— though not against the government, who mandates the health care guidelines and writes the policies (and has legislated itself exempt from recrimination), but against businesses trying to navigate the quagmire of regulation and taxes to attempt to comply with one the signature legacies of the Obama Administration and the John Roberts Court.

The more employees are encouraged to complain about what it is they aren’t getting, the quicker businesses can be fined into either complete compliance or else layoffs or even closures — all of a piece to bring us to a single payer system, which is precisely what has to happen, now that insurance has been redefined as coverage one can purchase after it is needed.

Which of course makes it not insurance at all, but essentially government-mandated private carrier welfare meant in the relatively short run to put private insurance companies out of business, with the “insurance” void filled by a colossal federal health care bureaucracy wherein everyone is covered, but no one (save those who are preferred clients to the government) gets the procedures one needs in a timely fashion, and death panels (as defined by Paul Krugman, Nobel winner and revered liberal economist, not Sarah Palin, reindeer wrangler and master of corn bread and caribou steak cookoffs) become the pragmatic fix to overcrowding and stubborly long-living old codgers who probably vote Republican anyway.

CNS News:

The Affordable Care Act sets up a new arena of whistleblower protections for employees who complain that their company-provided health insurance doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

On Friday, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published an interim final rule in the Federal Register that establishes procedures and time frames for handling retaliation complaints filed under Section 1558 of the Affordable Care Act.

For example, if an employer-sponsored health plan doesn’t provide an employee with no-cost contraceptives or sterilization – or any other “essential health benefit” — that employee may complain without fear of retaliation.

Whistleblower complaints may also arise in cases where a large employer does not offer a health insurance plan that meets certain levels of affordability and minimum value. In those cases, the company may be penalized if any of its full-time employees receives a tax credit or subsidy through an Obamacare insurance exchange. That could create an incentive for an employer to fire or lay off an employee.

Section 1558 of the Affordable Care Act protects employees against retaliation for reporting alleged violations of Title I of the Affordable Care Act. Title I requires most health insurance plans to provide certain “essential health benefits,” which were later defined to include no-cost contraception and sterilization. Title I also bars lifetime limits on insurance coverage and exclusions due to pre-existing conditions.

The regulation published on Friday says if an employee is retaliated against in violation of the whistleblower provision, he or she may file a complaint with, and ultimately receive relief from, OSHA or the courts.

[…]

It also says an employer may be found to have violated the ACA if the employee’s whistleblower complaint – or support for someone else’s complaint — led to one of the following actions:

Fired or laid off; blacklisted; demoted; denied overtime or promotion; disciplined; denied benefits; was not hired or rehired; intimidated; threatened; reassigned/affecting promotion prospects; reduced pay or hours.

A fact sheet about filing whistleblower complaints under the Affordable Care Act can be found here.

Just to put this in perspective, the government has mandated that companies provide one-size-fits-all health care.  And now it has empowered employees to police the businesses to get what’s theirs.

This appeals to the “social justice” crowd who invariably believes those who own businesses — being as they are driven by profit — are greedy bastards who owe the employees a kind of de facto control over the company, a kind of rise of the proletariat through government-aided guidance that these poor misguided class warriors don’t recognize will end with the closing of businesses, the loss of jobs, more former private-sector employees on the dole, and a culture of dependence on government that carries along with it the fitting destruction of private sector industry.

For the Democrats, who rely for their electoral power on slaves who believe they’re still free — and whose vitriol they’ve been conditioned to point at the capitalist system — this is of course a feature and not a bug.

And the current GOP establishment leadership is looking to get in on that, because it turns out big government benefits them, as well — and all this reactionary fringe talk about limiting the reach and power of the federal government is terribly unhelpful in the new branding of the kinder, more compassionate GOP.

Time to get over “nostalgia” for Reagan conservatism and embraced the more efficiently-run nannystate that is the dream and legacy of the Bushies.  Who just won’t go the fuck away, and whom we should be nostalgic for, if you ask them. 

Not the best strategery, if you ask this Hobbity Visigoth Bircher extremist — whose fringe extremism is so extreme that its Hobbity Visigothery threatens to burn through the national fabric and destroy the great national quilt of moderation and compromise and collectivism that is the only thing that can possibly ever save us from our mythically self-reliant, racist misogynistic nativist homophobic selves.

Amen.