While I wait for a report to process. . .
It seems to me that it’d be worthwhile for me to write up something more comprehensive on the contraceptive mandate, the Little Sisters’ objection, and how health insurance, in general, fits into this. But right now I have to work, y’know.
So here are two quick links from 2014, when this first became an issue, on the rationale behind the mandate:
“The “War on Women” has gotten out of hand” and
“Reading the Institute of Medicine.”
Fundamentally, the contraception mandate was quite different than the various other components of the set of “preventive services” that employers were required to provide for their employees. (Yes, employers are required to provide health “insurance” but the form of health insurance has been modified from true insurance to cover the risk of unexpected events to include predictable expenses as an add-on — as if GEICO included free oil changes in its car insurance — so that, with respect to these services, the effect is that the government has mandated that employers provide these to their employees. In the case of self-insured plans, where the employer simply pays the cost of its employees healthcare, after reflecting cost-shares, the requirement is even more direct.)
The objective of the mandate seemed to be, from my reading, to move women onto IUDs and other long-lasting, ultra-effective contraceptives. The rationale was, in part, that babies born of unplanned pregnancies, have a greater risk of poor health — that is, the mother is less likely to quit smoking or drinking, for instance. (Though it wasn’t clear whether they had controlled for the other factors involved here.) But there was a wider rationale, saving “society” money through fewer births.
For more detail on the Little Sisters’ case itself, see this explainer from the National Review, which covers all the key points.
And now my report has finished processing.
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