Focus on fact, not fantasy

Letter-writer Doug Smith (“27th-Century thinking (BC, that is),” The Telegram, July 5) is free to disagree with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Hobby Lobby case, but he should confine his disagreement to the actual decision, not the feminist fantasy one.

Hobby Lobby (which pays its employees twice the minimum wage) provided 16 kinds of contraception coverage before there was an Obamacare mandate, and happily continued to do so afterwards.

But Obamacare made it compulsory for the employer to provide an additional four kinds to which the family owned company had moral objections.

The court made a very narrow ruling, applicable only to this type of small family company, in favour of the owners’ freedom not to violate their religious consciences. Employees are free to obtain these four contraceptives from other sources, at little or no expense.

Smith completely misrepresents the substance of the ruling.

But the real question here is, should government be able to dictate to employers and privately owned insurance businesses what kind of health coverage policies they should offer?

This is akin to government dictating what kinds of foods a grocery store can sell.

As long as health insurance is a private-enterprise commodity, the companies should be free to decide what products they want to sell.

Americans have repeatedly rejected the adoption of Canadian-style, single-payer health care, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempt to mandate what they don’t want, while driving private insurance out of business, is in the process of imploding. Claudia Brown Burin