Obama Refuses To Budge

(A follow-up to this previous post. Settle in for one of my long posts)

According to this source:

Despite renewed statements of concern by Catholic leaders and lawmakers, the Obama administration is done negotiating and will finalize its plan requiring insurance companies to provide free contraception to women working and studying at religious institutions, President Obama’s chief of staff said Sunday....

What Obama has done is this: by forcing all insurance companies to provide contraception free of charge to insureds, these institutions, including hospitals, will have to (1) knuckle under, (2) stop providing any employer-based health insurance (They may not legally be able to do so), or (3) close their doors. Obama's mandate goes into effect on August 1, 2012.

Suppose you and I worked for one of these institutions? Would we stay as employees if there were no health insurance offered by our employer? Could we stay? Individual policies are expensive beyond belief and offer coverage more limited than that of group plans.

We have one world-famous Catholic hospital here in the Washington, D.C. area: Georgetown University Medical Center. This facility provides services at a level that no other nearby facility can, particularly in the field of neurology and neurosurgery. What happens to people's health care if Georgetown Hospital closes its doors?

And what of the Catholic University of America?

Now let's make it personal.

If you personally believe that Obama's mandate is one that violates God's law, are you going to cancel your health-insurance coverage? After all, if you have a group plan, you personally are voluntarily paying into a plan that funds Obama's mandate, which includes abortion pills.

Uncomfortable thought, isn't it?

"These are the times that try men's souls" — in a context different than the original context.

Once a government policy in place, undoing that policy is a Herculean task or an impossibility.

Make no mistake: Even though, thus far, the Catholic bishops have rejected Obama's mandate, Obama has won this round (and even beyond as I will note at the end of this blog post):

...[The bishops] said they still had "serious moral concerns," noting that the proposal didn't contain provisions for religious employers who self-insure, meaning the employer takes on the underlying risk of covering employees' health care....

I venture to guess that many employers cannot afford to take on that risk, particularly if high-risk individuals are in the pool of insureds.

On a Constitutional level, Silverfiddle recently made the following point at his site:

Does the federal government have the authority to tell a business to give things away? That's what Obama's tissue-thin fig leaf of a compromise does.... If the government can do this, why not command grocery stores to give food away?

Do Americans understand that Obama's recent mandate is tyranny most foul and Constitutionally baseless?

Do Americans realize what's at stake?


Additional Reading (contrasting viewpoint): "How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right" by Andrew Sullivan.