According to The Daily Caller:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior administration officials tell The Associated Press that President Barack Obama on Friday will announce that religious employers will not have to cover birth control for their employees. He will demand instead that health insurance companies be the ones responsible for providing free contraception.
Obama’s abrupt retreat is an attempt to address concerns from Roman Catholic leaders and end an election-year nightmare for the White House. Obama’s Republican opponents have criticized his handling of the issue.
Women will still get access to birth control no matter where they work.
But religious organizations that see contraception as a violation of their faith can refuse to cover it, and insurance companies will then step in.
So churches can buy health insurance and refuse to cover contraception … but their insurance companies will have to cover it anyway?
I’d ask if Obama really thinks we’re all idiots, but the answer is obvious.
Obama doesn’t think we’re all idiots. He just has a Marxist’s understanding of economics. He thinks the money is just going to come out of a big pot marked “profit” somewhere. IOW, HE’s an idiot.
Death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts.
“Popcorn!”
If I thought Obama was smart enough to run a conspiracy, I’d say all of this was a calculated move to force those organizations to drop health insurance, thus pushing more and more people into government-mandated health care.
– without a distinction.
“But religious organizations that see contraception as a violation of their faith can refuse to cover it, and insurance companies will then step in.”
Basically-this can only work one of two ways. The first is that the religious groups get charged by their companies. This would seem to defeat the purpose of the “compromise”.
The second is that the insurance groups are expected to provide it without charging religious groups. If they are still going to be allowed to charge other groups for the same service, then this would be an eminent domain action–the use of private assets for public purposes–and as it has not occurred via the due process of law, it is un-Constitutional.
The above took me about five-ten seconds to think through. If our political class cannot even minimally approach this level of thinking, then we have no hope for having anything but rule by fiat in the future, and the American Experiment will have ended in failure.
If Catholic groups continue to support Democrats after this debacle I hope they get whatever comes to them in the future.
Yeah, that’s the thing that really got me. Anyone with the economic understanding of a crow gets that the insurance company won’t really be paying.
I should also thinks this move somewhat bolsters the 9th and 10th amendment objections to Obamacare, since it is clear the bill is becoming a ever-expanding list of things of “oh, didn’t realize that”. At some point the 9th amendment, in particular, has to be realized as meaning something. If not, then judicial review just needs to go away, because spending gobs of time on precedents and then treating completely two amendments as dead letters does not speak of high intellectually integrity. Those two amendments mean something–the idea that the federal government cannot expand at will except via the amendment process. All bills passed by Congress should be looked through their lenses.
It also presents the “Obamacare individual mandate as a tax and not abuse of the commerce clause” argument with some issues, since the federal government is going to have to use the commerce clause as the authorization to enable it to force insurance companies to offer this contraception service, but not all insurance companies cross state lines, so I don’t know how the federal government requires this of those companies–and the required use of the clause to force companies to offer this service makes the Obamacare individual mandate easier to challenge, since it was argued in the run-up to passage that this was not a tax, but something else.
Also, if you make people buy health insurance, and contraception is now to be forcibly offered by all insurance companies, then the religious clause still comes into play, because individual purchasers/objectors will still be forced to pay, overall, for services they both never will use and object to. And there is no getting around the “overall” argument, because the federal government does not have the ability to make corporations accept lower margins on sales or not pass on costs to customers. Or so it seems to me (and yes, I know about price controls in times previous, but these aren’t those times anymore).
It’s either that, or forced contraception offering is an eminent domain of insurance company property without due process type of issue.
Overall I really don’t know how the Democrats square this circle without just admitting that we have entered the land of rule by fiats (and I don’t mean cars). I also think there may be a potential that they are hoping to see how many excesses they can build up before some militia idiot does something stupid and the media makes it the “Reichstag fire” incident needed for the election. Sad if true.
If anyone buys this BS? This is merely a smokescreen. Does anyone really believe that the effective rate charged to the insurance plan will not include those costs?
He’s in a typical Planet Left dilemma. Everyone he knows thinks like him, so he really didn’t see that forcing the Catholic Church (and other religious groups) to pay for abortions would be a big deal. He was clueless, and besides, he doesn’t really care what they think anyway. Just as with ObamaCare, when push came to shove he was perfectly willing to shove it down our throats. He can’t back down, but he also can’t go forward, as with Greece: It had to issue bonds but couldn’t afford to do so. (We’ll be there before too long, of course.)
Despite the pathos and bathos on the other side, it’s clear O and his lefty crew have to go before they take us past the point of no return.
Don’t worry, the Catholic bishops will buy into this garbage since they have no stomach for a fight. The issue of freedom is not their concern.
Wow, that’s his big compromise? The Catholic institutions don’t have to pay, but the insurance companies will.
I may be a lowbrow rube from flyover country, but even I can see how stupid that is.
I’ll bet Obama is hoping that the Supremes do him a big fat favor and find Obamacare unconstitutional.
Excellent point. The Supremes would be doing him a huge favor by killing ObamaCare, especially if they do it sooner rather than later. It would take a huge political millstone off his back. He may even get that.
This is how people pushed along by affirmative action think. Because their stupid statements and ideas have not in the past been appropriately punished by teachers and mentors — they have gotten an A and A minus when deserving C minus and D — they overestimate the power of word-smithing and underestimate the intelligence of listeners.
This debacle about abortion services and drugs is interesting, but the real story is that this latest Obama “episode” reveals the true nature of the man and his advisors. Obama is doing an end run around our republican form of government and the constituion. How is it that we pass laws, some very bad, and the Executive may merely absolve some from following them and require others to follow at his whim? The founders called that arbitrary and capricious. We fought a war over that very thing.
We obviously wouldn’t fight a war over that now.
That seems like an arbitrary and capricious thing to say.
My husband just pointed out that obama wants to be more like the Chinese communists. If this contraception/abortion mandate stands, look for the government telling us how many kids we can have, and even implementing enforced sterilizations and forced abortions. Just like the Chinese, who Dear Leader admires so much.
Of course I think you’re an idiot Charlie as your reasoning skills are amateurish and you have no idea nor do most of the posters here have any clue what his is about. It has zero to do with the Church’s right as that has been settled in many of the 28 states who already have implemented this in their laws. This is purely from our laws (that’s US law and I could give a rats behind about Catholic or any other religious law trumping US law). In 2000 a law was passed and implemented under George Bush and the Senate and House which were Republican in 2001. This enabled 28 states to tell insurance companies that if you offer a policy that cover prescription drugs then you must cover birth control – no getting out of it. Today close to 49% of all insurance policies do not cover any prescription drugs and any religious organization can buy one of those and they satisfy their conscience.
But most Catholic Law Schools, Catholic Colleges, and Catholic Hospitals offer this coverage and do you know why? Because they need to be competitive to attract high quality people. Sheesh you guys are so freaking dumb it’s pathetic.
The old white men (read Bishops and Cardinals) see another opportunity to try to change this as they have been losing in courts and the Supreme Court did not want to hear their arguments so the Appeals court decisions stood. This was not a religious issue but a women’s issue and thankfully our laws trumped the Catholic Laws.
The great thing is that Obama has now played you conservative yokels like a fiddle with all your screaming holy jumper attitude and then there are you poor candidates. Rick will look stupid as usual about this and Mitt already signed into law in 2005 forcing Catholic Hospital to give the morning after pill to women who say they have been raped. Even this does not do that.
Obama’s playing chess while Republicans are playing high card!
If they’re like you, a dog could cheat them at cards.
Luckily I don’t have to go through the full fisking, since Tom Maguire just did (nice parroting of that Mother Jones story btw).
Short version: the “law” was an EEOC ruling that has been nearly completely ignored, and hasn’t stood up in court on at least one occasion.