TA1LGUNN3R wrote:mets wrote:Food is not something that businesses are required to supply to their employees, nor is it medical service that insurance companies could cover for, so this is an irrelevant argument.
So your only problem is that it currently is not law to provide food (commissary) to employees? Would you not be averse to such a hypothetical mandate?
I would be averse to such a hypothetical mandate. Employers pay their employees salaries so that the employees can choose what to do with the money they receive. Since you're obviously about to point out that employers should not have to pay for their employees' insurance either -- fine. I agree. This discussion is about how it has to work if the mandate exists, not whether it should exist.
Also irrelevant arguments. Sex (along with race, nationality, etc.) is a clearly defined category by which it is commonly agreed by society that discrimination violates the idea of equal protection under the law.
So by then making mandates which observes one of these protected statuses, how is that not discrimination? By mandating that contraceptives are a positive right for women but not for men, for whatever reason, it becomes discriminatory.
It is a classical precedent in the U.S. that the equal protection clause is concerned with equal opportunity,
not with equal outcomes. That is, equal protection under the law is not about everyone receiving the same treatment; it's about guaranteeing that no one affected by the law is left behind relative to others. Affirmative action is the obvious example of how this plays out in practice. Affirmative action would be explicitly unconstitutional if we interpreted the equal protection clause as saying that everyone is literally treated the same way under the law. Instead, affirmative action guarantees that black people can gain extra probability of succeeding (say, at getting into college) to compensate for the racial bias that would normally give them less opportunity (in this case, we can think of it as probability) to get into college.
The same reasoning applies to this situation. If we guarantee some service to everyone in the US (in this case, health insurance), but the end result is that men effectively get a better deal simply because they are men, then we have violated the idea of equal opportunity. Without the contraceptive mandate for women, the outcome is the same under the law, but the resulting economic opportunities for women are diminished relative to men, because they have to spend a larger portion of their income on healthcare relative to men. (And it should be obvious that men absolutely get a better deal if no one gets contraceptives covered. Men can't get pregnant and they aren't at risk for ovarian cancer, both things that birth control lessens the risk of.)
mets wrote:OK. While you go and solve the greatest scam of the last century, the rest of us will talk about practical issues.
OK. I can't imagine much that is more practical than ensuring that this country's medical system doesn't balloon and collapse, causing pain, suffering, and debt within the next few generations.
Are you actually ensuring it, or are you just talking about it? The whole discussion of insurance is a red herring in this debate. Yes, it's an important issue to discuss, but until it's solved, we have to work within the system we're in. And as long as you sidestep the issue by saying "well, we should just solve the whole thing all at once," then women will continue to be treated unequally by the current law, hurting them continuously until we've come up with a better healthcare system.
