Plus, this isn't new. Insurance companies/employers have been required to provide coverage for bc since 2000 (ish - going on the article linked yesterday). The current change expands who is required (companies under 15 folks...) and adds the no-copay.

None of this shoves the bc down anyone's throats. It is an available option. Just like Viagra is an available option. Geeeeeeesh.

All your facts and reasoned arguments are a distraction! Obama has started a war on Christians! Which Santorum says will end up with Christians being guillotined!

(He really said that. It's some dog-whistle thing about the book of Revelations.)

Why can't people understand that enterprise-level content management systems don't come with out of the box solutions that anyone's ever satisfied with? How can people be so simultaneously sure that they're special flowers and that someone has solved this *precise* problem before in an entirely portable and externally supportable way. You can't have both ways. You can't decide that publishing means exactly *this* to you, and expect random (not overly expensive) application to have intuited that before you even came along. Not in content management. Not even in most business process automation I've encountered on a platform where you insist on defining precisely what "staging" and "production" mean to you.

Do you really want to use someone else's definition? Do you really think you could even satisfy two different departments in your one company with one definition, much less an industry-neutral application having already come up with your precise definition?

t /way-too-specific rant

Everyone wants their application to have one line of code and one button.

The line of code is "no bugs"

The button is "do what I'm thinking"

Would Catholic hospitals and such possible say "Fuck you then, we won't offer insurance"? I mean, that'd cause a lot of employees to up and quit, but...

I don't understand the compromise. Basically, Catholic Institution can tell its female employees "Although we are providing you with insurance, we do not cover contraception," but then the exact same insurance *will* provide contraception? How is it not covered, then?

Can someone re-word it for me? Because I honestly don't understand it.

It just puts the costs onto the insurance company, rather than the employer?

ION, I bought a tiny suitcase the other weekend, and it is just barely big enough for a wintertime long weekend trip, which actually makes it perfect, I think -- it will be great for a work overnight, which is half of what I was thinking about. But I can only bring the shoes I'm wearing today.

I don't understand the compromise. Basically, Catholic Institution can tell its female employees "Although we are providing you with insurance, we do not cover contraception," but then the exact same insurance *will* provide contraception? How is it not covered, then?

I'm not sure I understand it either. Are they saying that if Catholic Institution refuses to pay for contraception coverage as part of a health insurance plan, that the insurer must offer it to the employees free of charge anyway? So basically everyone still gets the same contraception-inclusive insurance plan, but Catholic Institution gets to say "We don't want to pay for this specific part of it"?

I think part of what's confusing me is the idea that an employer can pick and choose which parts of an insurance plan they will pay for. I always thought that insurers offered specific plans, which employers then bought, in their entirety, for their employees. In other words, I thought an employer could say, "We'd like to offer our employees your Plans A, B, and C." I didn't think they could say "We want to offer our employees Plan A except for the birth control, Plan B except for the mental health coverage, and Plan C except for the vision coverage."

I assume the insurance company's "plan with bc" will be the same cost as the plan w/o. I mean, I can't see them playing it any other way.

Would Catholic hospitals and such possible say "Fuck you then, we won't offer insurance"? I mean, that'd cause a lot of employees to up and quit, but...

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati flat-out said that if they were required to offer insurance that covers birth control, then they *would* stop providing insurance at all, to any of their employees.

Way to be pro-life.

Would Catholic hospitals and such possible say "Fuck you then, we won't offer insurance"? I mean, that'd cause a lot of employees to up and quit, but...

They haven't so far. But they do appear ready to jump off that cliff, at least at the upper eschelons.