Obama’s semantical change doesn’t make insurance costs disappear

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Updated: March 23, 2012 8:13AM

A month ago the Obama administration said religious organizations will have to pay for health insurance that cover contraception and sterilization, even if they consider those practices immoral. Two weeks ago, responding to widespread complaints that its edict violated freedom of conscience, the administration unveiled a “new policy,” under which religious organizations will have to pay for health insurance policies that cover contraception and sterilization, even if they consider those practices immoral.

And people are still complaining. Can you believe it? Last week the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard from Catholic, Baptist, evangelical and Jewish leaders who noted that President Obama’s supposed compromise, which the White House claims “fully accommodates important concerns raised by religious groups,” is “no accommodation at all,” as Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Yeshiva University put it. 

Under the new rule, Obama explained, “if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company — not the hospital, not the charity — will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge.” He insisted that “religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services.”

But they will have to pay for the medical coverage, the price of which will reflect the cost of contraception and sterilization. “Ultimately,” Harvard economist Greg Mankiw noted, “all insurance costs are passed on to the purchaser, so I cannot see how policy B is different in any way from policy A, other than using slightly different words to describe it.”

News outlets nevertheless reported the administration’s spin as fact. Reuters claimed “the revised approach puts the burden on insurance companies, ordering them to provide workers at religious-affiliated institutions with free family planning if they request it, without involving their employer at all.”

And what prevents insurers from shifting it back? The White House argues there will be no need, because providing 100 percent coverage for contraception and sterilization saves insurers money by preventing pregnancies and births. It is not clear why profit-driven businesses must be compelled to do something that supposedly boosts their bottom lines.

Testifying at last week’s congressional hearing, Catholic University President John Garvey called the administration’s cost argument a “Shazam Theory” that “resolves the intrusion on religious liberty by making the compelled contributions magically disappear.” Even if the administration were right about the financial impact, he added, his university still would be “forced to pay for … activities we view as immoral.”

The mandate’s supporters seem genuinely puzzled by the notion that their cost-benefit analyses do not override religious liberty. “Why should an employer’s right to reject birth-control coverage trump a society’s collective imperative to reduce unintended pregnancy?” asks Harvard administrator Erika Christakis in a recent Time essay.

Obama used to teach constitutional law, so he surely understands that the free exercise of religion is supposed to be guaranteed even when it’s inconvenient.

Christakis has some advice for people forced to subsidize services condemned by their religion: Suck it up. She says “the cost of living in a democracy is tolerating moral judgments we don’t always like.” Yet that is exactly what Obama refuses to do.