New attack on birth control: Trump proposal would give employers unprecedented power over women
THURSDAY, JUN 1, 2017 04:59 AM EDT
New attack on birth control: Leaked Trump proposal would give employers unprecedented power over women’s lives
Proposed health care rule on contraception would allow employers to impose their religious beliefs on employees
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Donald Trump may be a notorious libertine who slept around so much he joked that avoiding sexually transmitted infections was his “personal Vietnam.” But a leaked White House document shows that President Trump’s administration is now contemplating allowing women’s bosses to deem them too slutty to deserve basic health care services if they are having heterosexual intercourse. In any context whatever — married, single, monogamous or otherwise.
On Wednesday morning, Vox published a leaked copy of a proposed regulation that would give employers broad rights to cut female employees off from their current access to contraception. It’s important to note that this is just a proposal, and the Trump administration has made a habit of leaking proposed rules and executive orders, and then reshaping them in less radical terms after public outcry.
This proposal attacks an existing rule known as the “contraception mandate,” which requires federal agencies to include birth control in the list of preventive health care services that the Affordable Care Act requires insurance plans to cover without a copay. This rule, written by Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama’s administration, has long riled religious conservatives, who launched a series of legal challenges to the mandate, on the basis that forcing religious business owners or nonprofits to offer health care plans that cover contraception violates their religious freedom.
The Obama administration came up with a compromise: Employers with religious objections could opt out of the mandate, but if they did so, the government will step in to ensure that their female employees could get such coverage from somewhere else. That compromise protected a woman’s right to determine for herself what her beliefs about contraception are, instead of having an employer impose them on her.
What the Trump administration has now proposed is letting employers block their employees from getting contraception coverage at all. If an employer thinks only sluts use birth control, he can simply refuse to let a woman’s insurance plan cover it — without alerting the government so it can replace the coverage that the boss is blocking. It’s a crafty maneuver: Without repealing the contraception mandate outright, Trump would let employers drop coverage with no government replacement.
“It’s kind of unprecedented that employers can reach into your health insurance this way,” said Kelly Blanchard, president of Ibis Reproductive Health, in a phone interview.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/06/01/new-attack-on-birth-control-leaked-trump-proposal-would-give-employers-unprecedented-power-over-womens-lives/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Still no difference between Clinton and Trump, amirite?
American voters have been voting to give employers unprecedented power over ALL EMPLOYEES for about 37 years now, Why would women be any different.
I guess they've been convinced that if they work their ass off at their $12 and hour job and ensure the wealthy get massive tax breaks, they TOO will soon be bosses over everyone and get the benefit of tax breaks and lording over their employees.
