Religious University Abruptly Drops Birth Control Coverage

[SecularMotion]

By: David Dayen

I mentioned this briefly in yesterday’s Roundup, but I wanted to circle back to it, because it’s incredible. Despite the annoying way in which the President touts his policy preferences as previously “conservative ideas,” it actually is pretty incredible, just on an anthropological level, how conservatives can manage to turn on a dime on these policies, like cap and trade or the individual mandate, things that they’ve touted for many years. Now we have another example of this.

For years, Xavier University, a Jesuit school in the Cincinnati area, had a health care plan that included birth control coverage. Certainly this did not cause a whole lot of alarm as a breach with Catholic teaching. Faculty and other employees at the college, including non-Catholics, could get birth control under their health plans. It was only when the Obama Administration mandated this as part of their preventive health services menu that the President of Xavier even bothered to look at his insurance plan and what it covered. And finding birth control on there, he swiftly moved to cancel it, presumably because it violated his deeply held beliefs of which he was unaware until a little while ago.


http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/04/04/religious-university-abruptly-drops-birth-control-coverage/

[SamG]

1. "violated his deeply held beliefs of which he was unaware"

Yes, I see this is really just like Cap and Trade, an issue that is only important to those who dislike Obama.

That's it in a nutshell. These Catholics lived for years and years with a permissive liberal policy which treated women as real adults, capable of making their own personal health choices. Now that Obama has weighed in on the issue, suddenly it became a weapon they could wield against all women.

Disgusting.

[Leontius]

2. I have a question

I have seen the term used as "free birth control coverage" is this what the law requires or is this just an attempt by the right to confuse the issue? I have not looked at this issue in any depth or followed it closely at all.

[cbayer]

3. The Affordable Care Act requires that insurance policies include birth control

coverage at no additional cost to the insured.

[Shadowflash]

4. just a bully.

It certainly didn't violate his right not to use birth control because of his religion. No one forced him to use anything.

He just feels he has a right to force his religious doctrine on all the employees by making sure they don't have access to BC through their health coverage. I bet the employee premiums didn't drop a cent when that benefit was taken out.

[SamG]

5. Of course not! Insurance companies don't do that!

Rates go in one direction.

For a change in the policy, there will, no doubt, be an ADDITIONAL service charge to the University, to pay all those lawyers to write it up in legalese.