Fix Health Care Policy

The Battle for the American Conscience

More than 80 plaintiffs in 23 different lawsuits are now challenging the HHS mandate that will require many religious institutions to provide health insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and other contraceptive services. At the heart of these lawsuits is whether the government’s purported interest in marginally increasing access to contraceptive services trumps the basic right to religious liberty that both individuals and institutions have traditionally enjoyed.

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The institutions challenging the HHS mandate argue that it violates their right to free exercise because the mandate forces them to provide coverage for contraceptive services that conflict with their religious beliefs. HHS is allowing exemptions from the mandate for institutions that have as their primary purpose the inculcation of religious values and that mainly employ and serve people sharing the same religious beliefs as the institution. Essentially churches would appear to be the only religious institutions that meet HHS’s narrow definition of a “religion employer.” As Rev. Larry Snyder, President of Catholic Charities USA, has quipped, it is doubtful that the ministry of Jesus Christ would have qualified for HHS’s narrow definition of exempted religious services.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, Catholic Charities USA, contraceptive funding, first amendment, HHS mandate, sterilization

Alabama Joins Fight Against the “Unconscionable” HHS Mandate

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) has found a new ally in its fight against the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate’s coercive requirement that almost all employers, regardless of religious belief, provide and pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.

Earlier this month, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange moved to join the case to defend the rights of the Alabama-based network. Among other things, the State claims that “the mandate requires Alabama to regulate its health insurance market in a way that violates” various state and federal protections for religious freedom.

Attorney General Strange took to National Review Online last week to further explain his position on the mandate and denounce the rule’s coercive trampling on religious liberty.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, Alabama, anti-conscience rules, contraceptives, EWTN, HHS mandate

Obamacare Mandate: Fighting for Our First Freedom All Over Again

Today, the House Judiciary Committee held a full committee hearing to investigate the Obama administration’s unprecedented overreach through the latest Obamacare mandate’s assault on religious liberty.

Asma Uddin, an attorney with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, testified at the hearing on the administration’s insulting disregard for the right to religious freedom.

“As a Muslim-American woman and an academic, I have spent my career fighting for women’s and minority’s rights, and the fact that I must be here today to explain why our constitutional rights exist is extremely offensive to me personally,” Uddin stated.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptive coverage, House Judiciary Committee, religious liberties, The Becket Fund

Religious Liberty Under Attack

Today is Ash Wednesday — the first day of Lent — the beginning of 40 days of prayer and fasting observed by Christians across the country, culminating in the Easter feast. Likewise in April, Jews will gather to celebrate Passover, one of many traditions observed under the religious freedom that the U.S. Constitution was designed to preserve. Now, though, that freedom is under direct attack by the very government that purports to represent the people, and that is but the first step in Obamacare’s re-writing of America’s blueprint.

This week, two more Christian colleges joined other religious institutions in fighting back against that attack when they filed lawsuits against the Obama Administration for imposing an anti-conscience mandate under Obamacare. The controversial regulation forces almost all employers to provide health insurance coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization, without a co-pay.   (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, anti-conscience mandate, contraceptive coverage, Lent, religious liberty

Obama Administration Refuses Again to Protect Religious Liberty

President Obama talked the talk but then blatantly refused to walk the walk on the freedom of religious institutions from the Obamacare statute’s mandate for group health insurance coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization. The Obama Administration continues to trample on religious liberty by issuing rules that require many religious hospitals, charities, and schools to abandon the tenets of their faiths and comply with that mandate.

Many voices came together in objection to the interim final regulations of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Treasury and Labor Departments, implementing the Obamacare mandate, so expectations ran high that President Obama would order Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sebelius to correct the regulations and protect religious liberty before making the rules final.

On Friday, February 10, 2012, President Obama spoke to the White House Press Corps on the issue of the mandate. President Obama said:

Now, as we move to implement this rule, however, we’ve been mindful that there’s another principle at stake here — and that’s the principle of religious liberty, an inalienable right that is enshrined in our Constitution. As a citizen and as a Christian, I cherish this right.

Having recognized the inalienable constitutional right of religious liberty, the President went on to indicate that the Obama Administration needed to address the adverse impact of the mandate on that right, not taking the year that Secretary Sebelius had previously announced she would take, but rather addressing that impact within one or two weeks:

Now, after the many genuine concerns that have been raised over the last few weeks, as well as, frankly, the more cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football, it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution was not going to be an option, that we needed to move this faster. So last week, I directed the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up the process that had already been envisioned. We weren’t going to spend a year doing this; we’re going to spend a week or two doing this.  

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptive coverage, interum final regulations, religious institutions

No Way Out: How Conscience Gets Trapped in Obamacare’s Little Box of Horrors

If it weren’t for Obamacare, we wouldn’t have this problem. By “this problem,” we mean of course the Obamacare regulation that forces health insurance plans to provide coverage, without co-pay, for contraception, sterilization, and what many people believe are abortion-inducing drugs.

When it was announced last August, the forced coverage mandate contained only a very narrow religious exemption. That meant it would apply to many religious employers who object on religious or moral grounds to providing, paying for, or otherwise participating in abortion, sterilization, and contraception. This result, as Heritage has explained on several occasions, was a blatant violation of religious freedom.

Under pressure for trampling religious freedom, last Friday the Obama Administration announced certain potential modifications to the rule. Sort of. What the Administration actually did was post the final rule without any changes. That’s right—they posted the final rule without any modifications from the August 2011 version that caused the furor in the first place. And then they promised that sometime during the next year, they would pursue a new rule to address concerns about religious freedom.   (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, conscience rules, contraceptive coverage, final rule, religious freedom

Voices of Opposition Speak Out Against Obama’s Contraception Mandate ‘Accommodation’

“Simply unacceptable.”

That’s the near-unanimous response to President Obama’s supposed “accommodation” offered to those who objected to Obamacare’s mandate that religious institutions pay for contraceptive products and services—including abortion-inducing drugs.

That mandate — which tramples heavily on religious liberties — drew tremendous fire across the board, from Christians and Jews alike, drowning the President in a political maelstrom of his own design. And though today the President sought to calm that storm with a “compromise,” the voices of opposition are as strong as ever because, quite simply, it doesn’t remedy the moral and religious liberty objections to this mandate, and as a practical matter, it simply doesn’t work.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: abortion-inducing drugs, accommodation, contraceptives, Obamacare mandates, political maelstrom