Hobby Lobby mischaracterized several contraception drugs as abortion drugs and said they will not allow their insurance company to cover the acquisition of these drugs by their employees. The management claims this would violate their religious beliefs against abortion.
Medical experts have said that the drugs and devices in question are not abortion drugs, since they work to prevent pregnancy, not to kill embryos. These, and other contraceptives are often used, not as birth control, but as treatment modalities to overcome serious health issues. But as is so often true with religious/political extremists, these facts are ignored by Hobby Lobby owners.
So now we have a case decided by the Supremes in favor of Hobby Lobby owners that gives preference to their factually-ignorant beliefs over the health and welfare of their employees. What is frightening to me, in that it displays the scientific ignorance of so many people, is that there is widespread support for this denial of employees' right to proper medical care via commonly-accepted (until now) health insurance coverage.
This was not a narrow ruling, as some of the Supremes would have you believe. Soon we will see many other companies demanding to exclude necessary medical treatments, such as blood transfusions, and the like, from insurance coverage because of some ill-informed religious beliefs of corporate owners.
The Supremes indicate that the federal government could cover these employees' insured costs of contraception. Imagine that. A group of conservatives calling for what amounts to single-payer healthcare! This idiotic, factually-challenged ruling is yet more proof that health care should be removed from corporate hands and placed in consumers' control by way of a universal healthcare system.
Meanwhile, we have a Supremes ruling that the Taliban would surely endorse.
