SCOTUS Offers Obama A Way To Fix Birth Control Coverage Gap

[cal04]

(snip)
The Supreme Court said religious business owners like Hobby Lobby may opt out of providing cost-free insurance coverage for emergency contraception such as the morning-after pill and intrauterine devices (IUDs), which means their female employees would have no option other than to pay for birth control out-of-pocket.

This creates a hole in Obamacare's preventative care coverage, but the White House has options. One action the President could take is to simply extend to these women an accommodation his administration offered to employees of religious nonprofits like universities and hospitals: employers can opt out of it but insurance companies are required to pay the full cost of the contraception for female employees who want it.

"I think that's exactly what the court contemplates," said Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. "Female employes can be covered by an extension of the accommodation that now applies to the religious [nonprofit] organizations."

(snip)
"The Government could, e.g., assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives to women unable to obtain coverage due to their employers’ religious objections. Or it could extend the accommodation that HHS has already established for religious nonprofit organizations to non-profit employers with religious objections to the contraceptive mandate," Alito wrote for the Court. "That accommodation does not impinge on the plaintiffs' religious beliefs that providing insurance coverage for the contraceptives at issue here violates their religion and it still serves HHS's stated interests."

The first option would require an act of Congress, far from likely in the current political climate. But an extension of the accommodation could be done by executive action. The problem for the Obama administration is that even the nonprofit accommodation is being challenged in court by Little Sisters of the Poor, which says it violates their religious beliefs to fill out a form opting out of the birth control coverage. But the five Republican-appointed justices who ruled against the White House suggested that accommodation wasn't a serious burden on religious practices.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/how-obama-can-fix-birth-control-gap-created-by-scotus
more at link

[zipplewrath]

1. Simple way really

Separate off contraception as a publicly provided benefit. Make it part of medicare and available to all. Imagine that, parts of medicare available to all. I wonder how that might grow over time.

[yellowcanine]

2. But that is a poison bullet in this decision for the Religious Dominionists.

They do not accept that accommodation either so Alito and Kennedy have just opened up a huge can of worms. After the Christian Taliban reads this decision carefully they are going to be very unhappy.

[warrior1]

3. with this congress?