I guess I should read threads more carefully before replying. I completely missed the fact that a certain member feels that pharmacists should be forced to cooperate with murder schemes, yet he personally refused to cooperate with a scheme to commit spam.
The way I read what he wrote, he provides to them the services that they pay for, but does not provide fraudulent services (that are outside of his duties) that would help them in an enterprise he does not approve of (to wit: obtaining blocks of network addresses under someone else's name - that'd be fraudulent).
So the pharmacy-argument equivalent would be a pharmacist refusing (on moral grounds) to sell an abortifacient to someone who walks in with a scrip for morning-sickness anti-nausea meds. That would be very right and proper,
regardless of the pharmacist's moral views, because he would be refusing to provide services that were outside of his legitimate purview.
I see this issue as one of timing: If someone was a pharmacist already, and a drug came on the market that he found morally repugnant, then he should be within his rights to refuse to sell it under the "this is not what I signed up for" premise. Just as, for instance, a cop who had been on the force for years, when new department policy comes down that people of a particular type should be harassed for whatever reason, should refuse that duty; it was not a part of the deal when he signed up, and it's morally repugnant to him.
But if the pharmacist came into the job knowing that dispensing drugs of this type (and if the cop signed onto the force knowing that harassing "those people") was part of the job, then he signed up for it, and should STFU and do his job. Or quit. But not cherry-pick which of the duties he agreed to perform as a condition of employment he will
actually perform.
To try to change the deal after the fact, from either direction, is not acceptable. For an employer to alter the moral framework of a job after someone is employed is reprehensible. But for an employee to take money for a job that they knew they would be unable (or unwilling) to perform is likewise reprehensible.
As for government involvement in all of this: It's not the government's job to tell any business owner what they
must sell, who they
must hire, or what services they
must offer. If there are two pharms in town, and one of them chooses not to dispense some drugs on moral grounds, then the other one will get that business, and the people of the community will decide if they care enough about the issue to support one pharm over the other. If they overwhelmingly support the one that claimed a moral high ground, then likely that one will succeed and the other might fail. If they don't care, then if the morally-repugnant business is a significant revenue stream, then the one who took a moral stand might fail. Legitimate market forces, operating in legitimate ways.
Medicare's a different animal, because the government simply
cannot allow the free market to operate in this arena, or the wheels will fall off the ObamaCare cart; for economic reasons, more and more docs would refuse to take medicare patients, until the remaining ones are swamped with economically-untenable clients, at which point they'll either go under or they'll start refusing to take them as well, and the problem will snowball.
Of course, the wheels are going to come off the cart no matter what; when being a doc is no longer an economically-sound profession, people will stop becoming docs. The only solution
then will be one of two things: soviet-era-style totalitarian control of what profession each person goes into, forcing some people to be docs (with results comparable to soviet-era medicine); or a return to market-based medical care.
