The Obama administration has proposed a sensible way to provide women who work for religiously affiliated institutions with free coverage of contraceptives while exempting the organizations they work for from financial or administrative obligations to provide the coverage.
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For the past year, the administration has been battered by lawsuits and denunciations from religious conservatives that its health care reforms violate religious liberties by requiring employers to provide free birth control coverage even if the employers have moral objections. Those attacks were designed to try to discredit the health care reform law and hurt President Obama politically by portraying him, falsely, as an opponent of religious freedom.
All along, churches and other houses of worship have been exempted from the law's requirements. The issue has been whether organizations that have an affiliation with religious institutions, like universities and hospitals that employ thousands of people of different faiths and views on contraception, should be granted an exemption from providing free contraceptive services as well.
Neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court precedents give religiously affiliated institutions the right to be exempted from a neutral law of general applicability. The First Amendment is not authorization for religious entities or individuals claiming a sincere religious objection to the law to impose their religious beliefs on society.
Nevertheless, responding to those attacks, the administration a year ago proposed a reasonable compromise between religious objections and the right of women to affordable birth control. It put the burden on insurance companies to provide free contraceptive coverage to women who work for religiously affiliated employers without requiring any involvement by the employers.
On Friday, the administration issued a more detailed proposal that is now open for public comment. It does not seem to depart in any significant way from the earlier policy, and some advocates for women's reproductive rights, like the American Civil Liberties Union and Naral Pro-Choice America, praised the proposal. It modifies the definition of a "religious employer" and certain affiliated organizations to follow a section of the Internal Revenue Code more closely. And for the first time, it provides guidance for the large religiously affiliated institutions that self-insure, or pay their own medical costs rather than buy insurance coverage. These institutions can simply notify the companies that administer their plans that they will not cover contraceptives, and those companies would then look for a health insurer to offer separate individual contraceptive coverage at no cost to the women.
It will take some close accounting to figure out how best to handle the payment process for the coverage in the short run. In the long run, contraceptive coverage should save money by improving women's health and reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, abortions and medical complications from pregnancy.
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