

WASHINGTON — This coming spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear more than five hours of oral arguments in a case challenging President Obama’s signature health-care legislation. The case, brought by Florida and 25 other states and the National Federation of Independent Business, marks the highest profile challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The law, also known as “Obamacare,” has been controversial, as debate continues over what exactly its implications for both conscience and business are.
At the heart of the challenge is the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the requirement that everyone purchase health insurance. The mandate was dealt a blow when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that if it is constitutional for Congress to require “that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die,” then there can be “no limiting principles in which to confine Congress’s enumerated power.”
But it is potential conscience-rights issues that have the U.S. bishops and other defenders of religious liberty most concerned about the unfolding law.
“The bishops were absolutely clear in their letter to Congress in March 2010 warning that passage of the law would lead to taxpayer funding for abortion and contraception and to conscience violations for Catholic health-care providers,” said Grace-Marie Turner, president of the health care and tax-focused Galen Institute and co-author of Why ObamaCare Is Wrong for America. “Their warnings already have tragically been proven correct.”
Turner noted that the law will also disappoint many supporters, including some Catholics, because it will still leave 23 million people, “under the most optimistic projections,” uninsured, “and as many as 80 million more could ‘lose the coverage they have now,’ according to a survey of employers by McKinsey and Co. In addition, as many as 87 million people will be relegated to the Medicaid ghetto — promised coverage but with limited access to actual health care. The ‘reforms’ in the health law will harm the most vulnerable citizens, making it even harder than it is today for them to get care.”
Conscience Concerns
Turner noted that one important Catholic supporter of the legislation was Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association.
“The [broken] promises that abortion would not be covered, that Catholics would have conscience protection, and that the law would achieve universal coverage are three reasons that Sister Keehan and others should repudiate their support of the law and begin work now to promote the right reform that is based on true Catholic values, respecting life, human dignity and religious freedom,” she said.
Conscience concerns were raised just this month before the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on the Constitution by Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ new Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty.
Bishop Lori highlighted regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in August mandating contraception — “including abortifacients” — and sterilization coverage in “almost all private health-insurance plans.” He even cited Sister Carol, saying she is concerned about a “so incredibly narrow” exemption for some religious employers.
“The exception does nothing to protect insurers or individuals with religious or moral objections to the mandate,” Bishop Lori said. “The ‘preventive services’ mandate is but the first instance of conscience problems arising from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — enacted in March 2010 — an act whose goal of greater access to health care the bishops have long supported, but that we had persistently warned during the legislative process did not include sufficient protections for rights of conscience.”
“Public funding should go toward helping and caring for the most vulnerable Americans, not killing them,” said Matt Bowman, legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, which frequently goes to bat for conscience issues in court. “Clearly, the American taxpayers should not be forced to fund abortions, especially during tough economic times, but the health-care act threatens to do that and more. It threatens the conscience rights of health professionals, payers and employers, because it is not subject to existing federal conscience-protection laws, and Congress failed to apply comprehensive conscience protections to the statute. In addition, HHS recently mandated that all employers provide plans that cover abortifacients, contraception and sterilization.”
Bowman highlights the limits, though, of one court case: “Because these are not the issues directly raised on appeal in current litigation concerning the health-care act, the court may only strike down the mandate that individual citizens must buy health care and leave the rest in place. That would mean the federal government will still be free to impose most of these pernicious policies. The result will be the most significant wholesale federal intrusion into religious freedom in modern times. We should no longer tolerate taxpayer bailouts of billion-dollar abortion giants like Planned Parenthood. No responsible economic policy includes bailouts for big abortion.”
Leonard Nelson, a professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and author of Diagnosis Critical: The Urgent Threats Confronting Catholic Health Care, agrees that “the invalidation of the whole legislation is very unlikely, but it is more likely the court will declare the mandate unconstitutional and sever it, despite the lack of a severability clause.”
Back to the bishop’s main concern, Nelson said, “The most disturbing part of the legislation is the treatment of contraception as preventive care with the limited conscience clause. This include coverage of Ella, the drug with abortifacient properties. There is a narrow conscience clause, but it will not cover Catholic hospitals or other major Catholic institutions. Thus, unless they already had in place a self-insured plan, Catholic institution will have to provide contraceptive coverage without co-pays or deductibles. It applies to all insurance policies sold on and off the exchange as well as non-grandfathered self-insured plans.”
2012 Election
With every likely Republican nominee in the 2012 presidential election vowing to repeal the health-care law, a ruling that falls short of overturning the law would not mark a final political ruling.
Nelson believes the controversy over the health-care law is a real opportunity for Catholic health care in the United States. “If Obamacare is declared unconstitutional, then Catholic hospitals will probably have to provide more charity care,” Nelson predicts. “I would like to see Catholic health care more focused on serving the underserved. That is an essential part of their Catholic mission.
“In addition, under Obamacare, there is increased pressure on Catholic hospitals to consolidate their operations with non-Catholic providers to form larger organizations. This is due in part to payment reforms that provide incentives to reduce fragmentation in health and the significant capital investments that will be needed to form accountable-care organizations. As I noted in my book, it may be better for Catholic health care to be less focused on acute-care hospitals and more focused on alternative undertakings.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist.
Heaven help us. Welcome to the Soviet Republic of America or modern day Nazi America. When will we Catholics stop trying to fit in when we need to be the moral leaders and not the members of the pack? We are different and yes being more forthright will lower membership numbers but better fewer more faithful Catholics than people claiming to be Catholic and yet they proclaim in the public forum their disagreements with basic church teachings. You can’t be a faithful Catholic and live a life in public that goes against church teaching.
So, Mike are you telling the Bishops to shut up and embrace this abnoxious Obama Health-care Legislation because their wayward Sheep voted for Obama? If so, you are forgetting that any Catholic Faithful in the Political Position who supports Legislation which is against the Divine Teachings of the Catholic Church automatically ex-communicates himself/herself from the Church. Why not stop blaming these misguided pseudo-Catholics and support our Bishops as they brace themselves to fight this evil Legislation in order to protect the sanctity of life, the Family and the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony and the dignity of mankind?
‘“The bishops were absolutely clear in their letter to Congress in March 2010 warning that passage of the law would lead to taxpayer funding for abortion and contraception and to conscience violations for Catholic health-care providers,” says Grace-Marie Turner, president of ... the Galen Institute….’
Comments like this leave me with the impression that as long as taxpayer-funded abortion and contraception were dropped from the Obamacare bill, the USCCB would go right along with it.
Dear Bishops, what is the point of having an insurance policy that eats up a disproportionate of an individual’s or family’s disposable income?
What is the point of having an INSURANCE policy in a society that regulates physicians and hospitals to the point that fewer physicians remain in practice and are unable to meet the increased demand?
What is the point of having an insurance policy but NO access to health care?
“it may be better for Catholic health care to be less focused on acute-care hospitals and more focused on alternative undertakings.”
“then Catholic hospitals will probably have to provide more charity care,” Nelson predicts. “I would like to see Catholic health care more focused on serving the underserved.”
Questions: If the above were to happen: Where would the Catholic Hospitals get their money…from the government? If so, the government is still controlling. [right now the underserved are Medicare recipients and especially those in the “medicaid ghetto”
Correct me if my ‘thinking’ of this article is wrong.
As an older adult, I just want my government to stop trying to get full control of us, as Obama is trying to do. He calls it ‘progress”....[I call it ‘old Europe’]. Our government should not be in the insurance business.
If we had never had Medicare, paid for by the WORKING tax payers, businesses would have offered something else in their packages. [probably a better retirement insurance]
Mr.Obama,like the Chinese Communist leaders,has declared war on Christians,especially Catholics. He has sent American soldiers to Afghanistan to give those people freedom, but denies freedom to Americans. Americans and others are quickly losing all respect for Obama
If 85% of adult Catholic women in their childbearing years are contracepting (the same rate as the general population), whose conscience is being violated?
Solution: hire only celibate religious.
I can not afford to purchase health care. I can not afford to pay the penalty for not purchasing health care. The federal government in 2014 will have to put me in jail or prison for nonpayment of penalty for not purchasing health care.
We need to repeal Obamacare and not depend on the Supreme Court to do it for us. Andrew McCarthy in National Review online has an excellent article on this topic. Repeal it now.
What would be nice to hear from the Bishops would be a bunch of mea culpas and apologies for their promotion of nationalized health care to the ordinary Catholics. It might be one way to let those Catholics who voted for Obama et. al. and the programs they support know they were wrong.
The Bishops and other church leaders got what they were told they would get. They got what is the only reasonable thing to assume they would get. They got what was inevitable. They got exactly what one would expect from the liberals, primarily but not exclusively Democrat.
Maybe at some point in time they will not automatically reject opinions from conservatives that believe in subsidiarity, in constitutional govermnet, that believe the big government is always bad government.
At the least they might be suspect when the warriors in the culture of death are the leading proponent of massive programs and say “don’t worry; we are good guys”.
Frank
Well, if “good’ Catholics hadn’t been taken in by mr. Obama’s siren song of hope and change, and not voted for him, maybe we wouldn’t be staring down this hole. If “good” Catholics hadn’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and replaced conservatives in Congress with liberals, we wouldn’t be wondering where OUR rights as Christian Catholics might be headed. And, if the head of the Catholic Health Association hadn’t gushed her support and played into the hands of those who want to destroy our right of concsience in exchange for a White House photo op to impress her friends, we might not be staring at the health care abyss.