Your ♡bamaCare!!! Fail of the Day

Great — if chilling — reporting from Daily Caller’s Kathryn Watson:

Internal government emails from October 2011 and July 2012 obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials obsessed over which Catholic universities are exempt from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage for students and staff.

Judicial Crisis Network chief counsel Carrie Severino said the emails reveal federal officials defined religious organizations narrowly and arbitrarily by the tax code, rather than broadly and based on a desire for religious freedom, in order to make the maximum number of such organizations subject to the contraception coverage mandate.

“The fact that these officials are drawing these distinctions without having any relationship to the real, actual religious freedom concerns shows they’re not actually interested in religious freedom,” Severino told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “They were just trying to cover as many people as they could possibly cover.” [Emphasis added]

Under ♡bamaCare!!!’s birth control mandate, insurers are required to cover all FDA-approved forms of birth control for women — without any added deductible or copay. While that’s nice for women on birth control, it spreads the costs of private, individual birth-control purchases to post-menopausal women, to men with vasectomies, to gay couples, and even adds a tiny extra expense to my ten-year-old son’s health care coverage.

And, yes, the mandate forces religious groups like Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for birth control in violation of their Catholic beliefs.

Rather than make allowances for the Little Sisters (or for my son who believes that even kissing on TV is “super gross”), the Administration seems to have gone out of its way to ensure that there would be violations of the First Amendment rights of as many religious groups as possible.

So if you want to know why insurance rates are rising for everyone, look no further than ♡bamaCare!!!’s endless coverage mandates. And if you want to find defenders of religious liberty, you’ll have to look far beyond the authors and administrators of ♡bamaCare!!!.