Boonton, you were the one who objected to the people who were doing exactly what you say to do in your paragraph quoted above, hence my reference to the actual code itself.

The HHS Contraceptive Mandate rewrote the definition of “full coverage” to mean that a company must pay for contraception/abortifacients/sterilizations. You continue to make a claim that the fine for the Mandate is $2k when that appears nowhere–not in the articles by those “interpreting the code”, not in the actual code itself (which I’ve provided), and not in any outside source you’ve bothered to cite.

That $2K fine is in the Affordable Care Act, not the HHS Contraceptive Mandate.

You seem to want it both ways–to deny the claims of those who disagree with you, even though they are using methods you yourself claim to employ, and to deny those referencing the actual law. Good luck maintaining your credibility…

It sounds like the law is saying if a group plan offers ‘full coverage’ but doesn’t really cover everything that’s defined as ‘full coverage’ the fine on the plan itself is $100 per day per person impacted. So if a plan covers, say, mental health visits but then tells someone they won’t pay for a visit then the fine is $100 per day to the insurance company for each person denied. Not every person covered by the plan since only a few people at any given time are trying ot get coverage for mental health visits.

But that only applies to the insurance company itself that is selling and running the plan. The company itself is perfectly free to opt not to offer any coverage, pay $2K per employee and let the employees buy their own plans with their own money.

Reading the actual code

That’s usually a mistake. Legal code is pretty much like HTML code. The best way to look at a web page is to look at it with a browser, not try to read it from its raw HTML code. The best way to look at the law is to read the summaries of it and avoid the raw text unless you’re looking at a highly specialized application.

For example, back when the law was being debated a blogger made a big stink about something on page, say, 873, that sounded like the gov’t was taking over all the nursing homes. But a few pages earlier it was clear that it was some section about some pilot program that nursing homes could join if they wanted.

Lots of companies don’t provide coverage and aren’t going to. If they were going to be hit by $100/day fines for each person up to $500,000 a year we’d all know about it. If you think you’re reading that from the raw text, you probably aren’t.

Boonton, you need to check your facts again. I think you are getting information mixed, confusing Obamacare’s fine/tax with the HHS Mandate fine/tax. They are two very different things.

After trying to find the actual code itself (harder than I thought it would be), it does appear the HHS Contraceptive Mandate is most certainly, as reported by several organizations (Acton.org, LifeSitenews.com), $100/employee per day.

According to the Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute:

“1.(a) General rule
There is hereby imposed a tax on any failure of a group health plan to meet the requirements of chapter 100 (relating to group health plan requirements).
(b) Amount of tax
(1) In general
The amount of the tax imposed by subsection (a) on any failure shall be $100 for each day in the noncompliance period with respect to each individual to whom such failure relates.”

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/4980D

Reading the actual code, it appears to me that there is a $500,000 per year limit on the “excise tax” (let’s face it, it’s a fine, not a tax). Again, certainly an existential threat for many or most businesses.

There are groups on-line reporting the Mandate will cost $1.4 million for Hobby Lobby, and I don’t know how they’re arriving at that number. Perhaps the owners have incorporated in such a way that Hobby Lobby is composed of many businesses–not uncommon–and each subject to the $500,000 limit.

Consider charitable deductions on taxes. You give to the Salvation Army, I don’t. You’re paying less than I, I’m paying more. But are you doing more good than me? It’s unclear whose doing more. So if it turns out I am, am I persecuted because I can’t take advantage of that deduction? Perhaps my membership in the Ayn Rand Church of Individualism prohibits such donations.

I proposed a policy of limiting certain taxes to equal the magnitude of the problem the tax is designed to mitigate.

Not sure there’d be an easy way for a court to evaluate that but it wouldn’t be applicable to the health care law IMO given the $2K per employee or $600 under the mandate is less than the typical health insurance policy for a full year.

In this instance, I suspect you’re right. But as Artaban notes, there’s a larger principle here. Taxation is a potential threat to minorities, religious or otherwise. Jurisprudence involving both the Taxing Power and the Equal Protection Clause is thin.

But to charge MORE than appropriate to reflect the harm would be to tax a now-harmless religious observance. THAT seems inappropriate.

Creative but rather than empower judges to commission econometric studies to try to figure out the ‘cost’ I think this is best left to the democratic process….

Yet judged do rely on econometric studies when evaluating policies that dedicate private property for the public interest. They analyze how a property easement acquired through condemnation will influence the value of the remainder of the property. They analyze whether the rates a government authorizes a private utility to charge will provide a fair opportunity for the private firm to earn a reasonable return.

The 5th Amend. provides precedents. We just need some creativity here….

Not sure there’d be an easy way for a court to evaluate that but it wouldn’t be applicable to the health care law IMO given the $2K per employee or $600 under the mandate is less than the typical health insurance policy for a full year.

But to charge MORE than appropriate to reflect the harm would be to tax a now-harmless religious observance. THAT seems inappropriate.

Creative but rather than empower judges to commission econometric studies to try to figure out the ‘cost’ I think this is best left to the democratic process barring cases where the tax may be so absurdly high that it’s effectively trying to outlaw certain decisions.

Are there limits on Congress’s taxing powers? Courts have been cagey on this question…. [I]f we add the idea that people incur the tax due to religious compulsion, we may bolster the idea that the tax must be in proportion to the harm caused by the taxed conduct….

‘Incur a tax due to religious compulsion’? So if I’m guided to work intensely hard out of a Protestant work ethic I can claim an exemption from income tax’s higher brackets on the ground that the only reason I’m incurring it is my ‘religious compulsion’? Those advocating religious freedom here are advised to produce a way of expressing it that’s a bit better than “whenever someone waves their hand and says ‘it’s my religion’ they get their way!”

Agreed — which is why I didn’t propose such a policy. I proposed a policy of limiting certain taxes to equal the magnitude of the problem the tax is designed to mitigate.

Yes, most taxes are designed simply to finance government. But a Pigou/excise tax is designed to offset the harm of externalities arising from the taxed behavior. For example, we could charge a carbon tax to provide funds to finance mitigation measures required by global climate change. There are theoretical justifications for such taxes (and theoretical criticism), but the justifications rest on the idea that the tax is proportioned to the harm.

The ObamaCare tax, as a Pigou tax, should be calibrated to reflect the harm that arises when people fail to provide adequate health insurance. No, people with religious objections don’t get a free pass. But the cost of their pass is limited to the cost their objections impose on society. But to charge MORE than appropriate to reflect the harm would be to tax a now-harmless religious observance. THAT seems inappropriate.

Again you’re either the victim of biased reporting or are spreading misinformation. Just go to the State Dept website, it’s all there in black and white.

The Human Rights Reports go by year, you select a country and there’s subsections that cover various topics like speech, press, due process etc. Before 2011 religion was one of those many subsections. In 2011 the report says under religion to see the Religious Freedom Report. The Religious Freedom Report is set up exactly the same way except it’s devoted to religious freedom rather than making it one out of many freedom issues.

First you can’t claim religion was ‘purged’ from the Human Rights report. It’s not like they just deleted the section, they left the section and in it said to refer to another report.

Second, it’s biased to assert detail on religious freedom was taken out of the Human Rights report when you neglect to mention a new report totally devoted only to religious freedom.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/state-department-purges-religious-freedom-section-its-human-rights-reports

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/24/AR2010062405069.html

1. If you’re relating the story accurately, he sounds pretty stupid. Was he not aware inside the US embassy the United States has control but in the rest of the country it’s the Saudi gov’t?

2. Obama was elected in 2008 and was in office in 2010, when you say the report was issued.

3. On a fluke I went to the State Department’s website, looked up Saudi Arabia and found a whole section on their religious police, how all public displays of non-Muslim religion are forbidden, etc.

3.1 The 2011 Human rights Report purged neither Saudi Arabia or religious freedom. SA is right there on the State Dept. site with all types of criticisms for its abuses of human rights. Under religious freedom it directs the reader to the “International Religious Freedom Report for 2011″…which if you go to it is full of stuff on Saudi Arabia. Going to a few other countries I notice under religious freedom the reader is directed to the report dedicated to religious freedom for 2011.

Your claim that the Obama administration suddenly stopped talking about religious freedom either in general or in SA would appear to be either misinformed or deceptive.