Just a couple of years ago, amid the debate over the rules surrounding Obamacare, Democrats made some pretty weak arguments about employer control of healthcare. They said that if your employer doesn’t offer certain types of contraception as part of your insurance plan at work, then that is actually a case of your employer controlling your healthcare.
Your boss, they repeated ad nauseam, wants to “take away your birth control.” They might as well have said that the boss is taking away your pony by not giving you one.
They kept saying it again when the Supreme Court delivered its many court decisions in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
They weren’t very convincing at the time. But how much less convincing that case seems now — now that they are all calling for employers to force certain treatments upon their workers.
President Joe Biden’s directive forcing government employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and forcing federal contractors to force their employees to get vaccinated, is an actual honest-to-goodness example of employers controlling workers’ medical treatment. And suddenly, that’s just fine.
It’s almost as if Democrats’ professed concerns about employers’ excessive power over their employees’ existence were never sincere.
I am vaccinated, and I encourage anyone reading this to get vaccinated as well. I also believe that businesses may have legitimate reasons to require employees to get the vaccine — for example, to prevent workplace attrition or improve customer confidence about their health in a given establishment. And if your employer imposes such a requirement, you have the option of quitting.
But, of course, that was also true with respect to Obamacare and employers’ supposed “control” of what’s in their own health plan. So I guess it’s nice to see that Biden has finally come around to the idea that when an employer gives you a benefit such as healthcare, it has some say in what the benefit includes and how it must be administered.
