Vol. 76/No. 31      August 20, 2012

On Aug. 1, provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare, went into effect. One of the provisions requires companies with more than 50 employees to offer health care plans that cover contraception or face government penalties of about $100 per day per worker.

Hercules builds heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, sheet metal forms and other related goods. It is run by four siblings—Bill, Jim and Paul Newland, and their sister Christine Ketterhagen—who say the Obamacare provision violates their “religious freedom” because they are devout Catholics.

After Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010, the family filed suit seeking exception from providing contraception coverage. In preparing their legal challenge, they received backing from church-related groups and lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Judge Kane issued what he called an “ad hoc” ruling, giving the family an exemption until the lawsuit is settled. He wrote that the issue posed questions “so serious, substantial, difficult, and doubtful as to make the issue ripe for litigation and deserving of more deliberate investigation.”

Pointing to the administration’s own figures, Kane states that exemptions are already provided for bosses with less than 50 workers, bosses with grandfathered health plans, and certain nonprofit strictly religious organizations—denying coverage to more than 190 million workers and their family members.

While Hercules is the first for-profit, privately owned company whose bosses have reached for the same exemption, several dozen businesses run by Catholic institutions, including hospitals, schools and colleges, have also filed similar lawsuits.

But what these employers are demanding has nothing to do with the right to worship free of government interference. The foundation of this right has always been the separation of church and state, not the right of bosses to deny certain health benefits to workers because they don’t approve of them.

But under the banner of “freedom of religion,” supporters of the bosses in this debate turn the entire question on its head. In a July 30 article in the American Spectator, for example, author David Catron backs Kane’s decision and said the family’s lawsuit seeks to ensure the government “cannot force families to abandon their faith just to earn a living.”

Adopting arguments made by Hercules’ bosses and their conservative Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers, Kane says there is a better way the government could provide workers with health care without burdening the bosses—“creation of a contraception insurance plan with free enrollment.”

Ironically, the judge makes a case for what would be a step forward from any of the so-called health plans, put forward by Republicans or Democrats today—government-funded single payer health care paid out of general revenue. That would certainly be far better than President Obama’s bureaucratic nightmare, which imposes regressive taxes on workers, while providing a profit bonanza to parasitic insurance companies.  
 
 
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