Fix Health Care Policy

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