A year ago, Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's secretary of health and human services, said that while church-affiliated institutions would have to include contraceptives and abortifacients in their health plans, they wouldn't have to pay for such coverage. The insurance companies would absorb the costs, which would be minimal, if any, because of reduced pregnancies.
Opponents rejected this "compromise" for the sham that it was.
The Catholic Church, other religious institutions and private-sector employers with religious objections to such coverage rejected the February 2012 accommodation on two grounds:
(1) Their health plans would still be providing coverage at odds with their religious beliefs (2) The notion that such coverage could be provided cost-free was fiction, given that anything made mandatory in all plans would obviously be part of the cost of any particular plan.
Faced with strong opposition and various lawsuits, the Obama administration offered a new accommodation earlier this month.
And this one is no better, just more complex.
The Obama administration's new proposal says churches and nonprofit organizations with religious objections to birth control coverage would not have to pay for it. The female employees of institutions that object to such coverage on religious grounds and purchase their employees' coverage from non-religious insurers could opt for separate plans.
Again, insurance companies would pick up the tab for the contraceptive coverage, and recoup the cost by paying for fewer births, according to the administration.
The administration came up with a different, though no more honest, solution to the problem of what to do about self-insured religious employers.
In return for providing contraceptive-only coverage to these employers' female employees, insurers would get a credit against user fees for participating in insurance exchanges. The exchanges are online marketplaces where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for subsidized health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
The insurance-exchange credits point to the fatal flaw in the administration's whole approach.
If the exchange fees are meant to offset taxpayers' burden, a credit for providing coverage of contraceptives and abortifacients makes it a taxpayer-funded benefit.
And, of course, had the Affordable Care Act's backers had the honesty and courage to include taxpayer funds for such coverage in the measure from the start, no one would be filing religious liberty lawsuits against the law.
That's true for two reasons:
(1) Taxpayer funding would not require religious institutions to pay for benefits they find morally abhorrent. (2) Including such coverage at taxpayers' expense would likely have prevented the Affordable Care Act from passing Congress.
Back in early 2010, the White House issued an executive order that purported to reinstate the Hyde Amendment, which outlawed using taxpayer funds in support of abortion. Pro-life Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan cited this as a key reason for supporting the president on health reform.
Another aspect of the contraceptive mandate has received much less attention than the fight over religious liberty: the questionable science behind it.
The mandate was imposed soon after the National Academy of Science recommended that contraceptive coverage would improve women's health.
Yet, as recently as March, the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute reported that the "use of oral contraceptives (birth control pills) appears to slightly increase the risk of breast cancer, especially among younger women."
Given that breast cancer is by far the No. 1 cancer diagnosed in women, and that it kills roughly 40,000 American women each year, one would imagine that a president concerned about a so-called "war on women" might think twice about pushing for mandatory contraception coverage.
