Great article on the Hobby Lobby case and broader ACA implications

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In the wake of the Hobby Lobby case, suddenly liberals are wising up to the fact that it’s kind of stupid to have your health insurance tied to your employer who may — get this — have a whole different set of financial incentives and values than you yourself have. That’s not just obvious — it’s John McCain obvious. I myself like Sarah Palin, but I know how you guys feel about her, so sit down for a minute and quietly chew over the fact that the guy who put Sarah Palin on the 2008 Republican ticket figured out that employer-based health insurance was a bad idea a long time before it started dawning on you guys.

And even though it’s slightly salt-in-the-wound for me to point it out, we have employer-based health insurance because of you geniuses. Like a great deal of what’s wrong with American public policy, this largely goes back to the 1930s, the New Deal, and FDR’s update of Wilson’s “war socialism.” Short version: The federal government enacted wage controls, but employers still had to compete over the best employees, so they figured out ways to pay them that would get around the wage controls, and what they came up with was what used to be known as the “fringe benefit,” which today mainly takes the form of health insurance. You guys kind of liked this; “corporation” had not yet become a synonym for “villain” in the progressive vocabulary, and Italian-style corporatism was very much in fashion among progressives, even after Benito Mussolini had gone out of style. Using the private sector to implement public policy must have seemed like a stroke of genius — the welfare state was still a pretty hard sell in 1935.

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Tri-Sprintec birth-control pills run about $12 a month — cash, no insurance. More expensive pills such as Ocella start around $40 — or about half the typical cable bill, and, so far, we haven’t needed a national mandate or a trillion-dollar subsidy for people to see Duck Dynasty and The Biggest Loser. Progressives mad about Hobby Lobby started a campaign under the motto: “Not my boss’s business.” But Obamacare makes it — pardon me for noticing — literally your boss’s business. And I don’t mean “literally” the way Joe Biden uses it; I mean “literally” the way literally literate people use it. The alternative is this: Your money, your pills, your call. If what you care about is access to contraception, then that’s a pretty good model. If what you care about is using the levers of the state to force moral uniformity on the entire country so that atavistic Evangelical types have to knuckle under to your demands — well, you lost.

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