Arguments in front of the Supreme Court start next week in the Hobby Lobby case. Hobby Lobby is suing for a religious exemption from the Department of Health and Human Services mandate requiring that employer-provided health insurance cover contraception. Most of the coverage of the case has focused on Hobby Lobby’s objection to the contraception itself and how, if the business prevails, its employees will have to pay out of pocket for things like birth control pills or IUDs. But, as Tara Culp-Ressler at ThinkProgress explained on Wednesday, Hobby Lobby and their co-plaintiff, Conestoga Wood Specialties, are also objecting to insurance plans covering “related education and counseling” for contraception. In other words, these for-profit businesses aren’t just asking their female employees to pay for their own contraception, even though they are already paying for their own contraception by paying for their insurance coverage. These companies want to elbow their way into doctor’s offices and call the shots on what doctors can and cannot say to Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood employees.
“Essentially, if Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood are successful, they’ll win the right to refuse to extend coverage for doctor’s visits that include discussion about certain forms of contraception, like IUDs or the morning after pill,” Culp-Ressler writes. That would probably be something insurance companies could deal with if there was such thing as a specialized doctor’s appointment to only discuss contraception. In the real world, however, most women receive their contraception counseling at general gynecological appointments or annual checkups. You go in, get your blood taken, get a Pap smear, get your breasts squeezed, and then your doctor asks what you use for contraception, and you walk out with a prescription in hand. If Hobby Lobby has its way, by merely acknowledging the birth control pill during that appointment, your doctor would render your entire visit ineligible for coverage by your health care plan.
Crazy sex-hating wingnut assholes
I guess it all makes sense. If you’re such a non-person that you have no medical autonomy, why should you have any doctor – patient confidentiality? Why shouldn’t everybody know every last detail of what you discussed?
It was pretty clear we’d end up here after the law accommodated bishops’ fee-fees and trampled women’s civil rights.