Obama’s Catholic con job

By Tom Quiner

Quick recap: Barack Obama, by presidential fiat imposed a health insurance mandate on faith-based organizations. The Obama Mandate dictates these organizations must require three types of services regardless of whether it violates their conscience or not. These services include:

√ Abortifacients like the morning after pill, a pill that kills human life.

√ Sterilization.

√ Contraception.

Faith-based institutions screamed that this is a violation of their religious freedoms.

The president yawned.

U.S. Catholic bishops objected vigorously:

“We objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.”

They had more objections:

“We explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage.”

The president began to realize that Catholics and other faith-based organizations weren’t going to go away, that this may cost him votes, a lot of votes.

His solution is not a compromise, it is a con job that is cynical by even the president’s contemptuous standards. In essence, he said, “no problem, we’ll just force insurance companies to provide them for free. You don’t have to pay for them.”

Let us look at this compromise through the harsh light of basic honesty:

1. “Health” services that Catholics and other faith-based institutions consider to be immoral are still being forced upon their employees.

2. The services are not free. Someone pays. Whom? Why the organization writing the check. It doesn’t matter how much accounting sleight-of-hand you use, there is no free lunch. Faith-based groups are still paying for the destruction of human life … and for products that treat human life as if creation is a disease.

I have a simple solution. Let us call it the “Pro Choice Model”: let us eliminate ALL mandates at the state and federal level. Let us offer consumers real choice.

Two things will quickly happen:

First, insurance premiums will drop, because consumers will only pay for product features they really want.

Secondly, religious freedom is preserved. The federal government has no business telling us what to buy. And states have screwed up the insurance market by imposing dozens of mandates that drive up health insurance premiums.

And while we’re at it, let consumers purchase products across state lines like they do for practically every other product and service they buy.

What a win/win. The president could ride the Pro Choice Model to a landslide re-election if he wasn’t so driven by his anti-life ideology.