Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Your pay is structured in whatever way your employer decides and you agree to that when you accept your job. Your employer may in fact pay for your car and he may choose to take that away and pay you money. He may give you a car because it benefits the employer while giving you an equal compensation to take-home pay. There are many decisions in how compensation is structured and great differences in benefits to the employer and employee based on how they do it.
Adding an additional benefit to your health plan is going to raise rates to your employer's plan. Unless that employer then cuts your pay, he is paying more.
No matter how you do the accounting though it is compensation. It's just done in certain ways for tax purposes. There is still an amount that a company is paying for an employee. A company paying a $1 to my salary is no different than paying a $1 to a medical plan(besides some tax accounting stuff).
That's why I think it is disingenuous to say that an employer is "paying for" my health care benefits. No, they provide me health benefits in exchange for work performed just like they provide me a check for work performed. They aren't being charitable by paying for my birth control.
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Why not? Because they can't go to your doctor and prevent them from treating you.
No, you can just make it a lot harder by making sure insurance doesn't cover it.
It still goes back to if the government can require health insurance. I agree that may not survive the courts, but if it does, then denying coverage because your God hates birth control violates the separation of church and state by using church thoughts to make policy. Now, as I said, if an employer can get a waiver for any type of coverage then it's different, but then the whole thing is useless anyways.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama learned the Supreme Court upheld his signature health care plan Thursday morning about the same time as the nation, watching a television outside the Oval Office — split into four screens, all on cable channels.
Some of the earliest on-the-fly reporting about the 193-page decision had it that the court struck down the individual mandate — the linchpin to making the massive law work. But in short order White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler walked into his office and told Obama his law — derisively call “Obamacare” by critics — was valid on a 5-4 vote.
The ruling settled the legality of the hotly-contested, controversial law that will be a major part of Obama’s domestic policy legacy, whether he is re-elected in November or not.
The decision on the Affordable Care Act hands the president an election year victory in rejecting arguments that Congress did not have the power to order most people to have health insurance or pay a penalty — which five justices found to be a permissible tax.
While legal issues are settled, political wars over Obamacare will still be waged, especially with the election so close. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Washington said in reaction to the ruling, “What the court did today was say that ‘Obamacare’ does not violate the Constitution. What they did not do was say that ‘Obamacare’ is good law or that it’s good policy. ‘Obamacare’ was bad policy yesterday. It’s bad policy today.”
After the ruling, Obama said it “reaffirmed a fundamental principle: that here in America, in the wealthiest nation on earth, no illness or accident should lead to any family’s financial ruin.
“I know there will be a lot of discussion today about the politics of all this, about who won and who lost. That’s how these things tend to be viewed here in Washington.
“But that discussion completely misses the point. Whatever the politics, today’s decision was a victory for people all over this country, whose lives will be more secure because of this law and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold it.”
The mandate ruling
In a surprise move, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal wing, providing the critical swing vote in the ruling and authoring the opinion.
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