I currently choose to work for a catholic school that does not pay for practices that I find and that my Church teaches as morally wrong. If the HHS mandate is not over turned by the Supreme Court, rewritten by the Obama administration, or somehow altered by Congress, the opportunity will no longer exist to exchange my talents for money in a fashion consistent with my Catholic beliefs. As it stands now the time, creativity, passion, and love that I put forth toward make a living does not violate those beliefs. The HHS mandate changes that.

Now you may tell me that my reality does not exist because clearly I have coworkers who are taking their paychecks and using that money to pay for services that are contrary to the Church’s teaching. This is without question the case. But it was their exchange of time for money that afforded them the opportunity, not mine.

First, the employer and employee did not freely bargain and agree that some of the employee’s labor would be rewarded with health benefits. The government is requiring it

Actually it’s not required. You can pay a tax if you decide to offer no benefits at all.

More importantly even with money wages, it has never happened that employees and employers have ‘freely bargained’. There’s always been various gov’t laws involved in the labor contract regulating min. pay (sometimes even max. pay!), hours worked, who can do certain jobs etc. By this reasoning then your pay can never just be your pay unless it some type of pure Ayn Randian libertarian state is somehow created first.

The situation is more akin to a law that requires all employees with a car to drive his or her boss to a motel to meet his mistress. If a boss wants to use his profits on his mistress, that is his business, but should the law require his employee to cooperate in the deed?

This is a pretty poor analogy. If you were hired as driver what do you think would happen if you started telling your boss you wouldn’t drive him around? Imagine you were a clerk at a hotel who started denying rooms to unmarried guests? You’d be fired quickly and have no recourse in the courts.

How about a law that said employees had to be paid 25% of their pay in the form of a free car? That would be a better fit. It would be valid to say some employees don’t want to have a car so gov’t intervening in the ‘free bargaining’ would be a bad thing…but it wouldn’t be very valid to say because some employees would drive around with their mistress on their days off the boss was being ‘forced’ to violate his principles. IF the boss is going to pay someone in the form of a car (either because that’s just how the market works or because of a regulation), then the boss is not responsible and has no right to control the use of the car. The objection here really boils down to an objection against pay itself!

And that’s a valid objection, if you pay someone to do something for you, then you give that person purchasing power they otherwise wouldn’t have. Since you transferred that power from you to them, it’s quite possible they may do something with it you would never do. If you take such things seriously enough, then paying anyone for anything might be a major moral problem for the individual….but as a society there’s a limit to what we can afford to accomodate.

This is the flip side of the taxi cab driver who feels he can’t drive around a man and his mistress or the hotel clerk who feels he can’t check in unmarried couples. Such people do not have the right to demand their employers alter their business model to accomodate their beliefs. Likewise employers who can’t tolerate the idea that employees may ‘misuse’ their pay can’t expect society to accomodate the idea that employers get to veto how employees spend their pay.

The line I think that makes sense for us as a society to draw is to ask who has the power to actually decide whether some act happens? In case A, an employee is paid cash and goes out and buys contraceptives, abortions, etc. In case B the employee has ‘health coverage’ and can use that to decide on buying an array of health services. In both cases the purchase is driven by the employee’s decision, not the employer thereby making it the employee’s property right.

Third, the HHS mandate essentially dictates the term of the labor/benefit exchange by requiring that the employer provide the benefit at “no cost” to the employee.

A distinction without a difference IMO. The employee is providing labor is he or she not? If so then it’s not really at no cost. The ‘no cost’ is only in the sense of pure cash accounting.

The problem with the mandate is that it is not the same as case wages for a number of reasons.

First, the employer and employee did not freely bargain and agree that some of the employee’s labor would be rewarded with health benefits. The government is requiring it. Second, the two parties did not freely agree that the objected benefits would be included in the package. Again, the government is requiring it.

Third, the HHS mandate essentially dictates the term of the labor/benefit exchange by requiring that the employer provide the benefit at “no cost” to the employee. How that will work remains to be seen.

The situation is more akin to a law that requires all employees with a car to drive his or her boss to a motel to meet his mistress. If a boss wants to use his profits on his mistress, that is his business, but should the law require his employee to cooperate in the deed?

peg,

I think the difference between ‘critical’ life saving issues and ‘lifestyle choices’ is more blurry than you think. Had a friend once whose boyfriend was on dialysis. He started drinking again and started skipping sessions. Several trips to the ER saved him from death until at one point he died at home in his bed. Each trip to the ER, was of course, critical life saving health care but at the same time it was also caused by his ‘lifestyle choices’ in drinking and skipping dialysis.

Blood transfusions are not as clear cut as you think either. There are medical centers that specialize in low blood loss surgery and recycling the patient’s own blood as much as possible to reduce or eliminate the need for blood transfusions. These are very important to the person with religious convictions against tranfusions or concerns about infections from other people’s blood but otherwise are not a great medical necessity. Should an employer who feels tranfusions are wrong be able to use health coverage to steer his employees towards reduced or no transfusions by making it hard for them to choose options other than those centers?

Likewise consider the woman going into labor. Of course it’s critical that she have medical attention but that’s not the same thing as ‘health care coverage’. If your employer is allowed to deny you coverage because he doesn’t like the idea of a single woman having a kid or because he thinks you already had enough kids or whatever reason it’s not like you’re forced to give birth on the sidewalk. A hospital will still take you into the ER and help you give birth when you’re in labor. You will just have to deal with a $10,000 bill afterwards.

Almost anything could violate a religious belief. For example, it might occur to some employer that covering childbirth for unmarried women essentially is subsidizing single motherhood and premarital sex. Why not make covering childbirth optional? What about those who believe in population control who think having more than two kids just taxes earth’s resources unjustly? Needless to say a Scientologist may feel any coverage for psychologists or anti-depressants violates religious beliefs of some sort.

Other procedures that appear in policies to which religious objections have been raised include sterilization, in vitro fertilization and some other assisted reproductive techniques, abortion, abortifacients, certain sex change operations, and prenatal or pre-implantation diagnosis for conditions that are not treatable (i.e. precursor to abortion). Other possibilities could include assisted suicide and use stem cells obtained from destroyed embryos. Whether coverage of these is mandated by law would depend on the state or territory. Whether they are de facto included because of the “market” would depend on the market.

The HHS mandate, however, is something entirely different. It goes beyond mandating coverage to mandating that contraception and sterilization be provided at no cost to the recipient. To my knowledge this is a first.

By the way, I think you have Christian Scientists mixed up with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

In other words, while you may have a health policy that covers abortions, you can make not having an abortion (or for men not faciliating a partner getting an abortion) as a condition of employment….regardless of who is paying for the abortion.

Granted you may have to make this something that’s enforced by the honor system but then that would apply even if you had the option to buy a ‘clean’ health policy. Employees could still run out and get abortions, contraceptions and other things using their own money.

Also is your church associated with a large, major denomination? Why couldn’t all the churches in your state band together and negotiate with insurance companies as one large employer rather than having each individual chruch buy insurance on its own?

Do you pay your employees in money? Do you not realize money can be used to buy all sorts of things you would consider sinful and wrong? Abortions, contraception, pornography, and Lady Gaga albums. There is no option to pay employees with cash that can only be used for ‘approved’ purchases….although I could imagine that a large bank could come up with some type of prepaid debit card that would selectively decline attempts to swipe it for ‘unapproved’ purchases.

So let’s ask about paying your employees with money. Since your employees can do anything they want with cash, is your church being forced to subsidize bad things? I would say no. Your employees provide labor, you pay with cash. the moment they do a day’s work, the cash ceases to belong to your church and it belongs to the employee. If the employee does something good or bad with her cash, that’s her freedom and her property, not yours.

IF the market introduced the idea of a ‘prepaid Big Brother debit card’ that let you give someone money but let you approve or decline their purchases based on criteria you set forth (I could imagine parents might like such a product so they can give their kids money but keep some control on how its spent), then I wouldn’t be very supportive of employers trying to control their employees pay by using it. Nor would I consider a law saying that wages must be paid in money an unjust infringement on anyone’s liberty.

So all we have is a law that says some portion of wages should be paid in health benefits. The health benefit beongs to the employee, not the employer as the employee provided labor in exchange for the coverage (and in many cases also pays a portion of the premium). What employees do with that health coverage, IMO, is no more the employers business than what employees do with their paychecks.