Michael Greve at the American Enterprise recently posted in a Liberty Fund blog a trenchant analysis of the recently announced HHS regulations that will compel all insurance policies to cover contraception, sterilization, and morning after pills
He provides a very lucid analysis of the way in which vague statutory language about preventive care for women turned into preventing pregnancy and then got written into regulations.
Follow the progression: first comes a statutory text of sufficient ambiguity to keep the Catholic Health Association, representing Catholic hospitals, on board in support of the ACA. (Now that it’s been had, one hopes the association has learned its lesson.) Then comes an administrative creep forward and a de facto delegation to a private organization of known disposition, whose perceived authority and expertise provide cover for the bureaucracy. Then comes the wholesale, underhanded adoption of the interim rule.
By Greve’s reckoning, this travesty is of a piece with the entire agenda of Obamacare. It can’t be implemented, because its a Rube Goldberg contraption, and because dysfunctional as written, what does get done will get done by regulatory fiat.
