Tag Archives: morality

Some Government Health Mandate Fallout

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President Obama  insists, in response to religious organizations’ concerns, that the costs of birth control coverage can simply be shifted to insurance companies for those organizations with religious objections. This, though, simply demonstrates Obama’s cynicism.  The costs are far more than those of mere money.  The costs are moral, and shifting pecuniary costs to others (itself an egregious immorality) has no impact on this.

Some organizations recognize this moral cynicism and are demonstrating the courage of their convictions.  Vice President of Advancement at Franciscan University in Steubensville, OH, Mike Hernon told Fox News

We couldn’t believe the price (increase).  We had [their insurance company] go back and reconfirm it.  They said it was dictated by coverage limits that were released by the Obama administration.

The university had been excluding contraceptive services and related medications from its health insurance programs for its students.  The price increase that so shocked Hernon was a tripling: from $600 per year per student to $1200 for the fall semester and to $1800 the following year.  A large part of this increase was driven by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s mandate that the coverage available be increased to $100,000 for the students—for coverages that students don’t need.

As a result of the cost and of the moral violation the PPACA mandates demand, Franciscan University will be dropping its student health insurance coverage altogether.  This school cannot take part in a plan that

requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.

Hernon added that

This is putting people in a position where they are having to choose between their faith and their morality, and now an unjust cost.  These sorts of regulations from the government are forcing our hand in a way that’s really wrong. … At the end of the day, it’s the students who are hurt by this[.]

Franciscan University’s complete statement on the matter can be found here.

They’re not alone.  Ava Maria University, a private university in Florida is considering taking the same step for the same reasons.  University President James Towey says

My own sense is, I don’t see…how it makes sense for us to stay in this.

Towey noted that Ava Maria is looking at a cost increase of 65% – 85% from their current insurer.  He tried shopping the coverage, but other major insurers “wouldn’t even give us a quote.”

Do it my way, insists Obama.  Your moral objections don’t matter.  And never mind the cost, just pony up.  But this just demonstrates the failures: Obama not only is terrified of a free market in goods and services—dependency on government isn’t needed in such an economy.  But he’s also terrified of a free market in ideas.

Update: On Monday, Ave Maria University decided to go through with discontinuing its student health insurance plan.  University President James Towey said in a written statement

It is a sad day when Ave Maria’s students are forced to choose between enrolling in a health insurance plan that is both costly and offers morally objectionable benefits, and having no coverage at all.

Suicide by Spending

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Alexis Tsipras, head of the Coalition of the Radical Left—SYRIZA—has announced that if he becomes the next Greek Prime Minister after the June elections, he will demand that Europe expand funding for Greek spending under a new set of agreements, or he will repudiate all Greek debt, in the expectation that such a repudiation will collapse Europe’s economies.  Europe, demands Tsipras, must move to a more “growth oriented” policy vis-à-vis Greece.  But his idea of growth is simply growth in government and growth in government spending.

Of course, this is naked extortion, and it should make it impossible for any further talks between the EU and Greece to occur—and for any further money to be sent to Greece.

There was a scene (NSFW) in Blazing Saddles that comes to mind from this SYRIZA extortion attempt.  The EU shouldn’t fall for it.

Progressives and Truth

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Professor Elizabeth Warren, who also professes to be part Cherokee Indian, was on CNN’s Starting Point the other day, as reported by The Daily Caller.  In that appearance, Prof Warren said

You know, I’m proud of my Native American heritage….

Exactly what native American heritage would that be, Madam?

The slender thread upon which Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee rests—a purported 1894 marriage license application—has been exposed as non-existent.  Based on a review of the original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the statements of ReJeania Zmek, the Court Clerk of Logan County, Oklahoma, it is likely that the ephemeral 1894 marriage license application never existed.

Prof Warren continued in that interview:

Wall Street [et al.] wants to change the subject.

Actually, Madam, you’re the one who brought it up.  You’re the one who self-identified in the Association of American Law Schools as a minority person for your claimed purpose of “meeting other people like yourself”—never minding that the AALS lists its charges as minority, without breaking out the type of minority.  You’re the one who self-identified at UPenn and at Harvard, with the preferential hiring attached by those institutions’ affirmative action programs.  You’re the one who, just by coincidence, stopped self-identifying as a minority after you achieved tenure at Harvard.  What change of subject?

But this confusion of what is truth isn’t limited to Progressive Senate candidates.  It infects other Progressive candidates, also.  Here’s Candidate Barack Obama at the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” in August 2008, when he wanted the support of a particular group of Americans in the coming election:

Pastor Rick Warren to Barack Obama: Define marriage.

Candidate Obama: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.

(Then, with his typical hubris, Obama added, “I can afford those civil rights [of civil unions] to others.”)

Here’s President Obama, now appealing to another group [sorry about the opening ad] whose support he desires in the coming election:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Hmm….

Affirmative Action Revisited

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I wrote recently about the nature of affirmative action.

Here’s another take, from Victor Davis Hanson in an article in Townhall last week.

In the last 50 years, massive immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America, coupled with rapid rates of integration and intermarriage, have created a truly multiracial society.  So-called whites, for example, are now a minority of the population in California, and millions of people of mixed ancestry don’t identify with any particular ethnic group.

…

Nor is race sure proof of either poverty or past oppression.  Asian Americans, for example, have a median family income more than $10,000 a year higher than white Americans.  And if pigmentation is proof of ongoing prejudice, why don’t darker Punjabis and Arabs—who do not qualify for special racial preferences—deserve consideration over those lighter-skinned minorities who do?

…

In truth, after a half-century in our self-created racial labyrinth, no one quite knows who qualifies as an oppressed victim or why—only that the more one can change a name or emphasize lineage, the better the careerist edge.  The real worry is that soon we will have so many recompense-seeking victims that we will run out of concession-granting oppressors.

Because, after all, such programs have been fatally dishonest from their inception:

…a supposedly noble lie—that to atone for past bias we must be judged by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character….

A Sense of Privacy

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Last week, the House voted, largely along party lines, to abolish the American Community Survey, the new version of the US Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire, a survey that was supposed to be conducted annually, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Republicans claim the long form—asking about everything from demographics to income to commuting times—is prying into private life and is unconstitutional.  Oddly, the WSJ disputes this characterization.

That paper says,

[T]he ACS provides some of the most accurate, objective and granular data about the economy and the American people, in something approaching real time.  Ideally, Congress would use the information to make good decisions.  Or economists and social scientists draw on the resource to offer better suggestions.  Businesses also depend on the ACS’s county-by-county statistics to inform investment and hiring decisions.

But the WSJ is living in a fantasy world, as demonstrated by that adverb “Ideally.”  In the real world, we’ve seen the likelihood of “good decisions” (question for the WSJ: whose definition of “good?”) involving personal information emanating from Congress.  We’ve seen the quality of suggestions from the HSWIC* over in the government’s Energy Department.  As for the businesses, see below.

Leaving that aside, though, in the real world, stipulating the argument, the ACS still is an intrusion into my privacy.

The WSJ even shamelessly trades on its “authority” status:

National statistics are in some sense public goods, which is why the government has other data-gathering shops like the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics.

In the first place, they’re not goods of any sort, much less this baldly asserted public version, until they’ve been collected and thereby gained existence.  Even then, no, they’re not “public goods,” solely because they’ve been collected from a broad public.  They’re still made up of personal—private—data; having been collected up into a common database in no way places them into the commons.  In the second place, the WSJ has just made an excellent argument for abolishing the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics, also.

In the end, if these data have value for businesses, or any other entity, a market will develop for them (they’re not that hard to collect, and the barrier to entry into this market is, as my town puts it, speed cushions), and people can give up their personal data—or not—in accordance with their own decisions.  There’s no need to have these data confiscated by government fiat.

But the most amazing part of the WSJ‘s demurral is their rationale:

As for privacy, anyone not living in a Unabomber shack won’t be much inconvenienced by making this civic contribution.

Leaving aside the cynically Alinsky-esque claim that a confiscation is a “contribution,” when did individual privacy become something to be invaded at will, so long as it doesn’t “inconvenience” the victim?  Our privacy needs no justification from us to protect; we need no better reason to protect it—especially from a grasping government that’s supposed to be working for us—than that we don’t feel like being exposed.  The WSJ‘s logic is in line with the government’s logic of two centuries ago: the Indians aren’t using the land they’re on, anyway.  And we have a more important use for it than they do.

The inconvenience is the invasion of our privacy.  Full stop.

 

*HSWIC: Head…Scientist…What’s in Charge