Julie DelegalNow that our collective blood pressure is returning to normal, feminists need to revisit the Hobby Lobby decision with more objectivity. In a nutshell, ladies, we’ve been duped.
For those readers who’ve been living under a rock, the U.S. Supreme Court voted last week, 5-4, to do two things: First, they invented a new right for for-profit businesses — to freely exercise their corporate religion; second, they said that this new right was more important than patients’ rights to medical privacy.
The result? Family-owned companies don’t have to abide by the contraceptive provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act. The court held that two companies, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, were protected by federal free-exercise statutes, as individuals would be. The majority then weighed those religious rights against the government’s interest in providing easy access to birth control. In doing so, the court skirted a central issue. But then, so did the government. And so has the media.
Here’s what we all missed: Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, in providing a benefits package that included birth control, aren’t actually paying for birth control per se. They’re paying for a worker’s labor. They’re paying employees with insurance benefits. How the employees spend that benefit is their business, in the same manner as how they spend their paychecks.
Companies (and governments) pay their employees benefits to attract workers. Employers extend insurance coverage as part of compensation. Insurers respond by lowering costs for large groups of insured employees, which in turn, makes it easier for companies to keep offering insurance benefits.
The Affordable Health Care Act, in effect, merely standardizes the “currency” of those benefits packages. The government’s standardization of meaningful insurance coverage — made meaningful by coverage of preventive care, including birth control — is no more intrusive to businesses than laws about overtime. Overtime laws require, for certain types of jobs, that workers be compensated more for work performed over and above the 40-hour workweek.
Yes, the employer and the insurer have to work together. But the relationship between corporations and health insurance companies shouldn’t be held any higher than the relationship between corporations and their workers’ banks. The employer’s interest ends with the disbursement. Once Hobby Lobby or Publix or Baptist Hospital disburses a direct-deposit paycheck in an employee’s bank account, it has no say about what an employee may spend his or her money on.
Hobby Lobby can’t object to its employees contributing to Planned Parenthood, for example, because we know that in the United States, spending money can be equated to free speech. Publix can’t fire an employee for shopping at Winn Dixie, largely for the same reason. Baptist Hospital can’t object to its nurses’ spending their paychecks on alcoholic beverages, no matter how unhealthy the hospital deems the act to be.
Similarly, once a business makes a disbursement to an insurance carrier, it relinquishes all rights to interfere with how an employee “spends” those benefits under the plan. Paying insurance premiums is an act of compensation for work done. Once the payment is made, the benefit belongs to the worker, not the company. And it’s the worker, in consultation with his or her medical providers, who gets to decide how to “spend” that compensation.
Birth control and reproductive rights are hot-button issues. In the midst of our charged emotional responses, we allowed employers to assert themselves where they don’t belong – in our doctors’ offices.
We bought the implicit, paternalistic argument that insurance benefits are a “gift.” The truth is, those benefits are payment for work done.
Ladies — and I include the three on the Supreme Court — we’ve all been duped.
Julie Delegal, a University of Florida alumna, is a contributor for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville’s alternative weekly, and writes for the family business, Delegal Law Offices. She lives in Jacksonville. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
