Best explanation of the HHS “compromise”: it’s a shell game

Best explanation of the HHS “compromise”: it’s a shell game February 10, 2012

It is the intellectual version of being short-changed. Here’s what Ace says at Ace of Spades HQ

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

The old mandate was just to provide abortifacents. The “solution” just adds a new mandate on top of that one: That you lie about that fact in a legal contract.

This new “solution” is the same one you had before: You always had the option to lie to yourself that you were not part of the abortion providing industry, if you liked.

The only change is now that option is mandatory.

Obama’s actual policy doesn’t change, nor does the coercion against you. Just a new coercion is added — that you lie about it — to insulate him from the political consequences of his policy.

Your religious liberty, protected by an Enron-like accounting trick.  This is precisely what is meant when you hear the words, “add insult to injury.”


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