A letter in this morning’s paper summed up the whole debate over employers’ rights to pick and choose which health benefits they offer by stating, in essence, birth control is a private matter and should be kept that way. Meaning, of course, that individuals should simply pay for it themselves and not expect it as part of an insurance plan. Certainly an interesting perspective, but, if applied uniformly, wouldn’t it be equally logical to assert that pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing are equally private? Should health insurance distribute these costs over the broad population of rate payers?

If employers can elect on moral or religious grounds to deny birth control as a benefit in their plans, shouldn’t their rates go up to absorb the additional costs of increased pregnancies? After all, absence of birth control seems like a pretty certain guarantee of an increased number of pregnancies. Why should those outside the employer’s realm be forced to pay for the increased cost? Those costs – from prenatal to pediatric – should be absorbed in a risk pool limited to the employees of that business. Now, the employer could opt to pass those costs along to the employees as their share of the premium and could do so based on the number of pregnancies and children of each person in the firm. That would certainly make the cost of birth control seem less onerous.

As an aside, does this same benefit denial extend to vasectomies, tubal ligations, or hysterectomies? Back on track, allowing employers to cherry-pick benefits in the plans they offer employees opens a world of unpleasant opportunities – what if your employer states a moral objection to large families? Or to alcoholism? Or to cancer? Or to HIV?