So now we see how the Obama administration proposes to preserve the religious freedom of religiously-affiliated employers like hospitals, schools and charities while requiring all health insurance plans to include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraception. According to the “fact sheet” released this afternoon by the White House, “Religious organizations will not have to provide contraceptive coverage” or “subsidize the cost of contraception.” Nevertheless, the insurance companies with which religious employers contract to provide health insurance for their employees “will be required to provide contraception coverage to these women free of charge.”
This is economic nonsense. Insurance companies have no money to pay for such benefits for the affected employees except from premiums they charge the employers who purchase coverage for their employees. So, one way or another, the employers are paying for the products to which they object. For example, suppose that, under the old rule, a religious employer would have had to pay $5,000 per employee annually for coverage including contraception. Under the new rule, the employer may elect to buy a policy that says that it omits such coverage. But the insurer has to provide the coverage anyway, and it may not charge the employee for it. How will it pay for the coverage? Obviously by building that cost into the price it charges the religious employer. Hence, the new policy will cost the employer the same $5,000 per employee that the old one did.
Under the old rule, the employer had to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraception. Under the new rule, the employer has to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraception, but President Obama will say that it doesn’t, and we’ll believe him. That fixes everything. And to think, some people accuse President Obama of empty rhetoric.
February 10th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
How will it pay for the coverage? Obviously by building that cost into the price it charges the religious employer.
But this is not the case. Including contraception in insurance coverage is cost-neutral. In fact, it may make the insurance cheaper to provide. The cost of contraception is quite a bit less than the cost of prenatal care and hospital delivery. So there is no cost for the insurance company to build into the coverage. (Also, every employee pregnancy averted is one less dependent to be insured.) In fact, if religious organizations want to be totally pure, they will have to make sure they do not save money because their employees are using contraception. If they don’t want to pay for it, they shouldn’t benefit from it, either.
February 10th, 2012 | 2:53 pm
Wow…that was pretzel logic (the comment, not the post)
February 10th, 2012 | 2:58 pm
David, all of that assumes that 100% of the women who do not get employer-provided contraception coverage will go without contraception. Among women who have jobs (which is every woman in question in this situation) that is nowhere near reality.
You can’t calculate the cost of contraception vs. the cost of pregnancy as though no employer-provided contraception means no contraception. All it means is that they have to pay for it themselves, or get it through some alternate funding source, which would happen in the vast majority of cases of employed women who would use contraception consistently if they could get it.
(You could refute this if you could show me some data indicating that there is a widespread problem with employed women wanting access to contraception and being unable to get it only because it is not included in their insurance coverage, and therefore actually doing without it. Maybe it’s out there.)
“In fact, if religious organizations want to be totally pure, they will have to make sure they do not save money because their employees are using contraception. If they don’t want to pay for it, they shouldn’t benefit from it, either.”
I’m pretty sure that kind of logic forms no part of Catholic moral reasoning, nor of any known moral reasoning other than that proposed as a “gotcha” by people who want to argue against someone else’s position.
February 10th, 2012 | 2:58 pm
“The cost of contraception is quite a bit less than the cost of prenatal care and hospital delivery.”
Citation, please.
While this obviously true for any particular act of coitus and despite hearing it repeated ad nauseum for the last month, I have yet to see any evidence demonstrating this as begin true in aggregation. In fact, I am skeptical that such evidence is even calculable, as the economic cost/benefit of children is notoriously difficult to determine.
In fact, if your statement were generally true, it would suggest that the way to long-term economic prosperity would be to stop having children altogether. I doubt I have to demonstrate how silly such an idea is.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:07 pm
I was waiting for someone to make David Nikol’s comment.
Assume for the sake of argument that, by including contraceptive coverage, the overall cost of an insurance policy falls (because, since employees use more contraception, their other health-care costs fall). Nevertheless, the employers are still paying for contraception in the only sense that counts: they are required to pay dollars to the insurer who uses those dollars to buy contraception, etc. Hence, my argument in the post still holds true.
Consider this analogy:
suppose that the government requires me to buy a car and gasoline to run it, and then orders me to buy a more fuel efficient car instead. My overall costs may fall, if the added costs of the more efficient car are offset by even greater reductions in my gas bill. But the government has still required me to buy a more efficient car, and it’s ludicrous to say that I’m not paying for that car just because I am paying less for gasoline.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:11 pm
Well, pretty much everything that the Dems said to pass Obamacare was “economic nonsense” so I don’t see why we should expect them to stop now.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:12 pm
So long as contraception is legal and provided through insurance, religious employers who provide group coverage will ALWAYS at least indirectly subsidize their usage. That’s how insurance works. Even if there are different policies, insurance money is fungible.
I don’t understand how there can ever be a conscience argument here unless the bishops are demanding that it be illegal for insurance to cover birth control.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:15 pm
I had mentioned in a comment to the previous post that it’s likely that the Bishop’s opposition to paying for the coverage of contraceptive is probably influenced by a special concern about “giving scandal” in the Catholic sense of the term.
The idea is that a Catholic institution has an authoritative and public “teaching” role. The actions of these organizations witness to the moral and theological truths of the faith in that is public and prominent, in a way that private individuals normally do not. They have, therefore, an additional duty to avoid “teaching” against the faith and morals of the Church by their actions.
So I asked in my other post – can including this addtional intermediary step mitigate the risk of scandal? I don’t think so, but I wonder what others think on this particular point -
As I understand it, the compromise is as follows. Someone is hired by a religious employer and gets health insurance that, as an initial matter, does not include contraceptives. Then, at some point, the insurance company holding the policy contacts that employee and says – Hey, if you want free contraceptives, here are the steps to take. We, your insurance company will provide them to you free of charge.
How does this mitigate the risk of scandal? The implication is that the scandal is mitigated by the fact that it’s not the employer who is providing the contraceptives, it is the insurance company. But the insurance company is chosen and paid for by the employer. Is an employee likely to believe that somehow it’s “the insurance company” that is paying for the free contraceptives, not the religious employer?
As Robert has pointed out, this is ridiculous. Everyone knows that the insurance company’s services are paid for by the employer – not by non-objecting policy holders or from the profits of the company.
Can this kind of shell-game about who is “paying” for the contraceptives mitigate the concern about scandal? I would think it would only mitigate that concern for people who are very naive or uninformed about how service contracts work. At the end of the day, the insurance paid for as part of the employer’s compensation package is covering contraceptives.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:17 pm
Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article that explains the cost savings form contraceptive coverage but adds a possible new wrinkle that Robert T. Miller is, I think, addressing above:
February 10th, 2012 | 3:30 pm
Robert T. Miller,
I think you are arguing that if a religious organization marks its dollar bills and has paid $5000 for a policy that did not cover contraception, and it continues to mark its bills and pays for $5000 for a policy that does cover contraception, then some of its marked bills pay for contraception. That is true. But of course, unless the religious organization that provides coverage buys insurance from an insurance company that does not cover contraception at all, for anyone, some of its marked bills are paying for contraception.
Likewise, almost everyone with employer-provided insurance in the country today who pays part of the cost of their own coverage, if they marked their dollar bills, would find that those dollar bills are going for fellow employees contraception and in many cases abortion. (Almost all employer provided insurance covers contraception.)
February 10th, 2012 | 3:41 pm
“So long as contraception is legal and provided through insurance, religious employers who provide group coverage will ALWAYS at least indirectly subsidize their usage. That’s how insurance works. Even if there are different policies, insurance money is fungible.”
I suppose theoretically, an insurance company that offers no policies including birth control coverage could market to institutions with this conscience issue, and then it would not be an issue.
Maybe it’s not likely, but it would at least be *possible,* if it wasn’t illegal to do so (as the Obama HHS rule would have it.) And there’s definitely a moral difference between a government making something legally possible, and legally impossible.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
Can this kind of shell-game about who is “paying” for the contraceptives mitigate the concern about scandal?
sallyr,
From the New York Times:
To condemn this solution is to doubly condemn the organizations who have already complied with state mandates.
From some interesting comments on Mirror of Justice:
I believe he is correct about the issue of scandal, and he is writing about the original plan, not the newly modified plan.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:42 pm
I hope the bishops don’t fall for this nonsense. The only “compromise” made will be by the USCCB. This announcement is pure fiction.
February 10th, 2012 | 3:52 pm
The “cost” is a red herring.
The Catholic Church wants to offer insurance to its employees that does not include birth control, abortifacients, etc. That should be its prerogative under the Constitution.
Under both the original HHS mandate and the “accommodation,” the Catholic Church can’t do that. The government is mandating that the plans offered by the Church must include birth control etc.
So the compulsion, and the Constitutional violation, remains.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:00 pm
If it’s so cost effective for insurers to provide free contraception there should be no need for a government order. A healthy greed for obscene profits would be sufficient to lead them to provide free coverage. In fact their stockholders should sue them for dereliction of duty if they have been passing up such an obvious pot of gold all these years.
The economist was right when he did not pick up what looked like a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. If it were real it would have been picked up long ago.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:02 pm
pentamom, if the only possibility of complying with your conscience is hypothetical, then this either isn’t a conscience issue, or we’re talking about the wrong problem.
As the bishops have expressed themselves, the only realistic option for ensuring that religious employers don’t subsidize immoral behaviors is to ban any and all insurers from covering the costs of birth control. Even if 2008 law is repealed, any insurer will still offer a choice of plans, and those without abortifacients will subsidize those that do have them.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:06 pm
But of course, unless the religious organization that provides coverage buys insurance from an insurance company that does not cover contraception at all, for anyone, some of its marked bills are paying for contraception.
To amplify a bit on my own comment above, unless a company is self-insured, the premiums it pays to an insurance company go to the insurance company, not to pay the medical bills of the employees. Unless an insurance company has only one client, it is not taking money from each client to pay the medical bills of that client. The insurance company is selling many policies, taking a calculated risk on all of them, and pooling all of the premiums it receives so that if there is some kind of disaster affecting one of its clients, it can pay the claims for the unfortunate client and still make a profit overall. Consequently, if the insurance company covers abortion and contraception on some policies, and a religious organization purchases a policy that does not cover contraception and abortion, some of that money the religious organization pays is still going to pay for other policyholders’ contraception and abortions.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:26 pm
The point of an exemption is simply to enable an employer to avoid acting contrary to his or her religious beliefs, not to retain control of employees’ health plans, limit employees’ choices to those religiously approved by the employer, and avoid paying any money to anybody that might someday be used by somebody to provide services to employees not to the employers’ liking.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:39 pm
David Nichols says: To condemn this solution is to doubly condemn the organizations who have already complied with state mandates.
Well I don’t know if I was condemning anyone. I was considering whether complying with this mandate risks scandalizing the faithful (in the sense of leading them into sin).
It seems to me that this latest proposal does not adequately address the moral issue of scandal. The fact that some organizations have found no other way to confront this problem than to comply is not an answer to the problem. It’s simply a signal that this is a very difficult issue to solve.
February 10th, 2012 | 4:52 pm
“Unless an insurance company has only one client”
You mean like http://www.guidestone.org, the insurer for the Southern Baptist Convention?
February 10th, 2012 | 5:02 pm
David Nickol: Nonsense. Let’s say an insurance company does not include these services for a Catholic hospital’s thousands of employees right now. If the female employees, or wives of male employees with family plans, want those services now, they pay for them. It seems that most people do, and most people can already afford them. Anyway, if the insurance company has to provide those services tomorrow, their costs will obviously go up — forever. So that argument is silly. The only way costs would go down would be if women did not have those services and were having babies every two or three years.
February 10th, 2012 | 5:33 pm
Seems this whole fiasco soemwhat parralels what St.Paul had to deal with , in the category of food offered to idols ; now that The Church is being forced to do something She should not , hope it would be resisted and possibly an organsiation , such as Knights of Columbus can provide coverage , without the contraceptive coverage .
Hopefully a Santorum Govt . would encourage same , along with classes in preventive meausres that would be suitable for the issues involved ( free NFP classes etc ; ) and we might be very pleasantly surprised a few years down the road, to see how the group is doing better , health and even wealth wise than the other ( similar to what happened in Uganda , in AIDS prevention ,where The Church and hEr teachings on chastity is what helped .)
Such a move then could give the country the type of solid foundation in values , to help greatly in other areas too !
February 10th, 2012 | 5:42 pm
David Nickol,
Willful ignorance on this on your part doesn’t make the policy any better.
Women who want low-cost or no-cost access to contraception can already obtain it through Title X funds (funded at over $300M per year).
The HHS ruling isn’t even necessary to expand access to contraception. It is a needless poke in the eye to religious institutions and conscience rights. It doesn’t even make sense from a political standpoint. White House insiders such as Bill Daley (former Chief of Staff), Vice-President Biden and Leon Panetta waved the red flag on this before the ruling was announced. Six Democratic Senators have already jumped ship on this. This is just a bad idea all around.
February 10th, 2012 | 8:22 pm
To condemn this solution is to doubly condemn the organizations who have already complied with state mandates.
I’m willing to condemn Catholic institutions that submit meekly instead of prioritizing the tenets of their faith.
February 10th, 2012 | 9:46 pm
“The only way costs would go down would be if women did not have those services and were having babies every two or three years.”
Thank you Gail, you made the point much more clearly than I did. I notice David didn’t choose to address that, but in fact repeated his fallacy on another thread.
February 10th, 2012 | 10:56 pm
I don’t think that marked bills–even as a metaphor–is the right way to think of it. In order to comply with the law, a Catholic organization would, it seems to me, have to check to make sure that the insurer it was dealing with was going to offer contraceptives, sterilizations, etc. to the Catholic organization’s employee’s. The Catholic organization presumably would not be allowed to write a contract with some insurer who would refuse to do the government’s bidding by offering free contraceptives etc. In other words, the Catholic organization would use, as one of its criteria for choosing an insurer, the fact that the insurer provided contraceptives and all that. This means that the Catholic organization would be choosing them–choosing that they be offered to its employees. It has nothing to do with the flow of cash. It has to do with what you are intentionally choosing.
February 11th, 2012 | 1:56 am
[...] in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer.” In other words, as I argued yesterday, it’s the same system as before, except that President Obama says that it isn’t, and we’re [...]
February 11th, 2012 | 2:33 pm
“The only way costs would go down would be if women did not have those services and were having babies every two or three years.”
Thank you Gail, you made the point much more clearly than I did. I notice David didn’t choose to address that, but in fact repeated his fallacy on another thread.
I was wondering whether the government ought to be paying for my housing costs.
I’ve worked up some stats showing that the cost of your typical mortgage or rent is a steal, compared to the medical problems associated with homelessness.
February 11th, 2012 | 3:17 pm
Thank you Gail, you made the point much more clearly than I did. I notice David didn’t choose to address that, but in fact repeated his fallacy on another thread.
pentamom,
If there is a fallacy, it is assuming that armchair analyses of insurance benefits and costs are more accurate than industry studies. From the Washington Post:
Some of the evidence:
If you and Gail Finke are correct, the cost to the federal government should have gone up when it added contraceptive coverage for federal employees. But it didn’t.
February 11th, 2012 | 8:26 pm
“The administration thinks this is a good deal for insurance companies since the economics tend to work in their favor. Numerous studies have shown that covering contraceptives is revenue-neutral, as such preventive measures can lower the rate of pregnancies down the line. Pregnancy and childbirth coverage is, of course, much more expensive.”
Do these numerous studies apply to women who are already covered by health insurance, and who have household employment coming in?
If you don’t control for that, the studies don’t apply to this situation. Women who have their health care costs generally provided for and a steady income are more likely than average to already be obtaining at their own expense and using whatever birth control methods they would obtain if covered by insurance.
If it’s really true that women with sufficient income to afford birth control are having babies they actually don’t want all over the place just because nobody’s picking up the tab for the birth control itself, this is a weird, weird world we live in.
February 11th, 2012 | 9:51 pm
Do these numerous studies apply to women who are already covered by health insurance, and who have household employment coming in?
pentamom,
Yes. I assume you didn’t see my message of 3:17 pm when you wrote your message of 8:26 pm. To repeat: “Notably, the federal government, the nation’s largest employer, reported that it experienced no increase in costs at all after Congress required coverage of contraceptives for federal employees in 1998.”
February 12th, 2012 | 4:33 pm
The “cost” is a red herring.
True, but it’s fun watching David Nickol argue – apparently straight faced – that contraceptives don’t really cost anyone anything.
Condoms really just grow on trees. That occur naturally. And they fall into neat little piles – at night, of course.
February 12th, 2012 | 5:26 pm
True, but it’s fun watching David Nickol argue – apparently straight faced – that contraceptives don’t really cost anyone anything.
Blake,
But I haven’t argued contraceptives don’t really cost anyone anything. Obviously they cost money. However, I have presented evidence that insurance that covers contraceptives is either cheaper than, or costs the same as, insurance that does not cover contraception. It is really not difficult to understand.
Now, there is the argument that although the cost of the insurance will not increase for the employer, and possibly could decrease, their dollars will still be paying for contraceptives. But I have dealt with that argument elsewhere.
February 12th, 2012 | 7:22 pm
“The administration thinks this is a good deal for insurance companies since the economics tend to work in their favor.” —from the Washington Post article provided by David Nickol
It figures this White House is thinking of money instead of morality. Old people are also economic drains on insurance companies. Maybe the White House and insurance companies can brainstorm that problem, too, now that they have thought through the money-sucking “problem” of pregnant women and babies.
February 13th, 2012 | 7:29 am
now that they have thought through the money-sucking “problem” of pregnant women and babies
Peg,
Surely you are aware—with abortions running at over a million a year in the United States—that there is a problem with unintended pregnancies. We can disagree about how the problem should be solved (abstinence, Natural Family Planning, contraceptives), but surely it is not wicked in and of itself to try to get the rate of unintended pregnancy down from 49%. The Catholic Church has officially acknowledged the legitimacy of limiting and spacing children (for married people, of course) since Pope Pius XII, although “artificial” methods are still forbidden.
February 13th, 2012 | 6:12 pm
yes, David Nickol, I am aware of the abortion slaughter. That is a creation of secularism. The promotion and availabilty of artificial contraception hasn’t stemmed the tide. the secular world does not impress me in this regard. I really doubt that many (most? Why not?)pro-abortion people consider any number of abortions as wicked. I am not like them, and God help me I pray I never will be.
You can’t blithely agree to disagree on the solution and mention the Church opposition to artificial birth control as if that isn’t the whole point of this insurance controversy. We think artificial contraception, sterilization and abortion are wrong. Don’t coerce us into wickedness. Considering the life and death issue, the financial number crunching is disgusting.
February 15th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
But I haven’t argued contraceptives don’t really cost anyone anything. Obviously they cost money. However, I have presented evidence that insurance that covers contraceptives is either cheaper than, or costs the same as, insurance that does not cover contraception. It is really not difficult to understand.
The problem is that your evidence doesn’t actually prove anything of the sort, because there’s no logical causal link and no controlling for variables.
The “logical” conclusion is not to assume that you’re right, but rather to assume that this study is the latest in that long string of “Obama supporters throw around manipulated numbers” – throw it on the stack with “98% of Catholic women use birth control” and all the “increasing spending will reduce the deficit” budget proposals.
Lying with statistics is like crying wolf; after a while, nobody even cares enough to debunk the stats.
February 15th, 2012 | 1:36 pm
Surely you are aware—with abortions running at over a million a year in the United States—that there is a problem with unintended pregnancies. We can disagree about how the problem should be solved (abstinence, Natural Family Planning, contraceptives), but surely it is not wicked in and of itself to try to get the rate of unintended pregnancy down from 49%.
Except that it’s already been pointed out that lack of contraceptive coverage is not the problem.
There is no reason to think that it is the problem. The available evidence suggests that people who experience unintended pregnancies had access to affordable birth control.
So is there any reason to bring this back in, other than the need to get us off the topic of religious freedom and onto the “talking point” of “health” (so necessary for Obama’s strategy to work)?
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