Yesterday Obama issued a statement, regarding
the controversial healthcare bill that would force the provision of
contraception, in which he said that he was going to amend the legislation. See
my post “Have
Catholics Beat The Obama Healthcare Bill”.
The US Catholic Bishops Conference have now
responded to Obama’s statement with this statement:
The
Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for
all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of
providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the
“preventive services” regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.
First,
we objected to the rule forcing private health plans—nationwide, by the stroke
of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs
that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent
disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover
abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called
for the rescission of the mandate altogether.
Second,
we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and
severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral:
insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and
schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees
and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS,
if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for
all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers”
that HHS proposed to exempt initially.
Today,
the President has done two things.
First,
he has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of
sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both
unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to
reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of
religious liberty.
Second,
the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be
administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at
this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:
It
would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the
objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it
would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance
companies, are not exempt from this mandate.
It
would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer
such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that
coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain
this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s
policy, not as a separate rider.
Finally,
we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1,
2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who
desires it, without any government application or approval process.
These
changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some
measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection
for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and
secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious
insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the
case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage,
that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan,
financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting
employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.
We
just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning;
we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and
some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience
protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the
particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless
government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and
to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their
most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its
first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within
these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem
is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.
We
will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our
efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.
For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to
sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the
Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this
effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.
I think that the bishops are quite right in
their response. Just because Obama is creating a means for Catholics to
‘distance’ themselves from any direct involvement in the immoral behaviour,
does not change the fact that the behaviour remains immoral and, no matter how
indirectly this may be, Catholics would remain complicit in the immoral act. So,
if Catholics accept this compromise from Obama, Catholics may just as well have
accepted the original legislation.
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