We the corporations and fetuses of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union -
Oops - they really didn't mean union, did they? We can't have them forming unions!
I have long felt that pretty soon, only corporations and fetuses will have any rights, and the Hobby Lobby ruling brings us closer to that rarefied state of being. And I'm not sure the consequences are all that unintended.
This started as something else entirely - something else to delay and make the ACA harder to pass. I do remember the fight to get contraception included as preventative care. And that's the point - it's not about contraception itself, it's about contraception without the patient bearing the cost. I would guess that most of the employers in this suit and the many others in queue for their day in court have been providing their employees with health insurance that covers contraception all along. After all, who has the time and energy to read all the lines in these damn policies? Most companies look at the bottom line, at what it will cost them.
Over the years before the ACA workers had been complaining that their employers had been changing insurers every year or two, often forcing them to change doctors, and generally covering less and costing more - for the workers.
And insurers have been getting away with charging more for women's policies just because they could.
But with new rules governing what insurers can and can't do to screw their insureds, there were lists that had to be drawn up making explicit what they absolutely had to cover, and how to prevent serious health problems that they could no longer avoid paying for. And we fought to get contraception included on the list.
Fighting about the list was another delaying tactic in the attempts to keep the ACA from actually becoming law. Not by insurers, but by Republicans who were determined to defeat Obama on everything, and especially to keep anything significant from passing during his administration.
But contraception hit so many buttons, it's amazing the whole thing didn't just short circuit the system and blackout everything.
So enter the "religious freedom for us and nobody else" folks, and the Supreme Court with its corporate personhood agenda, and this is the mess you've got.
I wonder what will happen when corporations claim their second amendment rights and arm to the teeth.