With stinging rebuke pouring in, President Obama has now revised his mandate (from his Marxist Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathy Sibelius) that Catholic institutions must provide health care coverage to their employers that covers birth control and abortion-related drugs. Now he says that the Catholic entities won't have to pay for it; rather the insurance companies will provide it free of charge.
This is a transpartent case of changing the lipstick on the pig.
First of all, the Catholic entity is still buying the coverage from the company. In a moral sense, it is still implicated in something that goes against the Church's values. That is something that Obama and Sibelius wouldn't know about-or even care about. The fact is that this is of concern to all faiths, most of which have similar views on the issue as the Catholics.
Secondly, now the government is telling insurance companies that, in certain cases, they must provide part of their coverage free. What right does our government have to do this, I ask.
What if the government started telling McDonalds that they had to offer cheeseburgers for the same price as hamburgers? Or that the fries had to be free?
Creeping Marxism.
Sibelius sounds like a marxist to me! But we already knew that Obama was and currently is, "A Socialist" as Stanley Kurtz puts it. Here is what "Judicial Watch" had t say about Kathy, the Marxist:
ReplyDelete"Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: What did Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius discuss during all of those secret Obamacare meetings she held with Vice President Biden and Big Labor leaders? Obamacare waivers would be an excellent guess.
In September 2011, HHS announced an arbitrary cut-off to waiver applications, which had skyrocketed to 1,472 unions and companies seeking to get out from underneath the Obama administration’s healthcare overhaul. At the time of the cut-off, approximately 50% of the waivers granted covered employees of unions, even though union workers represent about 12% of the total workforce!
From the beginning, HHS has kept these waivers shrouded in secrecy. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against HHS on December 30, 2010, and yet the agency refuses to explain to the American people how decisions were made regarding which organizations received or did not receive a waiver.
While HHS was disproportionately doling out waivers to unions, JW also obtained documents from HHS that provide new details on a massive, taxpayer-funded, multimedia campaign designed to promote Obamacare. The total cost of this campaign, which notably targets Obama’s electoral coalition, could reach as much as $200 million over the next five years.
And this is how HHS describes the key to success for this campaign: “Health and program-related messages are processed by the target audience according to a particular reality, which he or she experiences. Attitudes, feelings, values, needs, desires, behaviors and beliefs all play a part in the individual’s decision to accept information and make a behavioral change.” In other words, the Obama administration is paying hired guns a lot of your money to manipulate American taxpayers into “accepting” the Obama way and “changing” their behavior.
This is certainly what HHS was trying to do with a series of three Medicare television advertisements featuring actor Andy Griffith. As Judicial Watch uncovered through FOIA, the Obama administration spent $3,184,000 in taxpayer funds to produce and air the advertisements on national television in September and October 2010. According to FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, the advertisements intentionally misinformed the American people.
And then there’s healthcare rationing. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS), which is under the auspices of HHS, proposed that Provenge, a Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for prostate cancer, be placed under a controversial “review.” After enormous public scrutiny, CMS relented and recommended the potentially lifesaving drug be covered by insurance. According to a Judicial Watch investigation, while the Obama administration claimed the cost of Provenge had nothing to do with their review process, records obtained by JW suggest otherwise. (Medicare, the FDA, and private companies are legally prohibited from denying approval of a medical treatment based solely on cost.)
And then there is Sebelius’s war on the Catholic Church and other “conservative” religious organizations. Sebelius’s HHS has written Obamacare regulations to punish long-held religious views that don’t comport with liberal ideology and would force hundreds of religious institutions to drop insurance coverage or risk running afoul of Sebelius’s pro-abortion Obamacare regulatory scheme.
The constitutionality of Obamacare may ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But in the meantime, Kathleen Sebelius has turned HHS into a political machine, using underhanded tactics to stack the deck in favor of Obamacare, while greasing Big Labor and other Obama political campaign allies."
Squid
The only Marxism going on here is the performance of the Catholic bishops, who are performing an act worthy of Groucho.
ReplyDeleteYou would logically have some sympathy with the bishops, because you don't believe employers should be under any mandate whatsoever to provide medical coverage to their employees.
If employers had no mandate, then this controversy would of course go away.
But, as long as there is such a mandate, this is a broadly applicable law, which nobody is entitled to be exempt from merely because the mandate conflicts with their religion.
What if an employer who was a Jehovah's Witness said his employees could not have blood transfusions covered?
This is not about freedom of religion. It is about the totalitarianism of employers making decisions for employees, and bishops claiming the right to dictate to some of those employers what they may offer employees.
President Obama stood firm on the substance of the mandate, which shows he is a man of principle, unlike the people who run the Komen Foundation. What he offered allows Roman Catholic institutions the consolation that they are not directly paying a cost, which doesn't really console them, but too bad, that's as much consideration as they are entitled to.
There is no Catholic Mandate. There is a general mandate for all employers. Catholics do not get an exemption. This is like, Muslims do not get to kill their daughters on the grounds that they should have a religious exemption from the homicide laws.
Why should employers have to provide this free of charge? Now there we have a whole separate question. First, to talk about "free" health care is a delusion -- on that we can all agree, you, me, Miggie, Findalis. It all has to be paid for.
What this regulation does is mandate there will be no co-pay or share of cost. But that means, the premiums have to cover the cost. Even non-profit plans are not in business to LOSE money. Anything not covered by premiums must be subsidized by taxpayers. For those below a certain income level, I think that is appropriate, but of course we can't do it for everyone. We'd all be taking in each other's laundry, so to speak.
Actually, I favor modest co=pays on just about everything. It is a good way to remind people that, yes, you are covered, but it all costs money, and if you're not willing to shell out $10, you probably don't need to see a doctor badly enough to ask the insurance risk pool to shell out $100.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteThe only thing an employers owes an employee is an honstt days wage for an honest days work. He does not owe you medical insurance thaqt pays for something he abhors. You are too embued with the union mentality. This is an abuse of power and an assault on religion.
Your ilk has always called everything unions demanded an "abuse of power." IF you had your way, wage laborers would all be living in shacks and slums and half their kids would be dying of cholera before reaching the age of 18.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of employer-paid medical insurance arose from two facts: working stiffs couldn't afford medical care, and employers were paying them far less than an honest day's wage. Ergo, along with an inadequate but overdue wage increase, get a health and welfare fund also.
But you are straying off topic. One issue is, should a church have an exemption from a generally applicable law? The answer in all American jurisprudence is "no."
The second issue is, should medical insurance be financed by employers? There are better ways. We could discuss what some of them are, once this petty squabble blows over.
P.S. "Judicial Watch" is commenting on what the Department of Health is doing?
ReplyDeleteNext the American Medical Association will be vetting candidates for the United States Supreme Court.