A First Amendment, Religion versus Health Care Battle under Circumstances Where More Sensible Institutions Would Have Created No Conflict at All — Our Baboon-Like Inability to See Things as They Actually Are and Fix Them

© 2012 Peter Free

 

02 March 2012

 

 

“Can’t find our way out of a paper bag”

 

Like human baboons, we busily and mouthily motor around doing incredibly stupid things, without taking a step back to ask ourselves whether there is not a better way.

 

For example, this week the American public was treated to the intensely politicized emotional furor caused by the “Blunt Amendment” (to a transportation bill) in the United States Senate.

 

The Amendment would have allowed employers to deny health insurance coverage for specifics that they objected to on “religious and moral” grounds.  Predictably, the controversy instantly focused on the pros and cons of contraception, particularly for women.

 

The amendment narrowly failed passage by a 51-48 vote, split almost exactly along political party lines.

 

In the maelstrom of back-and-forth shouting, virtually everyone lost sight of the fact that the battle was occasioned by the institutional illogic of the United States’ employer-based health insurance system.

 

Not one prominent leader pointed to the fact that the First Amendment entered the picture only and exclusively due to the artificial juxtaposition of the employer’s religious convictions and his/her/its employees’ health care interests that has been created by our silly way of providing health insurance.

 

The Blunt Amendment was, therefore, not a bona fide Constitutional issue at all.

 

It became one simply because our culture has been too oblivious to see that employer-based health insurance creates more political and economic problems than it solves.

 

Like constipation absent a laxative, employer-based health insurance and all the trouble it causes stays with us.

 

 

“Take a step back, and think about it”

 

History certainly has its inertia.

 

But, even though one can easily look backward in time and see why employer-based health insurance evolved in America, it is difficult to see why we should continue it.  Especially, given the economic (and sometimes moral) burden it inequitably places on businesses of all sizes.

 

Particularly galling (at least for people with working brains) is the unthinking cultural stupidity — which controversies like the Blunt Amendment reveal — regarding our almost consciously-chosen inability to see the forest for the trees.

 

Why would anyone of sane mind begin a system that makes health care dependent on the whims and financial ability of the employer?

 

Why should the “National Economic Security Interest” overlook the obvious problem posed by:

 

(a) indulging the moral whims of employers,

 

(b) even though those inclinations compete with the fact that everyone, of all faiths, needs a job —

 

in an economy where employment is often hard to find and, even more frequently, difficult to mold to one’s personal tastes?

 

If it were possible to homogeneously connect like-minded employers and job-seekers, all would be well.  The employer and his/her/its employees would share identical moral convictions.

 

But, historically, that has not been true.  Given the economy’s complexity, and the inequitable way jobs are distributed, employees only very rarely have the luxury of pairing up with completely like-minded employers.

 

This means that moral and religious conflicts between the employed and their bosses are inevitable.

 

A sane health insurance system would recognize this disparity at the outset.  It would not institutionalize a structure in which competing First Amendment rights have to conflict.  It would not oppose employers’ religious principles against employees’ equally important interest in self-selected access to the widest range of insurance-provided health care.

 

A rational health insurance mechanism would avoid creating unnecessary conflicts between people’s competing First Amendment rights.

 

 

Yet — creating unnecessary Constitutional conflicts is exactly what our existing health insurance system does — and virtually no one talks about it

 

During the Blunt Amendment battle, not one leader pointed to the obvious flaw in the way we provide health insurance coverage.

 

Allegedly competent minds did not recognize that the whole shebang was simply hot air expended in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons.

 

 

The moral? — With leaders like we have, the toilet drain is where we’re headed

 

When you can’t see the forest, you’re going to bang your head into a whole lot of trees.  With what we know about traumatic brain injury, that means bad things about America’s future.

 

I am not at all sure that this metaphor is so forced as to be inaccurate.

 

One of the problems with providing argumentative fools with Silliness Fodder is that they will use it to stir up all kinds of unnecessary trouble.  That’s Congress and the Executive Branch in a nutshell.

 

The sad thing is that sanely constructive people, like Senator Olympia Snowe, finally wash their hands of the Clan of Baboons — and leaves the Congressional Congregation of Stupids even dumber than it already, abysmally, is.