What the Hobby Lobby Case REALLY Means

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court made a ruling in favor of the company Hobby Lobby regarding birth control. In essence, the court decided that the company can prevent women in having 4 types of birth control medications based upon the company’s religious beliefs.

Now I have never been to a Hobby Lobby store nor do I ever plan to. The nearest one to where I live is over 75 miles away and the one in state is nearly 100 miles away. Like the company Chick-fil-A, they are not open on Sundays based upon their religious beliefs.

The big problem that I have with the Hobby Lobby case and one that really can’t be ignored is that this case could be interpreted as giving companies (any company whatsoever) to establish what type of healthcare that any of its employees can receive regardless of what type of care that the employee wants or needs.

Let me reiterate this: your employer will be able to determine what kind of healthcare you can receive and if they don’t like it, well tough luck.

This was exactly what happened to me back when I worked at Staples. I was out of work for nearly 3 weeks when I had a work-related (yes, I said WORK-RELATED) illness. During the time I was out, I received a letter from Staples stating that if I didn’t follow their rules regarding my healthcare, I would be terminated even though those “rules” were never made explicit in any paperwork that I had ever received during my employment with the company. When I brought the letter to the management, they just laughed at the letter as if it didn’t matter at all.

The bad thing is that apparently it DID matter as I was terminated less than 9 months later after my health did not improve and they got tired of dealing with me.

So now you are probably asking yourself, why didn’t I sue the company?

The truth is that I went through the proper channels to get a resolution despite the fact that I didn’t have a lawyer and had to represent myself in a very bad case. What was worse was that neither the state nor federal government did their job properly, which forced my case to be ultimately dismissed and having Staples get away with all the lies that they had built up against me over the years. I will be explaining all of this in further detail in future blog posts.

So, overall, my belief is that Staples along with any company now basically has free rein to allow/disallow anything regarding healthcare that they want. As long as you are under an employee’s health plan, they can do what they want and like with Staples, they don’t even have to tell you ahead of time.

Certainly this is not a result that any employee should be happy about especially those at Hobby Lobby and Staples.

Half-Year Reflection

Please note: This week’s writing is being posted in all my blogs as it is important to all of my published blogs.

You may have noticed that there has not been a blog post in any of my blogs for the last couple of weeks. There are a few reasons for that.

Among the most important reasons are the following:

· Weather plays havoc with my equipment so I remain offline and disconnected when the heat is high.

· My brain had run out of ideas to write about for a while.

· I was evaluating the stats to determine the future of my blogs.

Certainly anybody who has been reading my blogs recently will realize that I have had a difficult last couple of months. While I tried to put as much of a positive spin on what was happening around me, it seemed that I failed with that attempt. I don’t feel that I really did anything wrong, I was just misinterpreted.

As I mentioned in the past, I am always open to topic ideas in any of my blogs. So far, I have received only 1 idea which I plan on discussing in the next month or so. I am also open to guest bloggers who want to step up and write articles for any of my blogs. Since this has been a one-person operation, sometimes my quality seems to have waned at times. If anybody is interested in submitting ideas or wants to be a guest writer, feel free to email me at the address at the right. Please note that I accept both anonymous and named submissions, if you want the credit for it.

My other thing I have been doing is reevaluating how frequently I post to my blogs. Usually, my writings have been on Wednesdays allowing me to judge the acceptance on Thursdays. Lately, it seems that the numbers have been fairly light and the lack of “likes” and comments make me wonder what the public really want and what they don’t.

So, effective immediately, I have decided that I will be publishing a lot less in the foreseeable future. My plan is to update my blogs approximately twice a month per blog. However, this number could go up or down depending on desire of topics and anything that I come across that I deem to be important to discuss. I also plan on staggering the posting of my blogs so that both are not posted in the same week, but that could change as well. This choice was not easy, but I felt that it was in everybody’s best interest including my own sanity.

Overall, I expect that both the “Staples” blog and the “Rants” blog will continue for a long time as long as I take it a little slower. Hopefully, everyone will agree on that.