Awkward Utopia

Should a firm possess the right to impose its values on its employees? In providing discriminate health insurance benefits, firms can effectively influence what medical treatment their employees have access to. This is a biproduct of the system in place in which private health insurance (for myriad reasons I won’t even delve into now) is dramatically more expensive — often prohibitively so — than employer-provided health insurance. For many, the choice is not between health insurance purchased personally and health insurance chosen by one’s boss, but rather health insurance chosen by one’s boss and no health insurance at all. Thus, an employer can (cavalierly, perhaps?), in choosing which policies to purchase on behalf of his employees, dictate to them which treatments they’ll be able to receive. He can, to state the problem bluntly, choose not to offer insurance policies that would cover the cost of treatments he finds ethically problematic, even if the sole basis of his problems with those treatments is a personal religious belief not shared by his employees.

According to this article from the National Catholic Register, several states have responded to such forms of bullying by employers with redressive legislation.

These laws — which have been upheld by the courts — required religious institutions such as hospitals to provide contraceptives as part of their health insurance, unless these institutions could show that all of their employees and patients were of the same faith — an impossibility, given Catholic institutions’ mission to serve the entire community.

The question, again, is whether this is right. The UES aversion to governmental interference notwithstanding, laws are justified when they prevent one person from infringing upon the protected rights of another. A firm employing underhanded means to force its religious values onto employees (when non-compliance with those values, as in the example above dealing with birth control, constitutes perfectly legal bahavior) certainly qualifies as infringing on the right of those employees as consumers — does it not?

No. It does not. In fact, to legislate against a firm’s right to consciously refrain from providing health insurance that would pay for treatments it finds morally unconscionable is to infringe upon the rights of the firm. The first amendement to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” No law (outside of Massachusetts) yet requires firms to provide health insurance. Like salaries and pensions and access to a gym, benefits are precisely what their name implies: they are compensation, meant to attract the highest-quality employees to a firm. More importantly, no law requires an individual to accept a job for less-than-adequate compensation. Applicants maintain every right to choose to work, or not to work, based on their valuation of the aggregate costs and benefits entailed by each available option (health care coverage, or lack thereof, among them).