenance” costs, but what happens isn’t that everyone makes sure to have enough money to pay for all of their routine medical costs at all times, because our medical costs are not dependent on our incomes (not in the “good” direction, anyway – there are poor health outcomes associated with low incomes, which makes it even worse). What happens is that when you don’t have enough money, you avoid non-urgent medical spending as much as possible. It’s pretty obvious that doing that with contraception, or even just trying to cheap out on rather than using the most suitable form for your body and lifestyle, could have even more expensive negative effects.

I’m not aware of any evidence that large employers or insurance companies or anyone else uses bargaining power to get the price of birth control pills down to some level lower than what drug companies want to charge.

I’m not talking specifically about birth control pills, but about the total price they pay.

And no, I can’t possibly give you proof. For all I know, if you count up the retail price for everything a hospital does — $30,000 for a week in ICU, $250,000 for an open-chest heart operation, $5 for an ibuprofen pill in-hospital etc — maybe that’s what the insurance companies pay them.

And when you count up all the retail prices for all the pharmaceuticals that pharmacies dole out, maybe that’s what the insurance companies pay. I can’t prove otherwise.

Similarly, when IBM pays for health insurance for all its 100,000 US employees, maybe the price it pays is the sum total of what all those employees would pay if they got individual policies.

Do you believe that’s true?

WT 07.08.14 at 1:26 am:

Paying for birth control via insurance is a bit silly — akin to paying for gasoline through one’s car insurance…

Fine, then – let’s call it something other than insurance, and leave the semantic arguments behind. (Aside from that, the analogy misses a lot. Car insurance does not cover routine maintenance, inspections, mechanical repairs, etc. My health care coverage has covered routine visits, periodic physical exams, orthopaedic surgery, physical therapy, etc. BTW, my car insurance will pay for orthopaedic surgery under some circumstances, too.)

…(a weekly fillup is far more expensive than any birth control, by the way). If you can’t afford a weekly fillup on its own, neither could you afford an “insurance” plan that paid for a weekly fillup.

Who is your audience? People who can afford to own and maintain automobiles probably do find the cost of contraceptives relatively trivial. But there are plenty of places that reproductive behavior can occur – it doesn’t have to be in the car.

Same for birth control.

Wrong. Pricing does not work that way. Health care organizations (many of which bear the names of insurance companies, I know) have been getting better pricing than individuals for a long time. Here, you will find a study by US HHS about this very topic. It is one of many sources available about the differential in prescription drug prices. If you want to dispute it, you are welcome to point out a source that proves otherwise.

It doesn’t really make much sense to say that an “insurance” policy should cover regular weekly or monthly expenses…

The quotes show me that you already want to stop calling it “insurance”, but your reasoning has me worried about all those people who have chronic conditions that are treated with regular medication. When a doctor prescribes an anti-inflammatory for someone with Crohn’s disease, they pay out-of-pocket, but to overcome short-term effects of an injury or reaction to exposure, the same drug can be covered? Would someone with ankylosing spondylitis have to pay for their many years of physical therapy, while my two months of PT to recover from an injury is covered? Hepatitis C patients will be really interested in where that line is drawn.

Or does the reasoning about regular periodic medical expenses apply only to slu…birth control?

WT 07.08.14 at 7:05 pm:

I’m not aware of any evidence that large employers or insurance companies or anyone else uses bargaining power to get the price of birth control pills down to some level lower than what drug companies want to charge. Can you provide any such evidence?

WT, I am not aware of any evidence that the cost of health coverage that lacks birth-control coverage is enough cheaper that the covered person ends up gaining enough to cover the retail cost of that same birth control. Can you provide any such evidence?