Birth control ranks among the least of medical issues which can be considered worthy of guaranteed coverage under a health insurance plan. This country has millions of cardiac patients and cancer-stricken individuals who struggle to afford the drugs and procedures they need to survive. Certainly, they could use such a guarantee of free or low-cost treatment.
Yet contraceptives and abortion seem to be the only things treated as a birthright for the American people under the health care reform law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2010.
This mandate drew the ire of religious groups angered by a requirement that they foot the bill for something that clashes with their system of ethics and morality. Leading the opposition was the Catholic Church in the U.S., which went so far as to argue that the mandate violated their First Amendment rights.
Whether or not people abide by the church’s ruling against the use of birth control or not, the ruling is part of their doctrine. As such, the church-or any other religious group opposed to contraception and abortion-should not be forced as an employer to provide their workers with something that goes against the grain of the faith they minister.
Faced with the uproar caused by this mandate in this election year, President Obama gave a little ground on it last week, supporting a provision that requires health insurance carriers to pay for birth control rather than religious organizations.
Why didn’t President Obama and the authors of the health care reform law see this controversy coming? Better yet, did they even care what the reaction would be? This should never have come to pass.
Red flags about the health care reform law should have gone up during its debate, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” This was an outrageous “ram-it-down-the-throat” statement, but nobody seemed to care, and members of Congress passed the bill anyway.
Now we are dealing with the repercussions of this reform bill, which include new fees, individual mandates, taxpayerfunded abortion coverage and the potential breakdown of the private health insurance market. We wonder if the nation will experience buyer’s remorse once the full weight of this law kicks in.
President Obama wasn’t kidding when he said during his first presidential campaign, “We are looking for more than just a change of party in the White House. We’re looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington.”
In the same speech, he charged that there are those who would say and do anything to win an election. He claimed that this is why “people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore,” adding that “it’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us what to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us.”
Rules and mandates may have changed, but as this birth control brouhaha proved, the realpolitik of Washington that Obama was quick to condemn four years ago certainly remains the same under his leadership.
