Via Ed Morrissey, this is a significant blow to the Obama administration’s so-called compromise on the birth control mandate. The Catholic Health Association was a key supporter of Obamacare, and provided the administration with Catholic cover by initially supporting the mandate compromise. But after a long review, the CHA has decided that the administration’s accommodations don’t go far enough. USA Today reports:
President Obama’s support for his signature health care act took a fresh hit Friday. The Catholic Health Association, the nation’s largest private health care provider, has rebuffed the latest White House moves to make its contraception coverage mandate more acceptable to Catholics and conservative evangelicals, according to Religion News Service.
The CHA was a critical voice in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2009. Sister Carol Keehan, head of CHA, drew standing ovations from progressive Catholics.
The CHA expressed lingering concerns about aspects of the mandate in a letter to HHS on Friday.
The announcement comes at a terrible time for the Obama administration. Obama has already lost some ground with Catholic voters, and Thursday marks the beginning of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Fortnight for Freedom protest, which will highlight the mandate as an example of government persecution. It will bring the issue into pulpits around the country through lectures, prayer vigils and public action campaigns for two weeks (that is, if Obamacare is still around for that long).
The CHA has gotten advance word from a source close to one of the six Roman Catholics on the SCOTUS that the Affordable Healthcare Act is going down, and is using this opportunity to set itself up again as an honest broker for when the battles in Congress resume. n nThere is no other reason for them to turn away at this late date from the deal they signed on to after the earlier outcry.
It also is not likely true — SCOTUS leaks come not from justices but from clerks. It is the clerks who are trying to impress girlfriends and boyfriends, who are closer socially/culturally to law school buddies (and undergrad buddies) than the court and its culture, and who are not lifelong members of that guild. n nOften it is the clerks who have the most objective opinions of what the justices are thinking, it is they who are being told to revise draft opinions in response to what other justices think, they are more objectively neutral in a dispassionate analysis of the justice for whom they work than the justice himself/herself as well. One knows what one thinks better than anyone else, but it is others, with less and hence better data on what one thinks, who better know if one will actually act on those thoughts or not. n nSo the clerks have better information, can leak at a lower cost, and are far more exposed to people wanting it. My guess is that is where the leak, if any, came from.
Ms. Goodman is intuitively stumbling on something here that doesn't exist in most other faiths (LDS/Mormon being a notable exception) because the Catholic church is a structured entity with authority starting with the Pope and extending downward in a clearly defined organizational structure. There are thus two inherent schisms — individual Catholics who simply ignore specific teaching that come from Rome and with which they disagree, and various factions within the hierarchy fighting for control of the organization. n nHence this, in Morressiey's article, is quite relevant: "While the US Conference of Catholic Bishops have pushed for universal health coverage in the US for almost a century, the USCCB ended up opposing ObamaCare." And they likely still are and will continue to do so — with individual conservative Catholics still further to the right of these Bishops and openly so. At one point an individual who disagreed with Church teaching could be (and was) "excommunicated" — kicked out — but those days are long gone and individual Catholics routinely ignore dictates from Rome with which they agree. (Catholics using birth control comes to mind.) n nAnd at what point does the Catholic Health Association realize that they have taken a position which may benefit them personally (money for hospitals) but which is so far off-center that their organization will topple should they try to sustain it? Remember that Catholic hospitals depend upon donors — big and small — and that means that the donors have to be happy with what they are doing. The donors may not be happy with the politics, but they like the buildings named after their late parents and the rest, they like the healthcare being provided (and the knowledge that they would receive it if needed, that they would benefit from the first-rate super-expensive electronic wizardry they are paying for), and they tolerate the dissidence. n nTo a point. What folk failed to understand is the visceral cringe that individualists would have to the invasive nature of Obamacare, that they would consider it a violation almost like a sexual assault. It is the same sort of thing that we are seeing with TSA and the "naked body scanners" — people are bluntly saying "NO" and enough that the hospital administrators are likely being put into the position of either leaving the CHA for the good of their own hospital or getting the CHA to change its position. n nLarge organizations tend to change policies under such circumstances.