Timothy P. Carney
The Washington Examiner
11/30/2013
The audacity and mendacity with which the Obama administration defends its illegal contraception mandate is standard fare for politics. What’s distinctively Obamian in this fight is the insidious corporatism underlying it all.
Look at the contraception mandate from almost any angle, and you see the corporatism. Sometimes it’s on the surface, and sometimes it’s implicit in the arguments.
The contraception mandate is nakedly a huge subsidy to the industry that most firmly supported Obamacare: the drugmakers.
The drug industry has spent more on lobbying under Obama than any other industry. Top lobbyists at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in 2009 met behind closed doors with the White House and Senate Democrats, promising political support for Democrats in exchange for friendly provisions in Obamacare…
…Obama’s contraception mandate requires all employer-sponsored health care plans to cover 100 percent of the cost of all FDA-approved contraception. That gives customers incentives to choose Pfizer’s name-brand pills, because the entire cost is passed onto employers and thus onto customers and colleagues. And of course, this means more profit for Pfizer…
…this Obama administration crusade for separation of commerce and conscience restricts the freedom only of family businesses, which is good for their bigger competitors.
The contraception mandate is corporatist in the way much of Obama’s regulation is corporatist: it imposes costs –both financial and moral — on anyone who dares to go into business for himself. You’re better off being a local manager of a Walmart than trying your own hand at entrepreneurship.
Sometimes people think politics is about the collective versus the individual. Most of the time, though, it’s about the state versus civil society. It’s coercion versus voluntary association…
The entire article is at The Washington Examiner.
