Supreme Court Women Raise Questions on Contraception Coverage

◼ Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Ginsburg aggressively questioned the corporate challengers who want exemptions from providing contraception under Obamacare at Tuesday's oral arguments. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties say the measure violates their religious freedoms - TIME (Image source/Nikki Kahn—The Washington Post/Getty Images)

The three women of the Supreme Court dominated questioning at the beginning of Tuesday’s oral arguments in a case pitting religious business owners against the new health care reform law’s mandate that employer-provided insurance cover contraceptive care.

The court case will determine whether Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft store chain, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet company, can be exempted from providing contraception coverage to female employees through federally mandated health insurance policies.

Supreme Court proceedings make for notoriously difficult and unreliable predictors of how justices might rule on a case. That said, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasted no time in pressing the corporate challengers...

DON'T LIKE IT, PAY THE TAX...
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Related, via Hot Air Quotes of the Day:

“One religious group could opt out of this and one religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform,” Kagan warned. “Religious objectors would come out of the woodwork.”

In other words, kind of like the Amish, or Congress:

Along with eschewing cars and many other modern technologies, the descendants of 18th-Century German immigrants who practice the Amish and Old Order Mennonite religions, have effectively opted out of Obamacare, along with most federal safety net programs.
A little-known provision of the law with its roots in a 1950s battle over Social Security exempts these communities from the individual mandate, an element of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance in some form.

I guess Kagan’s point is to warn that our Balkanized system could get kinda fragmented, or something. WHY ARE WE PAYING THIS IDIOT?

◼ Supreme Court Women Come Out Swinging - CNS
Abortion fight haunts Obamacare...
◼ Health law penalizes 'wrong' insurance 18 times more than no insurance

Would President Obama prefer that you have health insurance of which he doesn’t approve, or no health insurance at all? Well, based on the penalties in play under his signature legislation, it would appear that he prefers for you to have no insurance at all than to have the “wrong” insurance (as defined, of course, by his administration).

As those who have been following the Hobby Lobby case—argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday—know, under Obamacare, the “wrong” kind of insurance includes policies that don’t provide “free” coverage of, among other things, the abortion drug ella, contraception, and sterilization (but only sterilization for women). (Coverage of cancer or heart disease—apparently being less essential—need not be “free.”)

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