Today, 2/10/12, President Obama announced what seemed to be a sort of compromise position with the Catholic Church regarding the Department of Human Services mandate, that all Catholic institutions would have to offer insurance packages covering birth control, contraception, the "morning after pill," and sterilization procedures as part of "preventive medical services." He claimed that his new position will respect religious liberty, by not requiring religious employers to pay for the coverage of services they find morally objectionable, while still allowing women access to free preventive care. He announced that, instead of religious institutions paying directly for these services, the insurance companies will have to provide them at no cost in every package they offer.
There are several problems with this. First of all, the economic problem: by requiring all insurance companies to cover these services free of charge to all women, premiums will necessarily increase for everyone. The government will likely step in to grant subsidies, as it does in Medicaid and Medicare and in clinics like Planned Parenthood. The burden for paying for these services will be spread to all of us. Therein lies the second problem: Catholics are still going to be forced to pay for services they find morally objectionable, in the increased premiums and, inevitably as the rest of Obamacare rolls in, through our tax dollars. Thirdly, Catholic institutions will still have to offer and carry policies which cover objectionable services because all insurance companies will be forced, by the government, to have them included in every plan. Therefore, there is still an infringement on religious liberty.
There is also an unprecedented power grab by the Obama administration here: he has decided that it is alright for him to force insurance companies to cover something with no copay, to force them to offer these services on every plan, to have them fall under the umbrella of preventive services, which, under Obamacare, are required to be free. It is an incredible overreach. There is no clause or phrase in the Constitution or Bill of Rights (or in the so-called "penumbras") which justifies the President in telling private companies what they can and can't sell, or must give away, in this case. When Obamacare is finally in total effect, we will see the government subsidizing much of this type of care, as more and more people will be forced, by increasing insurance premiums, into Medicaid (funded by the states, and matching funds from the federal government in most cases). Therefore, we will all be paying for these services in the end; either through our insurance premiums or through our taxes.
This situation reminds me of the outrage I felt when President Obama decided to fund human embryonic stem cell research with tax payer money. It involves similar issues, therefore I have decided to post the paper I wrote in its entirety in a separate blog today. It's somewhat lengthy, but very detailed. Please read it, with today's situation in mind. I will be writing more in my series about the issue of life and the ethics around birth control and abortion in the next few posts, as well as some other topics, but this is a sort of sidebar to that series.
Let's do keep a sharp focus on each aspect of the subtle and blatant erosion or destruction of the exercise of both constitutional and God-given rights. Certainly there should be less doubt about the right in this country to free exercise of religion than there was about the so-called right to privacy's extension into a mother's womb.
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