Telling the government rather than an insurance company that a university will not pay for contraceptives, such as abortion-inducing drugs, is only a “cosmetic” change that still forces a university to “facilitate” its employees getting contraception, four Christian universities in Oklahoma said in a new filing in their challenge to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate.
Represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the universities told the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the administration’s new “accommodation” – in which the government arranges cost-free contraception for university employees after a school files its “religious objections” directly with the Department of Health and Human Services – still makes universities complicit:
They must still file a document causing their health plan, insurer, and/or third party administrator (TPA) to be commandeered by the government and used as a mule to deliver certain objectionable items. Under the old accommodation invocation mechanism, they completed and sent a particular form to the insurer or TPA; now it is a letter to the government identifying the insurer or TPA, which causes a letter to be sent to the insurer or TPA. …
The government could use its money—which under the new rule it offers to pay to TPAs—to deliver these items through the government’s own channels, without hijacking the Universities’ own plan administrator or insurer by means of the Universities’ contracts and their letters to the government. But the government stubbornly insists on involving the Universities in the delivery channels anyway.
It’s a “semantic” argument that universities won’t end up paying for abortion-inducing drugs:
[T]he government cannot deny that the payments for objectionable items that the Universities’ insurers would offer under the interim rule are part of the Universities’ own coverage. Therefore the Universities are substantially burdened because they are being required to provide a plan that covers the items, despite the government’s semantic denial of that fact.
Senior Counsel Gregory Baylor of the Alliance Defending Freedom says religious nonprofits should get the same exemption offered to churches, rather than a string of proposed accommodations which indicate that the government can find “less restrictive” ways of providing contraception.
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