Conscientious objectors?
Show of hands — who was surprised that conservatives, conservative Catholics, and Catholic conservatives didn’t do a happy dance in response to President Obama’s revision of the contraception-coverage mandate?
First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that the religious exemption in the original mandate was far too narrow. They pointed out that Catholic institutions — animated by religious belief — that provided service in the areas of health care, education, and charitable work would be made to purchase health coverage that included services inimical to Catholic teaching. In other words, the bishops argued that their religious freedom was being infringed upon. And I agreed. Commonweal agreed. America agreed. The National Catholic Reporter agreed. E. J. Dionne. Mark Shields. Amy Sullivan. The Washington Post. The Economist. We all agreed that the Obama administration had overreached and needed to walk back the policy.
But then we started hearing other noises from the USCCB prolife office. The Hawaii arrangement? Phooey. It would force us to refer for immoral services. Then we heard bells. Taco bells, specifically, when USCCB Associate General Secretary Anthony Picarello floated the theory that the even if a Hawaii-like compromise was reached, the bishops still wouldn’t be satisfied because good Catholic employers, say, ones who owned Taco Bells, who didn’t want to provide contraception coverage — wherever they are — would not be exempt. That’s when some of us started to see the writing on the wall.
Yesterday, a flurry of USCCB letters and statements — private and public — gave the impression that the bishops are not of one mind when it comes to the revised mandate. To review, the new contraception mandate will not force any Catholic institution to purchase coverage that includes contraception services. Instead, it requires insurance companies to contact employees at such institutions and offer a separate policy that covers contraception at no cost to either employer or employee.
The first statement from the USCCB announced that the bishops were studying the new policy. Cardinal-designate Dolan, president of the bishops conference, called the revised rule “a step in the right direction,”and said he hoped to “work with the administration” to address the bishops’ concerns. Later in the day, another press release went up on the USCCB website. Titled, “Bishops Renew Call to Legislative Action on Religious Liberty” — in other words: we need you makers of law to write one to undo the mandate — the statement is considerably less optimistic than Dolan’s. Laced with sloppy talking points (e.g., “pregnancy is not a disease”), the statement says the conference needs time to study the administration’s proposal — but the bishops still want legislators and judges to rescind the mandate altogether:
First, he [Obama] has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.
Are the bishops asserting that the Affordable Care Act itself is illegal? HHS developed the list of mandated medical services (which includes contraception, along with many other services) because the ACA required it. And those “so many” who “would focus on exclusively on the question of religious liberty” are bishops. Like Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami, who just yesterday complained that “the administration continues to insist that the issue is about contraception; we disagree. It is about the first freedom of our Bill of Rights: the freedom of religion and respect for the rights of conscience.” So which is it? That the Affordable Care Act is illegal and gravely immoral because it mandates that employees have access to contraception coverage (including some that could act as abortifacients) — in other words, it’s about contraception? Or is it that the mandate is objectionable because, even as revised, it tramples religious freedom?
Here’s how that USCCB press release summarizes the revised mandate:
·It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.
This is an important point. I’m told the administration is committed to figuring this out; but it won’t be easy. Self-funded insurance plans (“self-insurance” is a misnomer) only contract with insurance companies to handle administrative tasks. Will those insurers provide the free contraception? This needs to get settled soon.
Back to the press release:
These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.
As explained to me by senior administration officials, that is false. Contraception coverage will be offered as a separate policy. If the bishops want to argue, as some critics already are, that they’re funding contraception by virtue of paying an insurance company at all, then they have committed themselves to a position at odds with their own practice. The premise of such a criticism is that money is fungible. Any dollar I give to an insurer — even for a policy that does not include contraception — could be used to offset the cost of providing such services as a separate policy. (That is the same argument the USCCB used to oppose the Affordable Care Act’s mechanism for handling abortion funding.) But of course bishops are currently doing just that — paying, say, Aetna for plans excluding contraception and abortion, while Aetna covers those services for other enrollees. Yet we have not heard a peep objecting to the arrangement.
And then there’s the question of the the bishops’ previous policy positions. During the health-care debate, the USCCB repeated the mantra that, when it came to abortion funding, all it wanted was to preserve the status quo, namely, the protections of the Hyde Amendment. That amendment prevents federal dollars from paying for elective abortions. For example, Medicaid is funded by a combination of state and federal dollars. Some states allow enrollees to receive coverage for elective abortions. The Hyde Amendment requires such states to segregate federal dollars from state funds that pay for elective abortions. So the bishops have already approved of a segregation-of-funds arrangement — and one that, according to Catholic teaching, involves a much graver evil. Why wouldn’t they approve of another one involving a lesser evil?
The revised ruling dispels the bishops’ original — and legitimate — criticism that Catholic institutions would be made to subsidize services they consider immoral. While the USCCB never made an explicit Catholic moral-theological argument, they were implicitly rejecting the first version of the mandate because, on their view, it forced them to illicitly cooperate with evil. Now, according to the new ruling, they won’t have to directly fund plans that include contraception. Keep in mind, the original narrow exemption remains in place. According to senior administration officials, the employees of chanceries, parishes, parish schools will not be eligible to receive free contraception coverage as a separate policy. But by the Catholic tradition’s reasoning, the bishops’ own policy positions, and their practice, they have run out of good reasons to object to the ruling.
Let’s say the bishops fail to grasp that the revised mandate constitutes a major victory for them, and they do not come to the same conclusions about the new ruling as have the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities USA (at least initially), and the Catholic social-justice group NETWORK — all of which have praised the revised mandate. What if they decide to pull employee health coverage and pay the penalty? How many institutions would be affected? Chanceries, parishes, and parish schools will not have to comply with the new mandate when it goes to effect in August 2013. The vast majority of Catholic colleges and universities are not under the administrative control of bishops. After the hospitals and the charitable organizations, what’s left?
If the bishops really want to go to bat for every private employer’s alleged right to opt out of providing contraception coverage, they will lose the public argument. And not only because Taco Bells don’t exist to carry out the mission of the Catholic Church, but because the public will start to wonder whether their objections all along weren’t motivated by religious-freedom concerns so much as by the desire to keep women from obtaining contraception.
Tags: Affordable Care Act, contraception, health care reform, HHS, USCCB
Thanks for following this.
Show of hands — who was surprised that liberal Catholics briefed beforehand by senior administration officials did a happy dance in response to President Obama’s revision of the contraception-coverage mandate?
GG, For the sake of argument, perhaps when the bishops finally get a chance to talk to the senior administration officials whom you find so persuasive they too will see that the new scheme is not just smoke and mirrors, as it appears to be to all but the mathematically challenged. Or, if the officials are too busy cultivating their allies, perhaps you can leak at least a few of the crucial details to the bishops, but only in materially remote cooperation with the evil hierarchs, of course.
Will somebody list all Catholic colleges and hospitals that NOW offer BC and have done so for years. SF Chronicle says Catholic colleges’ insurance in Ca have covered BC for years.
Even so, the bishops don’t pay insurance bills for Catholic colleges and they for a different reason don’t pay insurance bills for Catholic Taco Bells… because Taco Bell doesn’t have health insurance for their highly paid counter people. (-:… but maybe the bishops want the freedom and liberty to say absolutly no if the emploees had the nerve to ask for health insurance. at a Catholic franchise. .
Let me return here to a view I tried to express in the thread that John Schwewnker started earlier today.
Every responsible state has reason to establish and enforce conditions in which its citizens work. there are safety laws, anti-discrimination laws, taxes, licenses, etc. In a society that is both pluralistic and that has a government reasonably responsive to its citizens’ concerns, the government will devise policies programs that respond to their needs and concerns.
For an employer, any employer, this means that there are costs to doing business. One of the major costs is satisfying the reasonably established relevant state policies. In short, if x wants to be an employer in this society, he or she has to pay these costs. to avoid paying them, one would have to refrain from being an employer.
Now a few observations about the issue at hand.
1. It is not obviously unreasonable for the government to view these costs it imposes in the aggregate. Ask a business about its tax responsibilities. It’s the aggregated amount that is ordinarily the burden, not some particular part of the tax code. But when it is a particular provision of the code, then the business owners can seek to have that provision changed. Whether and how the government responds should depend upon how the change will affect the society as a whole, employers and employees alike. It shouldn’t want to give some employers unwarranted advantages vis-a-vis other employers. Nor should it want to place any employees at a disadvantage simply because they find themselves employed by the complaining employers.
2. As long as the employer wants to continue to employ workers, he or she has to be prepared, in a pluralistic society, to abide by the prevailing governmental policies. Certainly this is true of the Taco Bell owner.
3. I realize that the bishops don’t want to be connected in any way with a health care benefits package that includes contraceptive services. But I cannot see how they can reasonably claim that they have a moral right against the state that requires the state to agree with their claims that if their employees wind up with contraceptive services, this would mean that their Catholic employers were funding that particular benefit. That the employer has the right to determine exactly what part of the cost of doing business is to be counted as paying for this benefit strikes me as bordering on the absurd.
Slight correction you may want to make: I believe NETWORK is a social justice lobby, not a “charitable group” like Catholic Charities (though it may have a 501c3 and be in the Kenedy Directory for all I know).
Patrick –
In the language of Catholic ethics, cooperation is not “materially remote” cooperation, it’s “remote material cooperation”. The meanings are worlds apart. In fact the first phrase makes no sense. Do learn some tradition ethics and vocabulary. (I don’t know a lot of ethics, but that is really a howler.)
Grant – I’m curious about your description of the fungibility of the dollars, as it doesn’t accord with my understanding of how the pooling works. Of course XYZ Firm writes a check to 123 Big Insurer to cover premiums for its employees, but it is not my understanding that any savings generated from XYZ’s plans are then applied to cover more expensive services ABC Firm’s health plans. Aside from moral issues, such an arrangement would seem to create a massive free riding problem – and more importantly cut into 123′s profit. So I think the “pool” of dollars is limited to the specific plan and isn’t a general kitty being spread around.
This whole mess reminds me of the advantage of ending the tax deduction for employer provided health plans to begin with.
Another analogy: it’s like not tipping at a Paris cafe, because the service charge is already factored in. You’re still paying the waiters, i.e. Planned Parenthood.
By the way, I do agree with you that the bishops run the risk of making this look more like a fight over birth control writ large rather than religious liberty.
Quelle surprise! Catholic hierarchs niggling over minor details. Methinks, it’s that “gimlet eye of a canon lawyer” in evidence, again.
I have to think that the tepid response of Dolan in part reflects, himself an experience, astute politician, that Dolan knows that he may have won this political battle, but it seems that Commander-in-Chief Obama just may have won the war.
[NY Times reported today that Obama flashed his temper with his aides this past week and ordered them to come up with a revision of the mandate and end this controversy.]
The bureaucrats in the bowels of HHS will now have togo to work and start making allowances and compromises and arrangements (that’s what bureaucrats are for) for all those self-insured outliers, like EWTN (Catholic television network), but essentially it seems that Obama has tactically and politically outmaneuvered the hierarchs. It doesn’t seem that the President will have to go any further now politically to assuage the hierarchs.
The Catholic Left, i.e. Obama’s allies, [if there really is such a creature] are now back on board ready to go into the election, assisting the President in those critical swing states. The public is not going to support the hierarch’s retro ideology on banning contraception, or abortion in all circumstances for that matter. The hierarchs are on their own in that endeavor – they are not going to get the government to enforce a regimen when they have failed to convince their own people for so many decades.
In sum, all women will have access to needed health care coverage. That’s a pretty good health outcome. The real winners here are women.
Sadly, in the long run the hierarchs may have only further deepened their irrelevance and alienation from their own people.
Ann, I’ll accept your correction. I had thought of using the phrase “remotely material cooperation” but I thought that sounded too awkward.
The important point was that I wasn’t recommending any direct contact between GG and the bishops as that might violate his core principles.
This was probably not the best fight for the bishops to reestablish their moral authority. They lost their credibility due to much less remote cooperation with much more evil acts, and this is a situation where they benefit while bearing none of the costs if they get their way.
New York provides to parochial schools school bus service and textbooks for secular subjects. Under the fungibility of money argument, this assistance frees up funds for religious instruction, and therefore violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Your bishops are using an argument that can be turned around against them.
“Self-funded insurance plans (”self-insurance” is a misnomer) only contract with insurance companies to handle administrative tasks. Will those insurers provide the free contraception? This needs to get settled soon.”
–Grant Gallicho
Switching to commercial insurance should be feasible for most of those Catholic self-insurers. As Bishop Morlino found out, you have to be a very big organization before self-insurance is cheaper and the risk becomes manageable. Many of them became self-insured only to escape state laws requiring contraception insurance coverage in commercial insurance.
I think Jeff Landry is right, and it’s an important point. Employers who pay an insurer for a plan that doesn’t cover contraception are paying into a pool for all policy holders with the same plan. They are not paying for the medical fees of policy holders who have a plan that does cover contraception. The money used by the insurance company to pay for the medical services provided to those with policy A is segregated from the money used to pay for services provided to those with policy B. If Unagidon is reading this, perhaps he can set us straight.
Grant: I thought that Commonweal’s objection to the mandate was that the religious exemption was too narrow, sectarian, and Protestant. It seems to me that Obama has not widened the religious exemption, but he has created a special provision that would allow employers to side step this one particular service. I think this is a dangerous precedent if the goal is to make comprehensive coverage available to everyone, but that’s another issue. My point is this: Given that the religious exemption is still as narrow as it was in the first place, it’s not surprising that the Bishops are not satisfied. The question is: why are you?
Be careful, bishops, be very, very careful. The lagging support that the President may have had among liberal Democrats and Independent may have just been overcome by this public and blatant display of Catholic petulance. There is enough animosity against Catholic leadership in this country across all spectra already. This little brouhaha may come back to bite the Catholic establishment in the toosh more than it realized it would – particularly if they continue in their petulance and still kvetch about the compromise offer on the table.
Be careful, bishops, be very, very careful.
Re-read what Eugene Pagano said above for just ONE example of “what you sow, so shall you reap” politics.
Eric,
As I understand it, the new “accommodation” is available only to religious institutions, so there are really two exemptions now. As long as the new exemption really does keep Catholic institutions from having to subsidize contraception, then the bishops have no reason to object to it, even if they would prefer that there was not a contraception mandate in the first place.
What happens when an approach is perceived more as partisan than principled??????
You can niggle on about the accomodation, but…..
Grant –
There is a linguistic problem with the legal term “fungible” which is being tossed around in these discussions. Money is fungible legally, but what does this mean? It does Not mean that
money which we owned in the past and which is put into a bank account by the new owner becomes some one big metaphysical blob of money-mush for which we are jointly responsible.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “fungible” means “goods of which each particle is identical with each other particle, such as grain or oil. With respect to goods or securities, those of which any unit by nature or usage or trade, the equivalent of any other like unit.” “identical” here means “identical IN KIND”. It does not mean that each individual unit is the same unit/individual as the other individuals. Note especially: fungibility has to do only with the *equivalence* of units — it has nothing to do with any *identity of ownership* persisting through a money transaction nor with any sort of combination of individual units into some metaphysical monster like the money=mush we sometimes imagine it to be.
A related problem is the confusion in some people’s thinking of the identity of a unit of money and its ownership. When I give you money, my *ownership* goes out of existence, along with my responsibility for what you do with with it. True, I *might* intend that you do evil with what is now yours, but I can also intend that you NOT do evil, even though I have reason to think that you will.
Although the *ownership* of a unit of money is not the same thing as the money itself, the bishops seem to be assuming (irrationally) that their own prior ownership semi=miraculously continues in existence when they give the money to the ins. cos. and that they are therefore responsible for its use, that they have somehow co-operated with evil. But to say that the *identity* of a particular unit of money persists when it is given by one person to another is NOT to say that the original *ownership of the money* persists The payment of a premium involves an *old* ownership and a *new* one, and it is the new ownership (that of the ins. co.) which which grounds the company’s responsibility for what is done with its money.
Yes, one can intend that the company do something with it, and *if* what we intend is evil, then we are guilty — but our sin is not the company’s sin. Sin is always personal. And if we don’t intend an evil that the company does with it, then we are not cooperating in their evil deed. So if the company takes what used to be our money and pays for contraceptives with it, that is not our responsibility. We have not cooperated with evil at all unless we *intend* that the company buy the contraceptives with what used to be our money.
Do not multiply sins unnecessarily.
Patrick Malloy:
By percentage, probably the same number surprised that conservative Catholics are suddenly desperate to find new–and hilarious–reasons to object. Roughly zero in each instance, if you’re counting.
Grant mentioned item #5 in the USCCB’s talking points, but it was #4 that struck me, whining that Catholic affliated insurance plans can’t sell to the general public anymore.
LAUGH. What’s the First Amendment suppose to protect? The Church’s ability to save share in a market for financial instruments? Or the Church’s ability to save souls?
Patrick ==
You’re alternative expression still won’t do.
Given how you good you are at making careful distinction, you might even enjoy the scholastics’ finer points.
I’m happy to be corrected, but the idea that each health-insurance policy is assigned its own pool of cash by the insuring company seems impracticable to me. Group purchasers fiddle with policies (through brokers usually) in order to achieve a desirable premium rate. Is there a pool of cash for each of those policies? Or several pools that the insurer assigns to group plans based on a set of benefits each negotiates? Why would an insurer do that? What does free-riding even mean in shared-risk pools? Everyone pays in knowing that some benefits will be used by certain enrollees (like pregnancy care, or cancer care) and not others.
But let’s say I’m wrong about that. The fungibility problem would still apply to an insurer’s profit, to which all group purchasers contribute by paying premiums, and which in turn allow insurers to provide coverage for contraception, abortion, sterilization, etc.
John Hayes: My understanding is that large employers choose self-funded plans because they save money in the long run.
Re the show of hands — I’ve never voted for a Republican presidential candidate, but I know I’m conservative by Commonweal standards. So here goes.
I first heard about the new Obama position on NPR while driving back, and I did do a little happy dance at first — Great, a redo of the unforced error — Catholic hospitals don’t have to underwrite contraception, the insurers will do it instead. Hmmm. Then I listened to the EJ Dionne – David Brooks segment. http://www.npr.org/2012/02/10/146709343/week-in-politics-birth-control-and-the-primaries
Dionne hoped the new ruling would be good, not just a good first step, because the Catholic Health Association seemed to like it. Brooks had the more incisive analysis, calling it a subterfuge:
BROOKS: Yeah, I think there would have been consequences. I think a lot of people saw this mostly as a religious liberty issue. I think they understood that and that’s why they took the decision today. And I think the decision’s a fudge. It’s a subterfuge. They hide the cost of contraception behind a cloud. But nonetheless, that’s what we do in messy society. It’s not always principled. It’s not always logical, but we’ve got to deal with a lot of different sorts of people. We want to show respect to – especially to the Catholic workers who are really doing the Lord’s work in these neighborhoods. And by hiding the cost behind a subterfuge, that shows them some respect and so I think it’s a step in the right direction.
DIONNE: And I’m not sure I’d say it’s a subterfuge, as David says. I think it honors two religious liberty principles, that there ought to be access to contraception for employees but the church should not be forced to pay for it. And I think they’ve achieved two worthy goals here.
BROOKS: Yeah, somebody is going to end up paying it. I mean, they say the insurance industry is going to pay but they’ll pass the cost on. And probably some of those costs will go to the church. Nonetheless, it’s a polite fiction. It gives the church so they’re not directly responsible. And mostly, it shows respect and that’s what, you know, we do in our pluralistic society.
Dionne is doing a happy squirm — he doesn’t want it to be a subterfuge. Brooks will have none of that — it’s a polite fiction, the Church will stay pay for contraception, but it’s a show of respect. (Love the image of Obama showing respect to the mob boss bishops.) And Brooks is just fine with that, end of story. It’s a little more complicated for Dionne perhaps. Grant, I think it’s too soon to be calling out people as difficult just yet. Let’s see how it works.
The money used by the insurance company to pay for the medical services provided to those with policy A is segregated from the money used to pay for services provided to those with policy B. If Unagidon is reading this, perhaps he can set us straight.
Matthew Boudway,
Best not to get too committed to any one theory when people may come along who actually know the facts, but I am guessing you are wrong. If I buy an individual policy from United Healthcare, it is certainly not the case that United Healthcare expects to reimburse me for all my medical expenses using the money I pay them in premiums. Why should it be that way when a company buys healthcare for a group of employees through United Healthcare? If an organization expects to have all its employees medical costs paid out of the premiums it pays for its medical insurance, with the insurance company making a profit on top of it all, the organization ought to simply self-insure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/collins-the-battle-behind-the-fight.html?ref=opinion
We have not cooperated with evil at all unless we *intend* that the company buy the contraceptives with what used to be our money.
Ann,
I hate to move to the other side, but I can’t agree here. Surely companies can do things that are so reprehensible that we do not want to contribute to them in any way, even if we do not intend what they do.
James Englert:
REALLY?!?!? Brooks’ position isn’t the slightest bit incisive. It’s actually somewhat more juvenile and shallow than his his usual pablum.
All he really did in the end was offer a banal truism about the fundamental mechanism of insurance. Through premiums, in effect, everyone is always going to pay what everyone is going to get through claims. Yeah. So? Lloyd’s figured that 350 years ago.
Fact is, the Obama Adminstration wants to make contraception coverage standard issue and USCCB wants to stop that. Period. Restatements of the obvious with solemn eyebrow scrunches by David Brooks does not change that fundamental dynamic.
Excellent analysis. I made some simailr points (http://vox-nova.com/2012/02/10/contraception-compromise-sounds-sensible/) and was immediately attacked by the the GOP-leaning Catholic right. In this group, the “Obama Deranagement Syndome” is particularly virulent, and the tactics come directly from the Marxist playbook – seek to poison the stream and annihilate the enemy rather than compromise among people with very different viewpoints.
My fear is that the bishops are listening to these crazies, whose real goal is the Protestantization of American Catholicism (is it any wonder that the 2 Catholic GOP candidates are both the darlings of the evangelical right?). And in listening to this group, the bishops are actually setting back the cause of persuading people about the virues of the pro-life cause or about sexual ethics. Instead, it is seen as just another front in a doomed cultural battle of embittered white people, especially men, especially from the south.
And when will people start asking honest questions about state level mandates and about violation of religious freedoms in immigration laws supported by the GOP?
Matthew Boudway said: “The money used by the insurance company to pay for the medical services provided to those with policy A is segregated from the money used to pay for services provided to those with policy B. If Unagidon is reading this, perhaps he can set us straight.”
In a past life, I was he president of a company with several hundred employees. I never imagined that he checks we sent the insurance company each month were going into a pool to pay claims for our employees. Once we sent them the check it was their money and they could do anything thy wanted with it. Their side of the deal was that they would pay all the bills for our employees for all the benefits provided in the policy regardless of how much it cost them to do that. There was no connection between the money we paid them and the money they paid out.
I suppose that an insurance company could set up a “Catholic health insurance” division that sold only to Catholic institutions. If they exist, I’ve never dealt with one. I think there are some smaller insurance companies that are Catholic-only or Christian-only.
Like this couldn’t be seen coming. I don’t think the bishops were ever worried about conscience in the first place. Now their bluff has been called and they’re changing the argument.
jfx, my point was that Brooks didn’t hesitate to call it a subterfuge.
Joan Walsh calls it for what it is:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/11/catholic_tribalism_and_the_contraceptive_flap/singleton/
I think David Brooks, as cited by James Englert above, is making a significant error. He assumes that there are costs to the insurance co. That will need to be passed on.
I look at it this way, with a variety of made up numbers:
Employers pay insurers $100 for insurance +$5 for administrative costs.
The insurer sets the rate, anticipating paying out $97 in claims and keeping $3 profit.
The insurer then spends $2 to offer women contraceptive services, anticipating paying out $93 in claims because of the decrease in pregnancy related claims. The insurer keeps 7-2=$5 profit.
$2 could be counted as an administrative expense. Or it could be a speculative expense based on possible future savings. In either case, the money spent contractually belongs to the insurer, not the insured. This.math is not unique to contraception. It could be $2 for smoking cessation, which decreases smoking related claims. $2 expense could be raised by raising the premium, but the insurer could justify spending it to increase his profit $2. There is no loss to pass on to customers.
The real numbers are probably closer. As I understand it, this is how insurance works. It is a shell game. It is all lies. It does not make sense to people who know math. Etc etc. these are valid complaints, but they are complaints about insurance, not about government mandates.
(Fade as Dick Powell sings You’ll get pie in the sky when you die if you buy life insurance)
From an earlier post on self-insured plans and Fortune 500 companies:
“Self-insured is usually the route used by the Fortune 500 who can and want to design their own benefit plans in order to meet the needs of an older but more experienced workforce; want to maintain the benefits they have usually been offering over time so they can keep experienced workers and attract highly desired recruits. Many small and mid-market companies opt for the standard plans because of cost, because it takes an internal staff to administer your own benefit plan; pay for claims, etc.” They typically do not save money over time but they meet the needs of the specific corporation and can be customized – expatriates, keeping older, experienced workers healthy, competitive benefit offerings that give them an edge in higher highly qualified recruits, etc.
Over the next five years and the full implementation of PPACA, it will be interesting to see the future of “employer” self-insured plans. Since 2000, self-insured plans across the board have seen double digit increases in medical costs every year. This means that a corporation such as ExxonMobil pays more than $1 billion annually in medical coverage. That pattern can not continue for corporations. Realize again that PPACA was a compromise with large, corporate insurance companies – if the US Congress had moved to a single payer system, we would not be having this debate at all.
Mr. Boudway – good points…..this “compromise” basically splits the original HHS decision into two groups: the original exemption continues for dioceses, parishes, parish schools. Now, the “not for profit” catholic hospitals, universities, and social agencies have been given a way to meet the bishops’ “religious liberty” argument.
No one has yet identified or reported on the actual number of:
- catholic hospitals, catholic universities, and catholic social agencies in the US?
- then, two sub groups – how many of the above already met the original HHS decision (would bet that it is more than 50% and the bishops have rarely (never) squacked about this before); how many do not offer contraceptive plans? (example – DePaul University, largest catholic university in US, had to offer contraceptives when female faculty filed a lawsuit based on the EEOC laws and gender discrimination. The University chose to just add the benefit)
- finally, how many in the first sub group (dioceses, schools, parishes) already offer plans with contraceptives (again, with no bishops squacking about this)?
Would again suggest that we will continue to see a divide between the CHA and some bishops just like we did with PPACA. Deep down, the original mission of the catholic hospitals, agencies was to extend medical care to citizens that were underprivileged, economically poor; groups that were minorities; special needs groups, migrants, immigrants (illegal). In many ways, catholic hospitals/agencies laid the groundwork (using the gospel imperatives) to expand and extend comprehensive medical care to women (in all of the groups above). So, this compromise meets both the narrow religious liberty argument and captures the social justice values and mission of the sisters. (Something we don’t hear the bishops speak about at all – and Dolan is supposed to be quite an American History expert?)
On a cynical note – it is interesting to me that a few of the most outspoken bishops to date – Slattery and Wenski – are both big supporters of the TLM with all of its pre-Vatican II pomp and circumstance. Does make one wonder?
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/03/2622603/thousand-attend-first-latin-mass.html
Matt: Thanks for responding. It seems to me that, following the logic of the last Commonweal editorial, the government is still deciding what institutions are “religious enough” to receive a general “religious exemption” and which ones are only religious when it comes to contraception and thus require an “itemized exemption.” So, it seems logical that, for example, Fr. Jenkins might still be upset that Obama is saying that Notre Dame is “not religious enough” to simply be exempt from healthcare minimums all together. I also don’t see how, given this accomodation, we avoid the multiplication of “itemized exemptions” for institutions that self-define as religious.
James Englert:
If that’s so, then the entire controversy is subterfuge, including the Bishops’ contribution. Which I just more or less admitted. If I didn’t, I hereby admit it now. But there’s nothing remotely incisive about that analysis.
Again. It’s ALL subterfuge except for two things:
1. The Adminstration wants reproductives services covered as preventative health care.
2. The Bishops hate that and want to stop it.
The rest of it can get buried in the Vatican Library for a thousand years until some young scholar stumbles on it and gets a Ph. D. out of it.
Fun fact – - contraception is not covered by single payer insurance in Canada.
See: “How much does birth control cost in Canada?”
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100104160213AAhB8YU
Fun fact – – contraception is not covered by single payer insurance in Canada.
Patrick Molloy,
The reason is nobody wants to be put on a long waiting list for contraceptives. You need them right away! :-)
It is also a fact that Canada’s national health plan pays for almost all abortions.
If contraceptives sold as cheaply here as in Canada, we wouldn’t need insurance to cover it.
I sense that the Bishops know that they face a public relations challenge. How can average folks understand “the grave moral evil” involved when employees of Catholic-affiliated organizations are entitled to insurance coverage of contraception “independent” of the employer’s benefit package? On this blog there has been an informative discussion of the intricacies of the health insurance business. These discusxsions illustrate the difficulty of condensing these issues into sound bites usuable in Sunday sermons–particularly when some very knowledgeable insurance professionals might be sitting in the pews!
The Bishops now seemed focused on two “non-negotiable objectives.” First, Congress must pass the “Respect for the Rights of Conscience Act;” and second, HHS must eliminate the mandate that requires insurance policies to cover sterilization and contraception. Over the next 10 months, there are only two ways these goals can be achieved: either the Suprene Court rules unconstitutional the “individual mandate” of “Obamacare” — or the Republicans gain control of the Presidency and Congress. The Bishops have no direct control over the Supreme Court (even though six of the Justices are Catholics.) But the Bishops — along with House Republicans–do seem intent on keeping the passage of the “Rights of Conscience” Act front and center until November.
And if you enjoyed wrestling with the moral complexities of insurance funding, you have a real treat in store when (and if!) a serious discussion of the constitutional technicalities of the First Amendment — “free exercise of religion” — and RFRA –begins!
Joe F
“If contraceptives sold as cheaply here as in Canada, we wouldn’t need insurance to cover it.”
So we are forcing Catholic employers to subsidize contraception rather than using state power to help make contraception as inexpensive as it should be. There is the First Amendment, of course, but the business of America…
I have a not fully-though though sense that what we are seeing is wrapped up with a feeling that Catholics have become too assimilated in the U.S. and need to develop a stronger “Catholic identity” by doing things that mark them out as being “Catholic.”. Over on Father Z’s. Blog, 78% of readers voted that it is very important for th USCCB to restore meatless Fridays year around and another 11% “guessed” it would be good.
Perhaps some people see Catholic institutions refusing to provide insurance cover for contraception for any employee, Catholic or not, as a bold public marker of Catholic identity.
In that case, the issue is not whether the Church or institution pays for the contraception coverage but whether it is available under any circumstances – even if it is provided at no charge by the insurance company.
It will be interesting to see how the bihops’ arguments evolve.
P.S. That “meatless Fridays” poll was in response to a letter by Bishop Dolan:
“Another reason that usually surfaces in any discussion of this issue is the value of what are called external markers enhancing our religious identity.
Scholars of religion–all religions, not just Catholic–tell us that an essential of a vibrant, sustained, attractive, meaningful life of faith in a given creed is external markers.
The essence of faith, of course, is the interior, the inside life of the soul. Jesus, for instance, always reminds us that it’s what’s inside that counts.
However, genuine interior religion then gives rise to external traits, especially acts of charity and virtue.
Among these exterior characteristics are these markers that the scholars talk about.
For some religions, it might be dress; others are noted for feastdays, seasons, calendars, music, ritual, customs, special devotions, and binding moral obligations.
Islam, for example, is renowned for Ramadan, the holy season now upon them; dress; required prayer three times daily; and obligatory pilgrimage.
Orthodox Jews are obvious, for instance, for their skull caps, for the seriousness of the Sabbath, and for feastdays.
What about us Catholics? For God’s sake, I trust we are recognized for our faith, worship, charity, and lives of virtue.
But, what are the external markers that make us stand out?
Lord knows, there used to be tons of them: Friday abstinence from meat was one of them, but we recall so many others: seriousness about Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation; fasting on the Ember Days; saints names for children; confession at least annually; loyal membership in the local parish; fasting for three hours before Holy Communion, just to name a few.”
http://blog.archny.org/?p=1567
From Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic:
The insurance industry controls much of what is possible, but it seems unlikely that the fungibility of premium pools could be reduced in the fee for service context and the need for actuarial consistency. True, with respect to contraception alone we may be shooting ourselves in the collective feet, but there will come a day when the same reasoning is applied to abortion and euthanasia.
Re the johnathan Cohn excerpt.
If the bishops were willing to think about I that way, that would be fine with me.
In reality, there are no separate pots of money.
In that scheme, the employer buys an insurance contract that includes contraception for every one who wants It.
If the total premium is $100,000 per month and employees pay 30% of he cost, the employer sends the company a check for $100,000 each month and th payroll system reduces all employees paychecks by the amount of their share of the premium. All he insurance company knows is that it got a $100,000 check in the mail.
If the employer chooses to think that when an employee buys contraception the money came from the amount contributed by the employee, so be it, but no one else involved in the process understands it that way.
” — there used to be tons of them: Friday abstinence from meat was one of them, but we recall so many others: seriousness ** about Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation; fasting on the Ember Days; saints names for children; confession at least annually; loyal membership in the local parish; fasting for three hours before Holy Communion, just to name a few.”
** maybe you have mistaken the fear of mortal sin and hell when deliberately missing mass on Sundays and HD of Obligation for “seriousness.”
How about —
The plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car.
The BVM in an upended bathtub in the front yard.
The buried statue of St. Joseph when you wanted to sell your house.
The (unused) kleenex on the heads of women in church when they forgot their hats.
— and, lest we forget: the large families and the worn-out mothers, too. That was a clear “marker” of a Catholic family.
John Hayes: I think you are on to something regarding the renewal of “Catholic identity.” Once a religion becomes an identity, everything a religious person does can become an exercise of his or her religion. In which case, the government has an interest in making sure that religion so understood cannot impose its practice on unwitting and unwilling non-adherents by, for example, making their rights as employees subordinate to the religious dogma of their employer when the work for which they have been hired is not explicitly religious in nature. This is true whether we’re talking about schools, hospitals, or Taco Bell franchises.
Report from Western New York on Catholic institutions dealing with teh state law on contraception coverage:
“Last week, Bishop Edward U. Kmiec sent a letter to all parishes in the Buffalo diocese calling upon area Catholics to oppose the mandate and contact their federal representatives.
“We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens,” Kmiec wrote in his letter, which was similar to correspondence sent by his colleague prelates in New York and across the country.
New York is one of 28 states that have mandated birth control coverage for employers with prescription drug plans. The state law exempted churches, seminaries and other institutions with a mainly religious mission, but hospitals, schools and social service agencies were not exempted.
As a result, 1,300 full-time employees of Baker Victory Services, the human services organization formerly operated by Father Nelson Baker, receive contraception coverage in their health plans.
“We’ve done it reluctantly only because we didn’t have a platform to push back,” said Burkard. “We’ve been pushed already; we’re not going to be pushed any further.”
Catholic Charities of Buffalo officials declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a prepared statement, the agency said it complies “under protest” with the state law and includes coverage of contraceptive drugs or devices in its health plan for 493 employees.
“To not comply would be violating the law and could result in penalties and fines,” it said. “When this state law was approved in 2002, it received very little attention or public opposition. The Obama administration’s recent decision to mandate even broader coverage at the national level shines new light on not only state law but the more fundamental issue of religious freedom and liberty.”
Officials from the area’s Catholic hospitals, which employ 8,000 people, also declined to comment.
“We’re still studying the issue, and once we finish that evaluation, we probably will be ready to comment, but not at this time,” said JoAnn Cavanaugh, a spokeswoman for Catholic Health, which includes Mercy, Sisters and Kenmore Mercy hospitals.
St. Bonaventure University, which has 447 full-time employees, also complies with the state law, said Sister Margaret Carney, president.
But Carney and Burkard said the federal regulation goes a step further than New York’s law by requiring coverage of drugs that can induce abortion and forcing employers to subsidize coverage of sterilization.
“When you move to something that has a whole different moral footing, then you’re really raising the stakes,” said Carney.
Read more: http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article727121.ece
Matthew said: “I think Jeff Landry is right, and it’s an important point. Employers who pay an insurer for a plan that doesn’t cover contraception are paying into a pool for all policy holders with the same plan. They are not paying for the medical fees of policy holders who have a plan that does cover contraception. The money used by the insurance company to pay for the medical services provided to those with policy A is segregated from the money used to pay for services provided to those with policy B. If Unagidon is reading this, perhaps he can set us straight.”
If one is referring to claims that the insurance company pays, we call this kind of insurance “risk business”. The money for all of risk business is basically pooled, although we will track certain product categories (like HMOs versus PPOs) and group size categories (2-100 members versus 100 plus members) as “books of business”. The book of business is made up of all the groups in it. Each group has its own “medical loss ratio” (MLR), which is claims divided by premiums and which is expressed as a percentage. For example, if one pays $500 in premium and has $400 in claims, $400/$500 = 80 percent, so the MLR is 80%. Some groups have low MLRs and some have very high ones (imagine someone having a heart transplant; there is no way that they could cover that with the premiums from their group.)
The book of business has an MLR made of the combined claims divided by the combined premium. I could go on with this fascinating topic, but the point is that insurance company pools their premiums. They do not actually segregate them in any practical way. But how could they? When we pay our taxes, which physical dollar do we pay for Medicare and which one for defence? Could one withhold a dollar for one and not the other?
The only real way to make it work at all, in my opinion, would be for the Catholic agency to simply not offer contraception etc. as a benefit. A worker would have to pay out of pocket and make the personal choice to do so. Would this change the riskiness of the group and lead to higher premiums? Probably, although how much higher I can’t say (because I don’t know). Would these higher premiums be an injustice to the Catholic agency? That might be the real question.
John H. —
The notion of “Catholic institutions refusing to provide insurance cover for contraception ,,,, as a bold public marker of Catholic identity” reminds me of the times when a Catholic college would forbid beer on campus, thereby forcing the easily identified, “marked” Catholic students to gather down the hill to drink. The idea of a marker based on the institution declaring one thing while common knowledge is that it means little or nothing for the behavior of most involved Catholics does more harm than good. (e.g., Catholic contraception vs. Humanae Vitae)
Similarly, the meatless Friday rule often seemed more rewarding than penitential, as intended, for some living close to the NorthEast coast. The weekly obligation appeared to be to eat fish on Friday or else crabs, lobster, clams, or scallops — not bad. Some careful forethought on the subject would be a good preliminary, with particular attention to the hoards outside the USCCB actually expected to show their marks.
This is becoming impossibly complex.
I’m waiting to see what Dionne says.
Unagidon –
If I read you correctly, the MLR consists, at least in part, of a certain category of claims. Yet, if a certain policy doesn’t cover certain types of claims, I.e. contraception, then the grop premiums associated with that book of business don’t go to MLRs associated with a different subset of claims. So there is pooling, yet only among a common set of claims.
A brief word. Suppose that there is a consensus among citizens of a state that employees, for whomever they work, ought to have health care coverage that includes contraception. Suppose that their political representatives write laws that provide such coverage. Is it the Catholic position that the government cannot rightly write such laws, even if many people think that it is immoral for such coverage to be available? Even if the government does what it can to shield Catholic institutions from having to pay for such coverage? I trust that this is not the Catholic position. If I’m mistaken and it is the Catholic position, then what is to be said about Catholic participation in a pluralist democracy. It seems to me that some people would take us back to the pre- John Courtney Murray days.
I think the response of the President is a good compromise and one that the bishops should be satisfied with. I agree with David Smith that this issue has become impossibly complex, and it need not be. In my view, the Church is making something out of what should be “nothing,” as implied by Jack Barry above, and they should leave well enough alone. The time to make a claim as to the morality of contraception was long ago and they could not and effectively would not make that claim to their membership, so why make the claim now? The current Kennedy scandal in the news this week is certainly not helping the catholic cause. Until the church fully owns up to its own scandals, they do not have a leg to stand on concerning an issue that most people feel is a non-issue.
Markers?… Priests must wear clerics at all times when in public.. Sutanes preferred with Gregorian broad hats… { no excuse that they get ‘looks’.] ….do this first and then force dress the Sisters back in habits. That’s the ticket..
Bernard D. (9:15pm) — Powerful question, with long reach if answered. Is the word in the 4th sentence meant to be “moral” or “Immoral”?
Jeff said: “If I read you correctly, the MLR consists, at least in part, of a certain category of claims. Yet, if a certain policy doesn’t cover certain types of claims, I.e. contraception, then the group premiums associated with that book of business don’t go to MLRs associated with a different subset of claims. So there is pooling, yet only among a common set of claims.”
No. All premiums are pooled. It all goes into one big pot.
An insurance company will have lots and lots of different products. The difference between products is in what they will precisely cover and not cover. But if policy A is an HMO that covers contraception and policy B is one that does not, premiums are not segregated between these two. How could they be? Policy A will have different risk parameters from policy B and will therefore have a different cost. But insurance companies put dirty contraception-funding dollars in the same basket as the pure non-contraception dollars. That’s the thing about money; it’s always becomes innocent when it associates with other money. Sort of like being in a room sharing the air with a serial killer. You can’t say that you will breathe your air and he will breathe his air and it will somehow be different air.
(I am not very sympathetic to the idea of contraception coverage, not so much because it’s contraception but because contraception is an elective thing. I think that we should focus (first) on non-elective stuff.)
“BROOKS: Yeah, somebody is going to end up paying it. I mean, they say the insurance industry is going to pay but they’ll pass the cost on.”
No, they won’t pass the cost on. They will pay for the contraceptives — and they’ll pay with their own money. There is no need to pass on the cost.
Brooks and the bishops are claiming that because the money now makes the ins. co. more affluent (i.e. enlarges its pool of money/bank account) that what used to be the bishops’ money somehow enables the company to do what it otherwise would not have been able to do, viz., pay for the contraceptives. But there are at least two problems with this.
First, unless the the bishops’ money was earmarked from the beginning as payment to the contraceptive company and unless the bishops’ *agreed* that it would be earmarked so, it is difficult to see how it can be said that the ins. co. paid the contraceptive company with “the bishops’ money” in *any* sense of that phrase.
Second, the bishops’ money is not the only money now in the ins. co’s pool. All of its other premium-payers have together enlarged the pool, thus enabling the co. to become more affluent. So it isn’t as if the bishops’ contribution to the pool is the total amount enabling the ins. co. to pay for the contraceptives. At most, only a fraction of what the bishops used to own will be used to pay for other people’s contraceptives. And the most salient point here is that the money is NO LONGER the bishops’ own.
Third, *every* payment of any sort to any second party enables the second party to do things with the money which are immoral when the party so chooses. When you pay a restaurant for a meal, the owner will likely pool that money in her bank account. Like the ins. co, the restaurant owner is *also* capable of buying contraceptives with it and perhaps will. But this doesn’t stop you from paying the bill. When you pay the bill you are paying for the meal and ONLY for the meal. And that the money you give her might be spent for contraceptive on her way home shouldn’t stop you from paying her. Why? For the simple reason that you are not paying her for her contraceptives but for the meal you bought.
So, perhaps religious liberty is not the core issue after all…
It’s a much abused concept anyway, outside of freedom to worship.
Religious liberty was used by bishops for decades as a cover-up for their personnel decisions. “In order to practice our faith, we have the right to be as negligent as we want in assigning sexual predators. We claim the First Amendment allows us to rely on religious doctrines like forgiveness and redemption as excuses to criminally endanger children. No one can tell us how to handle priests.”
By all means – soutanes for all.
See picture here: http://www.wattsandco.com/clerical-wear/priests-wear/clerical-full-soutane.html
No change:
“Local Catholics attending Mass on Sunday will still hear Cardinal Francis George take issue with President Barack Obama’s controversial birth-control insurance coverage policy despite the president’s “compromise.”
The letter from George to be read at all Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago is dated Feb. 5.
But it has not been updated even after the president on Friday backed down from his stance asking all employers including organizations tied to religious groups to pay for insurance plans that included free birth control coverage.
The archdiocese on Saturday said George asked late Friday to make sure parishes and pastors read the same letter, with no changes.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/10582951-418/georges-letter-to-be-read-despite-obamas-birth-control-compromise.html
Unagidon, thanks for the crash course in health insurance. Your explanation tends to corroborate the suspicion that the accommodation is a “polite fiction,” to borrow David Brooks’s term. If it is, then there is no reason to be surprised or outraged that the bishops are not satisfied with this solution and still want a straightforward extension of the exemption that already applies to churches and religious communities. Without the accommodation, the default coverage paid for by Catholic institutions would include contraception; with it, the default coverage does not include contraception — policy holders have to opt in. But once they do, the funding is no different. The insurance companies are still using money from the premiums paid by Catholic institutions to pay for their employees’ contraception.
(A side question: In what respect would a separate policy just for contraception, paid for separately, be “insurance”? If I had a separate policy just for heart failure, say, that could be insurance in the traditional sense: I don’t know that I’ll have heart failure, but if I do, the insurance company will pay for all or some of my medical bills. If I am buying “insurance” for a product I intend to use regularly (and if I weren’t intending to use it, I wouldn’t be buying the separate policy that covers it), then this no longer has anything to do with risk, which is what insurance is all about. Or, as Megan McArdle put it, “Preventing pregnancy is not a low-frequency, high cost event, and thus it is not really insurable.” So, if I am paying the whole premium myself, then the only reason to buy this contraception “insurance” would be to take advantage of the fact that in our irrational health care system it may be cheaper for an insurance company to buy my contraceptives than it is for me to buy them myself. Like you, I am not very sympathetic to the idea of contraception coverage, and for the same reason. But I do think the question we ought to be asking is whether contraception would be too expensive for people to buy for themselves if private health insurance companies weren’t expected to cover it. In countries like Canada, where people pay for chemical contraceptives out of pocket, those contraceptives are less expensive; there is a high demand for contraceptives, and the market keeps the price down. (the market may fail to function in this way for medical services that are insurable in the traditional sense of the word.) In countries where contraceptives are covered, but by the state not private insurers, contraceptive are less expensive because the state makes good use of its bargaining power. Either alternative, it seems to me, is preferable to our situation.)
But this is the situation we are in, and bishops are currently paying premiums to insurance companies even though that money could end up funding contraception and abortions for people they don’t employ. That level of cooperation is no more illicit according to the Catholic moral tradition than the one that will be created by the new mandate.
Grant, perhaps. But to the extent that this is true, there was no reason to oppose the original pre-accommodation mandate. Conversely, if there was a reason to oppose the original mandate, there’s a reason to oppose the new one. In both cases, Catholic institutions are required to subsidize contraception or pay a penalty.
And one might wonder why the bishops never thought of this before. Perhaps some of them understand that, to use unagidon’s example, we don’t get to choose which of our tax dollars go to pay for a poor child’s meals and which pay for abortions for rape victims.
Doesn’t it follow that either the bishops should be opposed to any law that penalizes employers for not providing their employees with health insurance (since all health insurance premiums indirectly fund contraception if the health insurance company covers it for anyone) or they should establish a Catholic health insurance company for Catholic institutions that does not fund contraception for anyone. If such an insurance company existed, and all Catholic institutions got their insurance from it, then the bishops could continue taking the line they’re taking now. Absent such a company, the bishops are really saying they’re willing to be required by law to subsidize contraception for the employees of non-Catholic companies (whether or not these employees are Catholic) but not for their own employees (whether or not their own employees are Catholic). That strikes me a fairly indefensible position.
(And the reason they shouldn’t be opposed to a law that penalizes employers for not providing health insurance is that, barring a single-payer system, it’s the only feasible way to guarantee universal coverage, a policy goal that the bishops have publicly supported for decades.)
It will be interesting to see how HHS intends to draw a bright line on the insurance accounting spectrum from polite fiction to smoke and mirrors to fraud and deception. Will HHS hire very smart regulators to determine if insurance funds are properly segregated? Or rely upon the guardian angels of the insurance companys’ pricing actuaries to double-check all calculations? Insurance companies are ingenious when it comes to allocating overhead expenses, far more creative than even a platoon of guardian angels and no one will know the difference if they are excessively creative, least of all the Sebelius monitors, even in the unlikely event thar they would be motivated to do so. Perhaps the senior administration officials have already communicated their plan to Dionne at al.
Matt: The Bishops’ argument from the beginning has been predicated on the idea that there is a categorical difference between “Catholic” and “non-Catholic” institutions regardless of what they do and who they employ or serve. As long as the employer self-identifies as “Catholic,” it should be exempt from any government healthcare mandate. This is the extremely wide notion of “religious freedom” they are demanding.
Someone should summarize the comments on the comment sections of secular newspapers reporting that the bishops reject the new Obama accommodation. 10-to 1 against. and nasty too. Suggestion; The USCCB bishops ought to bench the Taco Bell attorney … where do they get these guys.?
“Without the accommodation, the default coverage paid for by Catholic institutions would include contraception; with it, the default coverage does not include contraception — policy holders have to opt in. But once they do, the funding is no different. The insurance companies are still using money from the premiums paid by Catholic institutions to pay for their employees contraception.”
Matthew – from the insurance company’s point of view, yes, it’s all one big pot of money. But from the Catholic employer’s point of view, I believe the President’s accommodation makes a real moral difference. If I’m an employer whose is opposed to contraception in principle, then having to *offer a contraception benefit* to employees is repugnant. And having to pay an insurance company for a contraception benefit is repugnant. It’s not nothing that this moral burden has been lifted from those employers.
No, Eric. The bishops’ position is that as long as the employer self-identifies as Catholic, it should be exempt from any mandate that requires the employer to subsidize something contrary to church teaching. They do not categorically oppose health-care mandates.
“But to the extent that this is true, there was no reason to oppose the original pre-accommodation mandate. Conversely, if there was a reason to oppose the original mandate, there’s a reason to oppose the new one. In both cases, Catholic institutions are required to subsidize contraception or pay a penalty.”
I think we’re circling back to last week’s discussions :-). We’re in the realm here of degrees of remoteness of cooperation with evil.
I can drive over to my local pharmacy and fill two prescriptions, one for asthma medication and the other for contraception. They’re both payments. The money all goes into a pool in the pharmacist’s books. It can be argued that the pharmacist’s profit margin on my asthma medication sustains his business, which in turns allows hundreds or thousands of other customers to buy birth control. So I’m cooperating, in some degree, with the procurement of birth control. But that degree is more remote than if my cooperation consists in buying birth control for a member of my family.
As far as I know, all large health insurance companies today issue at least some policies that cover contraception.
If your moral view is that paying any money to a company that pays for contraception for anyone is proximate material cooperation in evil, them you probably should not be dealing with your current health insurance company. For the time being, you my be able to find a smaller company that sells only to employers who do not want contraception coverage.
I have never heard anyone argue that it is a teaching of the Church that you should not do business with any company that pays for contraception.
That is the critical point to get past. If we agree that you can do business with a company that pays for contraception for others, then I believe that the proposed “accommodation” works.
You agree to pay the insurance company a fixed amount of money to provide health insurance coverage, excluding contraception, for your employees. That is the extent of your involvement.
Without your involvement, the government requires the insurance company to offer each of your employees a free insurance policy which will cover contraception – but only if they choose to take the policy. The employee deals directly with the insurance company to set up an account with them and resolve any issues between them and the drug store and clinics. You are not involved in any way with this arrangement.
Works for me.
“Is it the Catholic position that the government cannot rightly write such laws, even if many people think that it is immoral for such coverage to be available? Even if the government does what it can to shield Catholic institutions from having to pay for such coverage? I trust that this is not the Catholic position. If I’m mistaken and it is the Catholic position, then what is to be said about Catholic participation in a pluralist democracy.”
FWIW – my understanding is that there are several strands at play here.
* The church believes that moral law and human law should be in harmony
* The church’s framework for determining ‘how much government is enough?’ seems to be the principle of subsidiarity
* The church has argued that health care is a basic human right, and believes that government must step in to ensure its delivery if necessary
The church doesn’t view contraception (taken with a contraceptive intent) as being genuine health care. It would deny that there is some *right* to contraception. I’m sure that this is my own natural conservative disposition shining through here, but we should be very concerned about the rhetoric emanating from the Administration’s allies in this controversy that contraception is a right. Contraception is not a right. It’s an option, and almost always an evil.
“That is the critical point to get past. If we agree that you can do business with a company that pays for contraception for others, then I believe that the proposed “accommodation”
works.”
I agree.
But I’d add that it “works” for the single issue that has received the lion’s share of focus – the religious liberty issue.
The bishops have now raised a number of additional issues, and by and large they seem legitimate, too, and the proposed “accommodation” may not address those issues as successfully – in fact, it may create some new problems (e.g. with Catholic insurers).
Some liberal commentators were suckered by the bishops’ religious liberty rhetoric. They imagined they were promoting the liberal cause of religious liberty and in reality they were merely pawn in the bishops’ real agenda, which is the Vatican’s agenda. And that agenda is ALL about Humanae Vitae.
Let’s not scoff at Iranian theocrats any more. The only marked difference between the bishops and the mullahs when it comes to law and morality is that the bishops have forsworn capital punishment for sexual offenses.
But the real villains in the present farce are not the bishops — fanatical apparatchiks appointed by the Vatican — but the intelligent lay liberal men who let their minds be swayed by tribalist atavism.
I’m dismayed. 40% of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion.
The Netherlands has FREE abortion on demand, yet has only 1/4 the abortion rate of the most conservative, abortion-restricted states in the USA — for one reason and one reason only: they have much better universal access to contraception, including contraception counseling.
The contraception mandate would have prevented a hundred fold more abortions than would the sum total of (1) the overturning of Roe v Wade and (2) all the preaching from the pulpit and (3) all the Operation Rescue and (4) all the picketing of Planned Parenthood and (5) all the gory abortion photos and (6) all the cute ultrasounds of in utero babies and (7) all the “conscience clause” legislation and (8) all the self-righteous bloviating.
As a result of their false claim of having their First Amendment rights trampled, the actions of the Bishops will be responsible for a trampling of the 5th Commandment.
Spiritually speaking, they are being penny wise and pound foolish. Maybe their consciences will be spared over all the non-Catholic women who won’t use contraceptives or who will use them ineffectively. They deserve to lose sleep over all the abortions for which they will bear direct responsibility.
- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
Without your involvement, the government requires the insurance company to offer each of your employees a free insurance policy which will cover contraception – but only if they choose to take the policy. . . . Works for me.
How about something much simpler?
The religious employer agrees to pay the employee a salary of X dollars per month. Of that salary, the employee takes 15 or 20 dollars and buys his or her own contraception, if that is what he or she wants, or uses those 15 or 20 dollars however else he or she wants?
We can even call the 15 or 20 dollars “self-insurance” on the part of the employer. Oh, it’s “unfair” that the employee should have to pay for contraceptives out of their own pocket? Fine, pay the employee X + 20 dollars per month — now the money is coming from the employer.
Why get some third-party payor involved in the first place? Why engage in this pretence that it is some “insurance company” that is footing the bill here when insurance companies get all their money to pay out benefits from the premiums they collect?
This really is absurd beyond belief. The ONLY reason to shift the money around like Obama has dictated is to make the Church explicitly involved in something that Obama knows to be contrary to Church teaching.
In fact, as I understand it, that is one of the REAL compromises that the bishops, et al. put forward — that instead of a contraception coverage mandate, that in addition a health plan, employers be required to deposit, say, $500 per year in an employee’s health savings account (HSA) to be used however the employee wants.
That respects everyone’s freedom and if the employee wants to buy contraceptives with his or her HSA, he or she is free to do so, or they can buy something else. That way, everyone has an equal benefit, rather than sexually active contracepting people getting an extra benefit that non-sexually active people or non-contracepting people do not get.
Freedom. Equality. What is objectionable about that?
And yet the Obama Adminstration rejected it. Why? What is their ulterior motive?
And yet the Obama Adminstration rejected it. Why? What is their ulterior motive?
Bender,
I would be interested in hearing more on this. Did the bishops in fact propose this? I have seen nothing about any compromise proposals from Catholic groups or other religious groups. My first impression is that this arrangement would really amount to a more direct funding of contraception than the new proposal from Obama, but maybe not.
To come back to what I take to be the main point of the original post, (“If the bishops really want to go to bat for every private employer’s alleged right to opt out of providing contraception coverage, they will lose the public argument. And not only because Taco Bells don’t exist to carry out the mission of the Catholic Church, but because the public will start to wonder whether their objections all along weren’t motivated by religious-freedom concerns so much as by the desire to keep women from obtaining contraception.”), it seems to me that this is exactly right. Every public opinion poll, and every other indicator I’ve seen supports this conclusion.
For what it’s worth (and this is probably a separate discussion entirely), this is equally—if not more—true among Catholic Americans. The wholesale rejection of the Church’s official teaching on contraception—both here and around the world—by the vast majority of Catholics is now well into its second generation and shows no signs of abating.
J O’L @ 2:14 a.m.:
“But the real villains in the present farce are not the bishops — fanatical apparatchiks appointed by the Vatican — but the intelligent lay liberal men who let their minds be swayed by tribalist atavism.”
What I love about the wisdom of the East is its delicately molded phrasing.
External religious markers: I could go with meatless Fridays as a a sign of solidarity with other people around the world who don’t have the resources to eat much meat. It would be sort of like a year-round Operation Rice Bowl.
But I’m not sure about it being an external marker; wasn’t Jesus pretty down on public fasting and things of that sort?
“Bad Decision” is the title of “Commonweal’s” editorial. Archbishop Chaput, in an op-ed in today’s “Philadelphia Inquirer” lists a number of bad decisions that he sees forming a pattern:
“But it’s clear that such actions are developing into a pattern. Whether it was the administration’s early shift toward the anemic language of “freedom of worship” instead of the more historically grounded and robust concept of “freedom of religion” in key diplomatic discussions; or its troubling effort to regulate religious ministers recently rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna Tabor case; or the revocation of the U.S. bishops’ conference human-trafficking grant for refusing to refer rape victims to abortion clinics, it seems obvious that this administration is – to put it generously – tone deaf to people of faith.”
External signs of penance can focus us on acknowledging our sins and doing better, but the Catholic Church should be known for how well we love God and love our neighbor. Failing that, we fall back to external trappings like mandated meatless Fridays and confining ourselves into geographic parishes.
Twenty centuries years ago people said about us “See how those Christians love one another!” Our actions should inspire others to love God and love their neighbor. Then we won’t have to worry about losing our young people and struggling to have vocations to the religious life.
“— that instead of a contraception coverage mandate, that in addition a health plan, employers be required to deposit, say, $500 per year in an employee’s health savings account (HSA) to be used however the employee wants.”
I like that idea. My only question would be, don’t HSAs need to be linked to high deductible insurance plans? Unless the contribution covered the full amount of the deductible, which is around $2400 minimum per family, it just wouldn’t be affordable. So first, HSAs would need to uncoupled from high-deductible plans for this to work.
But my employer could I guess just pay me an additional $500 a year in wages to offset the loss of the benefit.
I would happily trade contraceptive coverage for good dental coverage. Our out-of pocket dental expense has run anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 a year for my family of 4.
Matt: Technically you’re right. I was being imprecise. But as far as the government is concerned granting a “religious exemption” regardless of what an institution does and who it employs and serves so that the employer can exclude from the mandated healthcare minimums “something contrary to Church teaching” is like making a check out to “cash.” This is not only because the government is not in the business of being up to date on the teaching of the Catholic Church, but it is also because every religion’s teaching counts when we’re talking about “religious exemption.” Right now, Obama has made a special Catholic exemption for contraception, which seems like special treatment to me. If the Bishops get what they want (and what I thought Commonweal wanted), there would be a blanket religious exemption to the mandated healthcare minimums, but a mandate without minimums seems a little thin.
To put it generously? Yes, how generous of the archbishop not to mention the administration’s decision not to allow girls under seventeen to purchase Plan B over the counter, despite pressure from Planned Parenthood et al. And how kind of him not to note that the Obama administration has directed about $2 billion in federal grants to Catholic groups. And how magnanimous of him not to note that HHS had to intervene in two states to stop federal Affordable Care Act dollars from paying for elective abortions in two states — including his own.
Grant,
Do I detect a soupçon of cynicism? And on Sunday!
Archbishop Chaput in the Philadelphia inquirer:
As I read the Jan 20 “adjustment”, Catholic “religious employers” (Catholic Charities, hospitals, Universities, schools, etc) do not have to cover those things in their health-care plans (Churches were already exempt from doing that).
It did not broaden the exception to include Catholic employers who are not “religious employers” (Taco Bell, etc).
The accommodation did not broaden the exemption as much as the bishops might have hoped, but I don’t understand the claim that it did not broaden the exception at all.
I think it’s unfortunate if the USCCB will only be satisfied if no employer is required to provide coverage for contraception. I don’t think that is a battle they are likely to win.
The archbishop didn’t even mention that the president is nice to his dog, and always says please and thank you!
Father Imbelli–
When it comes to Chaput, I can’t think of any other reasonable approach than cynicism. Its difficult to apply a hermeneutic of charity to someone who so evidently refuses to apply it to anyone else. I’ve tried for a quite a while to resist the claim that the US bishops are basically becoming a wing of the Republican Party, but it’s very hard to do so with a straight face. Chaput’s piece could have been written by any party hack, so distorted is it as Grant pointed out above. I’ve been scouring the bishop’s website and can not find a single mention of the decision not to move Plan B over-the-counter. That should have made the bishops jump up and down with glee. Not to mention Obama stepping in to stop ACA funding for abortion in the two states Grant also mentions. Chaput writes “we cannot afford to be fooled–yet again” by Obama and his ‘flexibility.’ Obama has kept his word with the executive order signed at ACA–though the bishops knew he woudln’t. FOCA was going to be Obama’s first act and we had to take up arms–except it wasn’t. Obama hates religion and would never compromise–except he did. Exactly who is trying to pull wool over whose eyes?
Is the Gospel really so weak that we have to manufacture persecution in order to be relevant?
Archbishop Chaput’s article is at:
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20120212_HHS_mandate_insulting_and_dangerous.html?cmpid=124488459
The title is “HHS Mandate Insulting and Dangerous”
Cardinal George had his letter of February 5 read in all churches today. It does not mention the changes made on Friday.
http://www.archdiocese-chgo.org/bulletin/other/HHSRulingLetter.pdf
Is anyone really surprised at Chaput’s partisan diatribe? This is his [Chaput's] self-perceived path to glory. Knock yourself out, Charles.
With the hierarchs’ rejection late Friday of any compromise with the Obama Administration, the real political agenda of the hierarchs is laid bare: Get the president no matter the costs.
The problem for the hierarchs is that Obama in one fell swoop has essentially politically outmaneuvered them. He has split the Catholic front into hierarchs on onside; Catholic women, Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities, Catholic Democrats and liberals on the other side.
Do the political math. Hierarchs loose – Obama Administration and women win.
The hierarchs rejection of and anger at the compromise President Obama engineered is understandable given their point of view: It’s hard after all those centuries of near omnipotence to be bested politically by a mere Chicago community organizer.
The hierarchs must have really savored that taste of being “important” again if only for a few days. Now, the hierarchs are consigned back into irrelevance again.
Never fear, Chaput will show them the way. Too bad, Chaput can’t deny Obama Communion like he did John Kerry.
Chaput, Inquirer, today:
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20120212_HHS_mandate_insulting_and_dangerous.html
My apologies for duplicating John’s prior posting of Archbishop Chaput’s letter. Impatience is at least a venial sin.
Here’s a portion of the letter that, I think, applies here.
I’m certainly not trying to belittle anyone. I don’t know nearly enough to engage – or, in many cases, even to follow – Grant and the others on all these important points. But I really feel, as Chaput says, that we risk wandering into – and getting lost in – the weeds. Exegesis and commentary are very important, but, under the circumstances, I think, they need to be at least accompanied by a tight focus on less controversial points.
Does anyone know Catholic Charities’ take on the “accomodation”? I’m hearing conflicting reports.
“Too bad, Chaput can’t deny Obama Communion…”
Actually, Jim, I’m pretty sure he can.
I think Bernard’s question was right on.
The Chaput comments here , I fear, demonstrate the issue of partisanship vs. principle.
Finally, i was much taken with Cullen Murphy’s op-ed in NYT Sunday Review.
Beyond this whole foofaraw, I fear is the increasing problem of the coming Church here led by intellectually thin and instransigent”answer men” who think they are smart and tha people are really listening to them.
Maybe we need an Occupy USCCB.
First: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/10/4254690/catholic-charities-usa-president.html
Then: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/revised-catholic-charities-usa-president-responds-to-the-administrations-announcement-on-religious-liberty-2012-02-11
Interesting.
Grant–
Thanks, and very. It appears some may have been counting pre-hatched chickens.
I thought Sister K accepted it in the blink of an eye. Wasn’t that in the news earlier – that the White House had phoned Dolan and her and someone else and she’d said, Yes, excellent, whereas Dolan had said, Good something’s happening, but let’s read it carefully first.
She seems to be perhaps a little too eager to be in Obama’s good graces.
I wouldn’t draw that conclusion. The language mirrors Cardinal-designate Dolan’s. I wonder if Fr. Snyder was pressured to revise his original statement. It’s awfully strange. I’ve put a query in to Catholic Charities USA.
Are we looking at the same article, Bob?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/the-certainty-of-doubt.html?sq=cullen%20murphy&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all
If so, what’s that got to do with the issue under discussion?
Hmm, yes.
versus
Sure looks as though someone said, “Whoa, there”. Probably a good idea. You can’t read lawyer language closely in just a few minutes. Takes days and committees.
Perhaps Fr. Snyder was pressured, but that would reflect poorly on both Fr. Snyder (for caving and saying something he doesn’t believe) and those who would pressure him to do just that. I think it’s more charitable to assume he changed his view after having sufficient time to read it carefully and pray over it. We’ll see.
Mark, I’m inclined to suspect that it might have been both. He may have reacted too quickly in his enthusiasm to be done with controversy and get on with seemed like more important stuff. Enthusiasm’s likely to fade quickly after its first outburst.
On whether the supposed new policy is any different from the initial policy, here is Greg Mankiw of the Harvard economics department:
I’ve just gotten around to reading the letter signed by John Garvey, Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon, Carter Sneed and Yuval Levin explaining why the “accomodation” is “unacceptable”.
http://www.becketfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Garvey-Glendon-George-Snead-Levin-stmt-Feb-11-2012.pdf
Somehow, these five very bright people have ended up describing a scheme that doesn’t seem to be based on the information released by the government – and then explaining why that strawman scheme isn’t good.
In the scheme they describe, a Catholic hospital would still be required to buy an insurance contract that, by its terms, includes coverage for contraception. The only difference would be that the hospital wouldn’t have to tell its employees that contraception was covered. Instead, the insurance company would contact the employees and tell them that the contracepion coverage was in the policy.
I can’t get to that story based on the “Fact Sheet” posted on the White House website. I don’t know how those five intelligent people could, either.
Instead, I think the plan is:
1. The hospital buys an insurance contract that specifically excludes contraception.
2. The government requires any insurance company that sells an insurance contract that doesn’t include contraception to contact everyone insured under that plan and offer them a separate policy covering only contraception. this is a separate arrangement between each employee and the insurance company and the hospital isn’t involved in it in any
Whatever that separate policy costs, either the employee or the government could pay for it. The hospital is not involved in any way in paying for contraception.
What is confusing the discussion is that the government says that it doesn’t cost the insurance company anything to provide that separate policy because it will pay out less money for pregnancy costs under its contract with he hospital. Therefore the policy should be free.
I imagine we’ll find out more once the insurance companies get involved in the discussion. If they say they must be paid something, then either the employee or the government should pay that something so that the hospital only pays what it has agreed to pay for its contract that excludes contraception.
In addition, the post’s claim that there is a “revised ruling” or “revised mandate” is highly misleading. No such thing is in effect. To the contrary, the rule as initially drafted went into effect on Friday, and any suggestion of revising the rule at some unknown future date has yet to happen. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/290859/nothing-squid-ink-ed-haislmaier
So it’s very odd to point fingers at conservatives for not being happy with Obama’s supposed new rule, when 1) the original rule that even Grant found objectionable is the one that is actually in effect right now and for the foreseeable future, and 2) the new rule is economically indistinguishable from the original rule anyway.
Stuart: The rule is being revised according to the details announced by the president. What that piece basically does is call Obama a liar. I’m not into that.
A brief response to the people that replied to the comment I offered yesterday.
First, to Jack Barry: I did mean to write ‘immoral.’ I was referring to tyhe numerous Catholics and others who might consider such a legal right to be immoral.
Second, to Jim Pouwels: JIm I was talking about the government’s having a LEGAL right to develop and enforce policies that imposed conditions on want to employ some workers. The point of my comment was to contrast claims about moral rights from those about legal rights. So I ask whether the Catholic position is that, even in a pluralistic democracy in which they participate in numerous ways, the bishops are entitled to claim, whenever they have a MORAL objection to such a policy and whenever that claim is disallowed by the government, that their constitutionally endowed right to freedom of religious practice has been infringed upon. They certainly have the moral and political right to complain, but it is by no means obvious to me that they can automatically claim that their CONSTITUTIONAL rights have been abridged. If they believe that they do have that sort of right, then their only recourse is to engage in the political process to try to gain that political or legal right.
In a pluralistic democracy, I cannot see that the bishops have even a good MORAL case to claim that, until the government imposes a policy that is fully in accord with their moral convictions, the government’s refusal to legally proscribe everything the bishops find immoral renders that policy immoral. Think Aquinas on the question of legally outlawing prostitution.
@ Stuart; ” revising the rule at some unknown future date has yet to happen.’
That convinces me. I’m going Romney whose grandfather was hounded out of the USA to Mexico on religious liberty grounds and the Catholic bishops stood by him to a man.NOT maybe this is just payback (-:
The rule is being revised, perhaps, but the new rule is not meaningfully different from the current one, and it’s the current one that Obama let go into effect on Friday.
If Bush had announced that a rule authorizing warrantless spying on all Americans at all times was to go into effect on Friday, and that rule did go into effect just as planned, I doubt that liberals would be doing a “happy dance” just because Bush then issued a press release promising to revise the rule at some future point (especially if the revisions didn’t make any meaningful difference).
Irrelevant.
Do you really think that Obama would call a press conference announcing the revision, then never bother to put it into place? I know a lot of conservatives like to imagine that the president is stupid (he uses teleprompters!), but I don’t think he’s insane.
Another point of view:
Andrew Sullivan: How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right
Feb 13, 2012 12:00 AM EST
Conservatives gleefully revived the culture wars. But they’re not winning. How Obama set a trap for the right.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/12/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-set-a-contraception-trap-for-the-right.html
I understand that if insurance companies complain that they are forced to provide free contraceptive coverage Obama is open to a new accommodation - – drug companies and other health providers can surely be ordered to voluntarily reimburse the insurance companies. Thus no one will pay and everything can be provided free of cost. If the drug companies complain, the Fed stands ready to print new money to repay them. And administration alchemists are prepared to change base metals into gold.
Expected reaction: immediate enthusiastic approval from all objective and carefully briefed observers for yet another grand bargain.
Patrick: If you have nothing substantive to add, please don’t work out your stand-up routines on my threads.
Grant, as a Harvard economics professor has succinctly explained, the proposal for a revised rule is materially indistinguishable from the rule that is in effect. The difference is only semantic.
Even if the new revised rule would make any difference, it isn’t in existence yet. It’s not that Obama is “lying” about what the new rule would say, but that a political observer would have to be very naive to think that administrations always follow through on the exact letter of what they initially suggest. Federal rules are altered all the time before being finalized due to circumstances, lobbying, shifts in political winds, changes of heart, and all the quotidian details of electoral politics.
So we have a new rule that 1) doesn’t exist yet, and 2) wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Anyone who objected to the rule now in effect shouldn’t be mollified at all.
No, what we have is a rule that was announced on Friday afternoon and as of Sunday afternoon it has not been codified yet — or at least not publicly. The president would have to be stupid and crazy to announce such a revision and then never implement it. That would be political suicide.
The bishops’ initial complaint, for those of you playing along at home, was that they were being forced to pay for contraception. As I have pointed out dozens of times now, that is not the right way to think about paying health-coverage premiums. So, according to Catholic moral theology, they were wrong before, and they’re wrong now.
Then the authors of the National Review piece are mistaken when they say that’s exactly what he did? Are we sure of that, or just assuming that it can’t be?
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/290859/nothing-squid-ink-ed-haislmaier
This, from that:
It doesn’t seem to me that Mr. Sullivan’s article speaks of a “contraception trap” set by the smart and wiley President. In fact, he doesn’t use the word “trap”. Maybe this is a case of one person writing the article and another, with a different agenda, the headline. It seems all Mr. Sullivan is saying is that he thinks Obama’s “compromise” position is “sensible”. If the electorate buy that, I guess things look bad for the bishops. I suppose Obama’s counting on that. We’ll see.
At any rate, don’t you still wonder why Obama picked this particular fight? Especially in an election year? Grant (above, 2:58 pm) assures us he’s neither crazy nor stupid, but it seems to me his judgement was more than a little off on this in the first place. For someone who’s supposed to be a brilliant politician, that seems odd.
Carolyn: Thanks for linking the Sullivan piece. It sounds to me like the Bishops didn’t have a case to begin with, other than asking for Obama to give them a break because they do good work. But, of course, asking the President to do you a solid has nothing to do with religious freedom or the morality of contraception.
Grant: If the Bishops were “wrong before,” why were you supporting them?
Well, Grant, that’s one of two popular ways of decoding it. There are smart, knowledgeable people on both sides. Luckily, the argument’s fairly simple to explain. I guess it’s up to “the people” to decide whether we have here a “sensible compromise” or just the same extremely unfortunate dictum worded in two ways. If the people like Contestant O, the bishops lose; if, on the other hand, they think Contestant O’s trying to pull a fast one, Contestant B at least doesn’t get shoved off the stage.
Archbishop Chaput is getting to be scary. He’s not fighting fairly. At least Archbishop Dolan tried to come to an accommodation with the President.
I don’t know if my pastor preached about this issue, but the parish bulletin indicates that he doesn’t find it an overwhelming concern. There is a little paragraph, an “Action Alert”, in today’s bulletin telling us to get a page of instructions in the back of the church on how to defend our religious liberties. On that same page in the bulletin there is a slightly larger little box (entitled “CHURCH FLOORS”) telling us, “Please do not be distracted by the newly cleaned and polished floors in Church. It is important that you pay attention to what is happening during the Mass so any “looking at one’s reflection” in the floor or “making hand puppets” in the shine during the homily is off limits.”
Let’s pray the rest of the clergy keeps things in perspective too.
So now we wait for the moderate bishops, especially those who are already paying for contraceptive coverage on grounds that it is acceptably remote material cooperation, to endorse the Obama compromise. And we wait. And we wait.
Hello? Anybody in a pointy hat out there? Will you once again give the voice of the Church over to Chaput and his ilk? Yeah, I was afraid of that. What would it take for moderate bishops (and progressives, if there are any left,) to actually speak up?
It would take the courage to buck the party line.
Lisa and Ann, I don’t understand what you find simply clearly wrong about Chaput’s letter. It seems to articulate quite well what he sees as multiple moves by Obama either to get the Church out of the public-services arena (human-trafficking contract, Hosanna Tabor) or to effectively nullify it (contraception and sterilization insurance).
Don’t you think that reasonable people might see all these moves as deliberately hostile to traditional institutional religion? Of course, traditional institutional religion isn’t your cup of tea, but many people are extremely fond of it. Should they be simply pushed aside?
As always, Stephen Colbert captures the heart of the issue: “A woman’s health decisions are a private matter between her priest and her husband!!!” From August 2011, when HHS first announced its guidelines …
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/393824/august-03-2011/women-s-health-nazi-plan
Regarding the references above to “the rule that went into effect on Friday”, here’s what it says about providing an exemption for non-profit religious organizations – i.e. Catholic Charities, Catholic hospitals, universities, etc:
This seems to cover the points presented by the president on Friday. The details will be worked out with the stakeholders before the rules for these organizations come into effect in August 2013.
Chaput is not a credible spokesperson on this issue. In Denver, he basically destroyed the separation of church and state and IRS rules by his insertion and influence on a state vote for/against SOLs. He publically and in writing pressured catholic members of the state congress to defeat the SOL bill. If technically, he did not commit any criminal activities, he ethically crossed over numerous lines. His positions against children of same sex marriages in catholic elementary schools is well known – even though his defensive argument would have meant that children of divorced and remarried catholics should also be banned from attendance. He plays loose with consistency in theological and moral positions. His last published book overidentifies the catholic position with fundamentalist evangelical thinkers – and I was raised in a part of the country when good catholic kids thought evangelical was a “bad” word.
His involvement in the Australian Bishop Morris affair is embarrassing – a bishop alleged to have supported married and female priests (which is a factual error that has been documented) but who nonetheless did the investigation which resulted in Morris removal – and yet, Chaput (per last week’s Vatican Sexual Abuse conference and statements by Msgr. Scicluna on the use of canon law provisions against bishops who cover up) could be a valid candidate for such penalties from Rome. And really, what is the comparison between what Morris is alleged to have done and Chaput’s behavior towards confirmed abuse victims.
This is becoming a ridiculous situation and again, the catholic in the pew watches our episcopal leaders deconstruct again and again.
It was a true pleasure to see the White House take the wind out of the proverbial sails of the USCCB.
It was no surprise to see our bishops still complain about this revised policy.
If this new arrangement will save insurance company payouts for pregnancy-related costs (after all, cheaper for birth control than for hospital, doctor, etc.), why would the bishops still complain?
August 2013 may not be the correct date. I haven’t tracked down when the “one year safe harbor from enforcement” begins.
Chaput, Inquirer, today:
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20120212_HHS_mandate_insulting_and_dangerous.html
In other words, this is his full-court press to become a 32nd Degree Catholic cleric. With his retrograde actions and words, he’ll most likely succeed. He can be The Tim’s straight man.
Chaput apparently couldn’t find a suitable Philadelphia Lawyer on arriving in his new archdiocese last fall and brought in his legal help from Denver. Lawyers had helped him in his successful 2005 campaign to defeat reforms of Colorado statutes of limitation that would have made a difference to sex abuse victims.
https://viewer.zoho.com/docs/hDddTa
The same is going on in Chaput’s new archdiocese: “Catholic Church Fights to Kill PA’s Statute of Limitation Reform”.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/cover-story/138884039.html?page=1&comments=1&showAll=
“The Writing on the wall” is the explanation. The Republicans do not want to work it out and let Dolan and the bishops know that. The bishops are doing what they have been doing campaigning against Obama and the democrats no matter what. The bishops had a chance and succumbed to politics again. Call to moderate bishops seems futile. This is the JP appointees. Loyalty over truth and virtue.
What of the religious freedom of non-Catholics working at Catholic colleges and hospitals? Will they be forced to accept an insurance policy that won’t cover BC and other services on most policies elsewhere? Will they be discriminated against? It seems they will if the bishops have their way.
The president is trying to respect the rights of women to services and the rights of Catholics to not pay for services they find sinful — a tough balancing act. The bishops aren’t one percent helpful. They aren’t taking time for discernment, reflection and prayerful meditation, allowing some room for the Holy Spirit to guide them, in building a consensus. Instead they have a ready-made consensus –right out of the Republican political playbook. They seem not to care about the religious freedoms of non-Catholics. They are quite willing to do to non-Catholics what they say the president is doing to them. Sort of a twisted and tarnished Golden Rule.
Jim Lein, the bishops do not think ANYONE should pay insurance coverage of what they consider to be evil actions. Just as they would object to insurance coverage of poisoners so they object to insurance coverage of contraceptionists (who are also abortionists in the case of the morning-after pill). Evil is evil is evil! Not only for Catholics, but for anybody. Theocratic logic.
David Smith: “Wasn’t that in the news earlier – that the White House had phoned Dolan and her and someone else and she’d said, Yes, excellent, whereas Dolan had said, Good something’s happening, but let’s read it carefully first”
According to the second statement by the USCCB, the bishops were not called at all.
Ah, interesting. So Obama wants to work only with his Catholic friends, ignoring the bishops? Perhaps he’s thinking, Worked for ACA – why not this time, too? Divide and conquer. We’ve got our own Catholics. Let the bishops make fools of themselves – all the smart people are with us.
Maybe he just can’t believe anything he sees as so trivial could ever bite him badly. Perhaps “his Catholics” are telling him he’s right about that. Who knows?
http://usccb.org/news/2012/12-026.cfm
From that: “We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance.”
That statement was dated 10 Feb. Is that the statement you’re referring to, C? – the bishops saying they weren’t notified. Was Sister K notified, but not the bishops? That little detail is really important.
In Ireland we are scoffing at all former politicians who went cap in hand to the Nuncio or the Archbishop or the Vatican to get approval for pieces of legislation and we see it as representing a time of immaturity that we have outgrown. If Obama allowed his legislative authority to wait on episcopal nods would that not amount to the same “Rome rule”? Bishops are a lobby, but lobbies should not be slavishly placated. The best way to suss out the Catholic problem is through a trusted middleman — Sister K in this case.
Mr deHaas,
yesterday (@4:56) you drew up a bill of indictment of Archbishop Chaput that is both descriptive and prescriptive. Prescriptively, you judge that he “ethically crossed over numerous lines;” that he “plays loose with consistency in theological and moral positions;” that he “could be a valid candidate for such penalties from Rome.”
May I respectfully suggest that all you succeed in showing is that the Archbishop took positions with which you are in disagreement; and that your prescriptive assertions represent considerable overreach.
My sole quotation from the Archbishop’s op-ed piece was his assertion that there is a troubling pattern of transgressions upon religious liberty by the Administration. That statement can, of course, be challenged. But too often, these discussions on both left and right, take on the appearance of ignoring the message because of its provenance. Thus Obama is demonized on the right and Chaput on the left. And we keep the partisan pot at the boiling point.
It is difficult to avoid deep disgust at this whole situation. I agree that President Obama may very well be the beneficiary. In speaking of the violation of a human rights and conscience, the bishops reveal themselves as the biggest of hypocrites ever. They daily violate the rights of Catholics by denying a right to one of the sacraments guaranteed at Baptism, specifically the ordination of women. They deny us the right to select our own leaders, trampling subsidiarity in their wake. What can be said about full financial disclosure and the refusal to reveal their diocesan dealings? Who are they to deny the call by God to married men who feel the vocation to priesthood? The supreme value of life is a given. Where is the outcry at equal levels against the death penalty? We are facing a Eucharistic famine of monumental proportions for our grandchildren and this issue, control of women’s bodies and bedroom management, is the best they can give us? I think the emperor has no clothes.
I like G. Wiegels take:
“The media spin notwithstanding, this is not a matter of “shifts” on “birth control” by the administration; it’s a matter of a grotesque overreach by state power, one that threatens the entire fabric of civil society as well as the first of American liberties, religious freedom. That is why the judicial challenge to the HHS mandate will be mounted on an ecumenical and inter-religious basis, as the protest against the mandate has been. And that is why legislative attempts to reverse what Obama and Sebelius have wrought have drawn bipartisan support.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290871
An addition to my comment just above. What of CATHOLIC workers in Catholic institutions? They, along with non-Catholic workers, will be deprived of insurance coverage of BC services. They will in effect be forced to not sin — or at least to pay for it. Something is wrong here. If, say, 98 percent of married Catholics have used BC, then what is the fuss about? Why would these people side with the bishops? The religious freedom issue seems manufactured. The issue is BC. Let the church settle its differences between bishops and laity before drawing outsiders into it.
Grant,
Forget all the legal, religious, and political falderol. The last sentence in the last paragraph of your post is the most important one to me: the bishops are motivated by a desire to prevent woman from obtaining contraception. I also believe it is a ploy on the part of the conservative bishops to rouse those whom they see as their base, the “faithful,” as opposed to “liberals.”
Birth control pills were prescribed for me years ago by my Catholic gynecologist for a specific medical condition and also because I had two children, with some complications, barely a year apart. It never occurred to me to ask a priest about it because I didn’t think it was a priest’s business. I have always considered the church’s stance on contraception to be of a piece with the hierarchy’s general misogyny. Stephen Colbert hit the nail on the head with this one.
“I have always considered the church’s stance on contraception to be of a piece with the hierarchy’s general misogyny.”
I have always considered ill-considered statements such as this to be a sign of someone who cannot make a compelling argument on the merits.
You offer moral reasoning to declare President Obama’s vague proposal as morally acceptable. Fine, for you, for CHA, for whoever accepts it. But you forget, again, that this is not an optional policy. It is a mandate. No one is saying that if CHA wants to cover contraception on connected-riders the federal government should stop them. The issue is whether the federal government must force everyone to agree with Grant Gallico and CHA. What right do you have to impose your moral rationale and conclusion on people who reach a different moral nclusion in their own conscience? What right do you have to impose your beliefs on groups who believe that their provision of insurance directly facilitates contraceptive coverage, where it is the one and only key that is necessary and sufficient to empower an employee to obtain contraception coverage from the specific insurer who is being paid by the employer, and therefore it is morally unacceptable cooperation in violation of that group’s conscience? How dare you force those groups to embrace your own conscience and reject their own? How dare you do that and call yourself liberal? You are not recognizing that “reasonable people can disagree,” you are declaring anyone who disagrees with your very specific causuistic conclusion to be not only unreasonable, but so unreasonable that it is OK for the government to fine them or force them to violate their consciences because they disagree with you and Sr. Keehan and EJ Dionne. You’ve never answered my queston: how dare you impose that view in favor of a mandate on the imposed groups, as liberal and a Catholic?
And so now the government mandates that insurance companies pay for the BC pills. What of Catholic insurance providers; surely there are Catholic CEOs of some insurance comapnies. It is Ok then, to force them to do this wrong?
Don’t citizens have the right, individually, to not do what they think is wrong?
If the government can require that people of faith with moral reservations against chemical abortion provide for chemical abortion, then it’s a small leap to requiring that people of faith provide for surgical abortion. The “compromise” is a shell game, obvious to all except those who don’t want to see the obvious. Why is this not clear? Frankly, I think it is. I think those Catholics who are happy dancing over the Obama “compromise” are those who are eager to mouth any bone Obama throws them, not because he is genuinely interested in their concerns, but because they are in his camp, anyway. I believe the word is “accomodationist.” Whatever Obama came up with would have been hailed as his having heard and courageously addressed their concerns. The proof is in the pudding: Obama came up with nothing, and yet his Catholic lap dogs bark gleefully.
I am dumbfounded, too, by the ready embrace of the notion that contraception, abortifacients and sterilization are regarded as basic health care, eligible to be bought and paid for by the government. Do people who want to use birth control not work for a living? Contraceptives are easily accessed and relatively cheap. If you want them, go out and buy them with your own money. The idea that the government (read: taxpayers) are responsible for providing every want or perceived need that any citizen might contrive is busting this nation financially. Obama is a statist who is only too happy to agree that government is the answer for everything. When did Catholics on the left turn into statists, for heaven’s sake?
Finally, as I recall, the protection of the free exercise of religion was not intended to apply only to churches and church-affiliated institutions, but also to individual citizens.
Bernard give it up. Your position did not hold water the other day, and repeating it today does not make it any more credible. The mistake you keep making is assuming that the majority gets to make all the rules which is generally true, but the constitution limits the areas where that applies. Religion is one of those limited areas. The facts about employees, anti-discrimination etc just confuse the issue. The administration included an exemption for religious employers so even they acknowledge that this issue is at the intersection of church and state. Even just a church celebrating only the sacraments needs employees…
As for the second part of your question about morality and the law here are a couple of comments for you to ponder
At first there seems to be no distinction between law and morality. There are passages in ancient Greek writers, for example, which seem to suggest that the good person is the one who will do what is lawful. It is the lawgivers, in these early societies, who determine what is right and wrong.
But it is not long before thoughtful people recognize the difference between what is actually legal, or legally right according to the political authorities and what should be legal. What should be legal roughly corresponds to what is really right or just, that is, what we would call morally right. We find, for instance, the distinction between what is legally or conventionally right and what is naturally (or as we would say today morally) right.
Plato, for example, holds that knowledge of what is just or moral, and the ability to distinguish true justice or morality from what is merely apparently just depends on the full development and use of human reason. According to Plato, there is a very close connection between true justice or morality and human well-being or flourishing. Legal and political arrangements that depart too far from true justice should, if possible, be replaced by arrangements that better promote justice and thus well-being.
Ethics, therefore, has claimed a right to criticize legal arrangements and recommend changes to them. Many debates about the law, when they are not merely debates about how legal precedent mechanically applies in a particular situation, are also ethical debates.
Let’s summarize the relationship between morality and law.
(1) The existence of unjust laws (such as those enforcing slavery) proves that morality and law are not identical and do not coincide.
(2) The existence of laws that serve to defend basic values–such as laws against murder, rape, malicious defamation of character, fraud, bribery, etc. –prove that the two can work together.
(3) Laws can state what overt offenses count as wrong and therefore punishable. Although law courts do not always ignore a person’s intention or state of mind, the law cannot normally govern, at least not in a direct way, what is in your heart (your desires). Because often morality passes judgment on a person’s intentions and character, it has a different scope than the law.
(4) Laws govern conduct at least partly through fear of punishment. Morality, when it is internalized, when it has become habit-like or second nature, governs conduct without compulsion. The virtuous person does the appropriate thing because it is the fine or noble thing to do.
(5) Morality can influence the law in the sense that it can provide the reason for making whole groups of immoral actions illegal.
(6) Law can be a public expression of morality which codifies in a public way the basic principles of conduct which a society accepts. In that way it can guide the educators of the next generation by giving them a clear outline of the values society wants taught to its children.
Here is a website you can view
http://www.philosophyetc.net/2004/08/law-morality.html
God Bless
Lauretta,
The church is 100% behind this:
‘Birth control pills were prescribed for me years ago by my Catholic gynecologist for a specific medical condition…’
But this really is no argument, its just name-calling
‘I have always considered the church’s stance on contraception to be of a piece with the hierarchy’s general misogyny’
mary louise hartman, suppose, just suppose, that for some unfathomable reason, Jesus Christ thinks women should not be ordained to the priesthood….