>> The government isn’t prohibiting insurance companies from offering health insurance plans
That’s right, it’s mandating it.
>> How can you even suggest that insurance companies should have the right to force employers to pay for certain coverage?
I evenly suggested that? Nope, just something you fabricated.
>> policies to be paid by Microsoft ... better define “spouse” the way that Microsoft wants to define it.
Strictly a private sector situation excluding any law that regulates policy structure. Not our problem.
>> And are you seriously going to argue that it isn’t taxpayer money that pays for government workers’ health insurance policies and that it’s really the employee’s money?
If it’s your money, then take it back from the next federal employee you bump in to.
>> Let me guess: when the government gives welfare recipients food stamps (paid for with taxpayer money), you think it’s some sort of constitutional-rights violation for it to say that they can’t be used to buy chewing gum?
It’s not the chewing gum, it’s the Skittles. Go to www.no-food-stamps-for-skittles.org for more information.
>> If you want to argue that same-sex “spouses” are no different than spouses from traditional, one-man, one-woman marriages, then go ahead and argue
No, but feel free to keep on jumping to conclusions in order to protect your precious sense of statism.
You should learn the difference between being a regulator and being a market participant before spouting off about “statism.” When the federal government compels employers with more than X employees to provide health insurance, it is acting as a regulator, and it certainly is statism. But when the federal government decides what health insurance plan it will buy (with our money) for government workers, it is doing what every employer that offers health insurance does (and did long before the government mandated employer-paid health insurance), and thus is acting as a market participant, not a regulator (a distinction for which there is ample jurisprudence in cases involving the Dormant Commerce Clause).