One of the advantages of hyperlinks is that you can so easily find out where some bizarre idea started. For example, in a discussion of
Idaho's proposed mandatory ultrasound bill,
the screaming lefties are talking about:
Arizona is currently trying to pass a law that will allow employers to fire women who are using birth control. Wouldn't surprise me if Idaho is next.
http://crooksandliars.com/susi...
When you go to
that link, you find someone telling you this, and the
next link down makes the same claim. But then you get to the newspaper coverage of the bill, and it's not
quite what the previous reports indicate:
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 Monday to endorse a controversial bill that would allow Arizona employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for contraceptives based on religious objections.
Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”
This might qualify as a bit intrusive of a law, but then again, it's an attempt at making an end-run around Obama's intrusive contraception mandate. And it is
not a bill to allow employers to fire women who are using birth control.
The Arizona bill ended up all over my facebook news feed, so I looked up the story. It's bullshit. Actually, the story is probably worse than that, as BS has been usefully defined by a philosopher as "statements made with no consideration of their truth value" - I think the story as presented on Jezebel.com is actually intentionally distorted.
ReplyDeleteThe bill would allow all employers, not just religiously-affiliated ones, refuse to pay for contraception coverage in their health plans. Arizona would become only the third (I think) state which allows that of all employers.
Anyone who is modestly familiar with health-care law knows that your employer is not allowed to ask *how* you're using your health coverage, so the premise of the Jezebel article, and the original "State Press" (ASU paper) is false. The State Press article states would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment. This is false, and if the student writing the article had actually learned how to do journalism, she would have found this out before writing such crap.