Birth Control for Liberty? Part II

Posted by Stone January 22, 2013 1 Comment 96 views

Welcome back to my posts on the healthcare reform Law and liberty. As I promised Cathy in my comment to her response article last week, this post will be dedicated solely to the religious infringement issue. The Cato institute and Cathy agree that the healthcare reform law violated religious freedom, but I have to disagree.

Firstly, Churches, mosques, et cetera are exempt from providing this coverage. Makes sense. But what about hospitals, colleges, and so on? My response to that is this: a religious institution can reasonably expect all employees to share in the establishment’s religious beliefs; an “employer” in a church would appropriately assume that his/her “employees” subscribe to the same beliefs. However, a college or hospital cannot make that same assumption. Certainly Notre Dame college, for example, has a huge number of employees (staff and faculty) as well as students that aren’t Catholic, as their course offerings reach well beyond clergy path and they are not a single-sex men’s institution.

It’s also important to note that available birth control dramatically reduces the number of abortions and children born out of wedlock to teens, so that’s a win for most religious groups. But should employers be forced to pay for insurance that covers birth control if they’re personally opposed to it on religious grounds?

Well…yes. All insurance must now cover birth control provided the insurance is not self-sourced from a religious institution. Employer-paid benefits are part of a worker’s compensation, and therefore, assuming a worker has opted-in to a plan (which commonly includes an automatic deduction from their payroll), an employer is not entitled to tell his or her employee how she or he may “spend” his/her “wage” on any grounds, much less religious ones. The company is paying the insurance, not the private employer; the funds for the plan come from the company account and the employee’s payroll, not the personal account of the business owner.

Further, since the insurance company is actually “footing the bill” for the birth control and not the employer anyway, how the employee uses her health insurance is frankly none of the employers business. Insurance plans cover the cost of blood transfusions, but it is much less common to defend the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses to deny that coverage to their employees due to their personal religious restrictions. An employer has no more right to refuse an employee insurance that covers birth control should they want to use it any more than they have the right to demand a worker’s bank statements to prove they’re not using their check to buy alcohol, cigarettes, or pornography (Since most companies employ their workers at-will, they technically do have this legal right, but again I stress that a legal right is not necessarily consistent with liberty and freedom and I would hazard a bet that a case over wrongful termination due to failure to release bank records/termination over bank records would almost certainly be ruled in favor of the employee).

I lean on the side of “individual liberty” over “corporate liberty” in this case; that is, I believe that the individual employee’s rights should be held in higher regard than that of an entity. An individual employer has a right to not use birth control and to vote for political representation that is more aligned with his or her views. To use his/her power in his/her corporation as a means to exert religious will over employees may be legal, but it certainly isn’t right.

About Stone

Stone (not a pseudonym) considers herself to be a bit bookish (and doesn’t consider than in insult). Stone enjoys comics (her thesis was on Batman), sewing, working on stained glass windows, and writing. Stone is particularly interested in how Liberty thinking was applied differently in the American and French Revolutions; she is a student of History with a specialty in Enlightenment Era Thought and Revolutions, obtaining her Bachelor’s Degree in History in 2009 from Agnes Scott College.

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This argument is incredibly problematic for a few reasons:

1. An arbitrary distinction between corporate and personal liberty. If I start a business and employ more than (I think it’s 20 or 25 people), I have to provide them health insurance. If I don’t believe in birth control, and I have to provide them with not just insurance but a *specific kind* of insurance that means I have to purchase birth control even though I don’t believe it. Why does the fact that I own a company make me not worthy of those rights?

2. The individual mandate requires all individuals to buy insurance if they are not covered under employer insurance, they have to purchase it or pay a tax. How is that not a violation of individual liberty? I don’t see how it could not be.

3.This statement:

” But should employers be forced to pay for insurance that covers birth control if they’re personally opposed to it on religious grounds? Well…yes. All insurance must now cover birth control provided the insurance is not self-sourced from a religious institution.”

Is circular. Your statement here is that religious institutions should be forced to provide birth control because the law says so in an argument that’s attempting to show that forcing religious institutions to buy birth control is not a violation of liberty. Appealing to the law to support your argument does not work here at all.

4. You go on to say:

“Employer-paid benefits are part of a worker’s compensation, and therefore, assuming a worker has opted-in to a plan (which commonly includes an automatic deduction from their payroll), an employer is not entitled to tell his or her employee how she or he may “spend” his/her “wage” on any grounds, much less religious ones.”

Actually, there are lots of different ways an employer can provide health insurance. An employer can give their employees the option of using their group-purchased health plan, which has the potential benefit of being cheaper and avoiding the hassle of having to shop around for insurance. When the option is presented, that is when there is an automatic deduction in their pay. They’ve essentially just had a middle man do their shopping for them. However, the employee then *makes the choice* to accept the plan provided, and your argument fails. They have then chosen that plan, and, thus, the package that comes with it. They also have the option of providing their own. They have made the purchase choice, so your argument just doesn’t work in this case.

An employer may choose to provide their employees with insurance *in addition* to their wages as well. At this juncture, then, does the employee really have a say in what their company buys them? I believe most of the time they can opt out or purchase insurance in addition to what their employer provides them, but in the case of the employer providing insurance on top of a salary or wage, it is NOT the case that the employer is “choosing how the employee spends their money.” The employer is then choosing how to spend ITS money, and it certainly has the right to do so.

Finally, with the instance of a governmental mandate, I do not think it is fair at that juncture to say that insurance is then a part of an employee’s compensation. If a company is just complying with the mandate, then they’re not adding onto compensation. They’re complying with a government mandate.

And one last point:

5. You draw a distinction between mosques and institutions like Catholic universities. I argue that this distinction is specious and dangerous. Religious institutions extend far beyond the church and always have. Secular people have taken their services gladly, as they are often quite good. However, there is always the understanding that *you are taking part in a religious institution*. Notre Dame doesn’t hide the fact that it’s Catholic. Everyone who works there or goes to school there knows that. This is a part of religious pluralism and diversity. As long as you’re clear about what the institution is and isn’t, you should be allowed to make your own rules. That’s the *nature* of freedom of association. To tell Notre Dame that it can be a school but not Catholic flies in the face of the tradition of American pluralism and the First Amendment. If someone feels that their insurance should provide birth control, and they know that Catholic institutions do not do that, they can and should find another job that better suits their needs, or purchase a separate plan that does include birth control.

Yes, birth control is important. The freedom to purchase what you need for yourself is important. But some values, like freedom of religion, association, and being able to participate or not participate in any market you want are more important than birth control.