BREAKING: Is Obama Backing Down on Contraceptives?
Or is this bait and switch?
The Obama administration, stung by fierce opposition from Catholic leaders to a new rule requiring that insurance plans offer free contraception, announced it is revising the regulations so that religious-affiliated groups don’t have to pay for the coverage. But President Barack Obama insisted that all women must still be covered….
The compromise detailed by the president stipulates that insurers – not the religious-affiliated employers — would have to contact individuals directly about how to obtain contraceptive services, which would be provided at no cost, in accordance with the health care law.
More at Kaiser Health News.
Sounds like bait and switch.
Like Rush said today, Obama does not have the constitutional authority to arbitrarily change a mandate he did not have the authority to impose from the beginning.
To many are missing the larger point: It is not about the Catholic church, it is about government exercising its will in a way that if not overturned will change the USA forever. Allowed to stand there will be no limit on what government may require in the name of the health its wards, the people.
The declared right of medical care in the name of “prevention” will be manifested in ever increasing control as the State fails to deliver the promises.
This is about as disingenuous as public policy can get. Officially, religious institutions do not have to provide free contraception. However, the insurers who underwrite the employees of the religious institution must provide free contraception.
In economic terms this means the cost of free contraception will be passed on to the religious institutions indirectly. By that I mean, insurers will know to automatically pad the bid to offset the cost of free contraception when trying to win business from religious institutions. Or, the cost will be passed on to all other members (or their employers) have insurance through the same company. There is no free lunch — the cost of free contraception has to come from some somewhere.
Devon Herrick nails it. Plus, there will be deadweight loss because insurers will have to establish some kind of bizarro parallel claims-processing bureaucracy to deal with claims submitted only for contraception and only by women who work for Catholic institutions, such that the employer does not “cover” the claim.
I cannot even begin to imagine what that looks like. I expect that it will invite plentiful opportunities for fraud, as well as administrative confusion. (Actually, the two will go hand in hand.)
Furthermore, many large Catholic employers are surely self-insured, ERISA-exempted, employers, making this “accomodation” meaningless.
President Obama has demonstrated again and again that he has not the slightest passing acquaintance with how health insurance operates. I suspect the reason Sec. Sebelius looked so glum at the press conference is that she realizes that her department will have to operationalize this absurd new regulation, thought up in an overnight panic by a politician desperate at losing the votes of Catholics in the rust-belt states – whether they practice contraception or not.
And, if we are to believe the president, a regulation that was supposed to take a year to finalize, will now be re-written in a week or so.
I predict that the furor over this mandate has just begun!
To all, let us hope the furor has just begun. I only hope people are starting to realize just how arbitrary this enforcement can be and how much of a jackboot to the throat our government can become.
The administration probably knew in advance that there would be backlash, but they went ahead with it anyways knowing that they could go to plan B and put the burden on the insurers (leaving it to the insurers to put the economic burden on religious institutions by passing costs onto them).