Today, President Obama spoke of a compromise on part of the Affordable Care Act that deals with the provision of contraceptives. You can find a video and the full transcript here. At one point, he said,
“Today, we’ve reached a decision on how to move forward. Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services – no matter where they work. So that core principle remains. But if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company – not the hospital, not the charity – will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without co-pays and without hassles. The result will be that religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly. Let me repeat: These employers will not have to pay for, or provide, contraceptive services. But women who work at these institutions will have access to free contraceptive services, just like other women, and they’ll no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.”
But ultimately, this is nothing but a run-around. His plan is to put the responsibility for providing contraceptives on the insurance companies rather than on Catholic hospitals and charities. But like most people of Obama's political persuasion fail to realize, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always ends up paying, and it will not be the insurance companies. They will simply raise insurance rates to offset the new cost, thereby passing it on to consumers, who in this case are Catholics. So in the end, Catholics are still being subjected to a government mandate to pay for something that they do not support.
The other thing that Obama does not seem to realize is that this is not fundamentally about money. This is about core principles. Imagine for a moment that the government mandated the worship of and giving of offerings to idols in church. There would certainly be an uproar. Now imagine that the response of the government would be to say that the church does not have to collect offerings to the idols, but must still worship the idols. The money is taken out of play, but the flawed core principle remains.
Of course, this is just one symptom of a systemic disease that infests our government. That disease is called statism, and the libertarian values of government that stays inside the confines of the Constitution and stays off the peoples' backs is the cure.
