Thursday, February 9, 2012

Don't make a federal case out of it!

But they did. You know all those state laws I have been babbling about? The ones that mandate employer-provided health insurance to include family planning? and that the Roman Catholic bishops have had to learn to live with? in spite of their howls of terror and despair at a new law mandating the same thing nationwide?
Bishops emerging from cave. From Inside the Hotdog Factory.
Turns out these laws are simply implementing a rule that has already been nationwide for 12 years: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos (quoting Mother Jones) reports that
In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn't provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today ...
What's new in the new law is the fact that there's no co-pay, since the Affordable Care Act requires preventive care to be dispensed free—oh, and that religious exemption that the more progressive state laws added, just because they wanted to be nice.

So what was it the bishops were upset about again? It was OK to have contraception as long as you shelled out the $25 a month? The religious exemption as it was just made them hungry for more? Didn't have anything to do with the Kenyan Muslim socialist Mau-Mau name on the bill, did it?

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