Obama, seeking to quell birth control furor, shifts cost to insurers

President Obama, yielding to pressure from religious groups and others, withdrew a mandate that religiously affiliated institutions include free birth control in health insurance plans for employees. Now, insurers will pay.

|
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
President Obama, accompanied by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces the revamp of his contraception policy requiring religious institutions to fully pay for birth control, Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, at the White House.

In an effort to quell the furor among religious employers over mandatory birth-control coverage, President Obama announced a change to his administration’s policy Friday.

Under the proposed new rule, religiously affiliated institutions will not be required to include free birth control in health insurance plans for female employees or to refer them to outside organizations for birth control. Instead, insurers will be required to provide contraception to all employees free of charge.

The administration had originally intended to spend a year working out an accommodation with religious groups. But the uproar condensed the process to a couple of weeks. The goal was “to find an equitable solution that protects religious liberty and ensures that every woman has access to the care that she needs,” Mr. Obama said in a statement at the White House.  

“Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services, no matter where they work. So that core principle remains,” Obama said. “But 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, without copays and without hassles."

The president stated that the overall cost of health care is lower when women have access to contraceptive services.

The Obama administration has been under fire since last month, when it announced its birth control mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. Churches themselves were already exempt, but religiously affiliated organizations such as charities, hospitals, and universities – which hire many people outside the faith – were not. With the Roman Catholic Church leading the charge, they objected vehemently to what they consider a violation of religious liberty. Some Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden and former White House Chief of Staff William Daley, both Catholic, had reportedly registered concerns about the mandate.

The issue has also reverberated in the presidential campaign, reviving the culture war in a big way and highlighting the political challenge for top contender Mitt Romney among the Republican Party’s conservative base. After losing three contests last Tuesday to Rick Santorum, a vocal social conservative, Mr. Romney was already reeling.

Now, in his speech Friday afternoon to a big conservative conference in Washington, Romney faces pressure to convince this key constituency that he would fight for their causes as president. As governor of Massachusetts, he instituted a health-care reform that served as the model for Obama’s reform. He has also claimed that he fought to overturn a mandate for birth control coverage when he became governor, though some Democrats in Massachusetts dispute that.

Catholic Democrats who had criticized the White House’s original proposed rule responded positively to Obama’s announcement.

“There are some who have wrongly used this debate to pit women's rights against freedom of religion,” said former Gov. Tim Kaine (D) of Virginia, who is running for the US Senate. “The steps taken by the White House show that there is a way to respect both.”

But it seemed doubtful that Friday’s announcement would end the larger political debate.

At CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference – speakers used the uproar as a springboard to attack the administration and burnish their images as defenders of religious liberty and of the unborn. Some religious conservatives oppose the use of birth control pills, as they can work as an abortifacient.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R), who ran for president in 2008, thanked Obama for giving social conservatives a new spark.  

“You have done more than any person in the entire GOP field, [more than] any candidate has done, to bring this party to unity and energize this party as a result of your attack on religious liberty and the attack on the personhood of every human being in America,” said Mr. Huckabee.

“Thank you President Obama,” he continued, “for doing what apparently none of us Republicans could apparently get done.”

Staff writer David Grant contributed to this report. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Obama, seeking to quell birth control furor, shifts cost to insurers
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0210/Obama-seeking-to-quell-birth-control-furor-shifts-cost-to-insurers
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe