In one sense, the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby seems less awful than many liberals feared it would be. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, says that the government cannot force closely held corporations to finance coverage of contraception if the owners of those corporations object on religious grounds. The phrase “closely held” is important here. It comes from the IRS and it refers to companies in which five or fewer individuals own more than half the stock. Taken literally, the decision is limited to just those employers. Publicly held companies like Target or United Airlines remain subject to the same Obamacare mandates as before.

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, called Alito’s opinion a decision of “startling breadth.” There are good reasons to think she is right. According to one 2009 study, about half the workforce is employed by closely held corporations. And unless I’m misreading the opinion, Alito and the four justices voting with him haven’t ruled out expanding the exemption to include more businesses. More important, the ruling establishes a new principle: that corporations can have the same rights of religious belief and expression that individual people do. I'm not a lawyer, but it sure sounds like this could allow them to opt out of other laws they find objectionable, including anti-discrimination laws.

That’d be troubling in any circumstance, obviously. But it’s even more troubling given the way the U.S. social welfare state has evolved.

The fundamental problem here is the way the U.S. has decided to provide its new entitlement to health insurance. In many other countries, the government takes on this responsibility directly, by creating its own insurance program or regulating insurers as if they were public utilities. We do the same here in the U.S., for the elderly, through Medicare. But for the non-elderly, we’ve decided that most working-aged people should get coverage through their employers, with the employers retaining lots of latitude over how to do it.

There are practical and defensible reasons for doing this. It’s how the majority of working-age Americans got coverage before the Affordable Care Act became law; forcing everybody to go onto a new, government-run program would have caused a great deal more disruption. But this arrangement also creates complications. What happens when employers aren’t enthusiastic about providing that coverage—or, as in the Hobby Lobby case, about providing one particular part of it?