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.