Little Sisters and Birth Control

… and if your manager is a nun, you don’t even need to bother asking. 

In a way I don’t blame the Little Sisters of the Poor for their objections.  It makes sense because we pose the wrong question in this country.  Even with the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ‘ObamaCare’), the procurement and administration of health insurance is still left to employers, who peruse the details of costs and coverage.  This is a vestige of the ancient ‘patron’ theory of employment—which enabled broad invasions of employee privacy—most aspects of which have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Health insurance is a human right, and the minimum basic coverage required under the ACA is bare bones.  It is much better to view paying for the coverage as part of the cost of employing people, while leaving the selection and administration to professionals.  That administration is time-consuming and costly for small employers; it is terribly inefficient for, say, a restauranteur to be expected to gain enough expertise (not to mention power) to negotiate with a huge insurance company.  No other advanced industrial country burdens employers with this; we shouldn’t either.

It would be much more efficient and affordable to establish a single risk pool, called ‘human being’, and negotiate rates for minimum basic coverage en masse.  For those employed, the employer’s role would simply be to contribute the appropriate amount into a fund to cover their obligation – much as is done with Social Security and Medicare.  It is not an employer’s business to look into the details of a human being’s healthcare coverage, any more than a range of other personal choices they make. 

I understand the Little Sisters balking at having to specifically procure health insurance coverage that contains clauses they find immoral.  This should not be in their hands; they should not be customizing coverage – any more than an employer who is a Christian Scientist might customize coverage that covers only prayer. 

Modern Propaganda

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  - Garry Kasparov

We are inundated with an amazing torrent of misinformation.  I had naïvely hoped that the global pandemic we face might have encouraged at least some of the purveyors to take a break, or tone it down a bit.  But, to the contrary, they have ramped up the nonsense, and the sources have proliferated.  

Manipulators easily find wedges, and offer easy answers to those confused by the complexity of the real problems we face.  Otherwise intelligent people are overwhelmed by it all, and give up their filters.  The timeless siren song of the deceiver, ‘You can’t trust anybody … so trust me!’ echoes throughout the canyons of our society, emerging from the depths of the dark web.  And we products of the sixties and seventies, trained to be skeptical of authority, are easy prey for those who claim that their voices have been silenced by a cynical establishment.

There is an entire ecosystem of fraud.  Much of it is not even internally consistent, but once somebody has been captured within its web, they no longer expend the effort to connect the dots; they just believe.  And because distrust of outside influences is integral to the program, it is extremely difficult to correct the record from outside the bubble.  

We who exist outside the bubble face the difficult decision to either listen dispassionately, as people repeat these paranoid fantasies, or offer corrections and clarification - tearing friendships apart, and promoting the very social discord and disunity the deceivers seek.   

I, for one, am utterly exhausted, depressed, and totally pessimistic about the potential victory of truth over ‘alternative facts’; of serious peer-reviewed science over ‘maverick’ nut-cases; of evidence and statistics over well-coached gut feel, denial, and cognitive dissonance.