A Remarkable Failure by the Obama

Yesterday, president Obama ran for cover on the issue of requiring coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion pills in the health insurance plans of religious institutions. In the face of monolithic opposition from the Catholic Church joined by many others upset by the attack on religious freedom, Obama came up with his new "accomodation": the institutions will no longer have to provide the insurance. Instead, the insurance companies have to provide this coverage.

I wrote yesterday about the dishonesty of this solution; it is no solution at all. The cost for the various disputed services would still be paid by the religious institution in the form of higher premiums; the insurance companies would certainly not pay for these services for free. Then, however, an even bigger problem with the "accomodation" became apparent. More than half of the Catholic institutions in question are self-insurers. In other words, the institution pays the medical costs for its employees by itself. The insurance companies only administer the insurance plans to keep control of the costs incurred. Here is a simple example of the resulting problem: a professor at St. someone university gets health insurance from her employer. She is told that the plan comes from United Health, but actually, all the medical bills are paid by the university. Health claims are submitted to United Health, but this is done so that an organization trained to review health claims for validity and plan compliance is involved. This setup takes the burden of such review off the university and it reduces the ultimate cost of medical expenses for all. Then Obama comes along with his new accomodation. Now United Health is supposed to pay for the contraceptive and abortion services, but United Healthcare does not pay for anything at all in this situation. All such payments come from the Catholic university. As a result, even Obama's phony accomodation does not work here.

What you see here is another revelation of the true nature of the Obamacrats. Their goal is to force birth control and abortion on all people even if there are religious objections to such practices. When faced with opposition, Obama and the Obamacrats did not try to sit down with Church groups to develop some alternative that would allow for religious freedom. No, Obama just had his people dream up some phony bandaid to put on the self-inflicted wound. These people who are supposedly so smart that they can now run the national entire health care system instead came up with a cure that does not even come close to working. Indeed, these purported geniuses made clear that they did not even know how the healthcare system works (but they are supposed to run it).

What we are seeing here is the basic fallacy of Obamacare and the liberal statist society. There are no people who can take over and run the everyday life of the country without doing serious damage to it. Liberals are no smarter than anyone else; they just think that they know better. So what we get when liberals are in power are half-baked ideas that cause chaos for the country. Freedom is the system that allows for the most efficiency. Freedom is the system that lets people live in happiness without having to genuflect to big government. Freedom is the system that lets those with talents and who work hard prosper, thereby raising the entire society to new heights.