The Democrats Are STILL Trying to Force The Little Sisters of the Poor to Pay for Abortions

Well, unless they are pro-death and anti-natal. As long as a Catholic bows down to the alphabet gods, they are fine by Democrats. Think Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

The FBI famously labeled traditional Catholics--read, those who hew most closely to catechism--as domestic terrorists in waiting. They placed informants in churches, for God's sake, as if they were Islamist terrorists because they were skeptical of birth control and abortion.

This has been going on for a very long time. You may recall that the Obama administration tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose mission is caring for the elderly, to cover birth control and abortion in their health care plans. The fact that this violated their First Amendment rights was no barrier to their plans, because Democrats quit caring about First and Second Amendment rights long ago.

When the Supreme Court ruled that the Little Sisters of the Poor were protected by the Constitution, and Congress gave them explicit protections based on their religious freedom, most of us assumed that the issue was decided.

Most of us were wrong. As much as Democrats love to blather on about nobody being "above the law," they only mean that Democrats should control the law and get to decide what it means.

As with bakers exercising their right to refuse baking a cake for a gay wedding or refusing to make dildos out of pastries, the Democrats can't leave religious folks alone. It is the principle of the thing. Their job is to dictate to the people, and our job is to comply without complaint.

It is an iron law in their world. Any dissent makes you a Nazi and a multi-phobic. I can't keep track of the things I am supposedly terrified of. Of all the phobias I am supposed to have, the only one I identify with is the phobia of being taken out by a suicide bomber screaming about Allah.

That one really bothers me, although even there I don't live in fear that it will happen to me. The odds are on my side.

You would think that the left would be smart enough to leave a group called "Little Sisters of the Poor" alone. It's not like they are great in number or even a household name, and you have to admit that the name itself should warn opponents to keep their hands off. You can't find a much more sympathetic bunch.

But of course, for the left, Hamas is sympathetic, and nuns are scary and must be bullied into submission.

It is impossible to overestimate how much any dissent is intolerable to the left. That is the essence of totalitarianism. In the old Soviet Union, even novelists were so repulsive to the regime that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to be crushed, lest the regime appear weak.

The same is true here. Little Sisters of the Poor cannot be tolerated, lest anybody else get the idea that liberty still exists in America.

Gutmacher Policy Review
Author Kinsey Hasstedt

Abortion Coverage Under the Affordable Care Act: Advancing Transparency, Ensuring Choice and Facilitating Access

Reproductive rights are under attack. Will you help us fight back with facts?

HIGHLIGHTS
• Transparency about abortion coverage is not yet a reality, but it is necessary and achievable as the Affordable Care Act continues to be implemented.

• Beyond transparency, individuals should have the option of an affordable health plan that includes abortion coverage—something that is not the case in most states today.

• Ideally, health plans would be required to cover abortion, which would enable women to choose whether to use their coverage for abortion if they find themselves in need of such care.

Abortion is basic health care and therefore should be covered by health insurance. However, in passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Congress decided against guaranteeing coverage of this basic health service, and established rules unique to abortion coverage.

Under the ACA, an issuer opting to cover abortion care in marketplace plans must follow particular administrative requirements to ensure that no federal funds go toward abortion. Moreover, states retain the option to ban abortion coverage in marketplace plans outright, and half of states have already done so.

Given the special treatment of abortion care under the ACA and the confusion it has created, individuals covered by or shopping for a plan should be at least able to easily discern whether and to what extent a plan covers such care.

In the ACA’s first full year of implementation, however, individuals were largely unable to obtain clear, consistent information on whether a given plan covered or excluded abortion, according to a 2014 Guttmacher Institute analysis.

Building on that analysis, Guttmacher has gathered sufficient information about 2015 marketplace plans to determine that this is an ongoing problem. Antiabortion policymakers and advocates are exploiting this lack of publicly available information on abortion coverage to call for new legislation that purportedly advances transparency, but is actually aimed at discouraging—if not eliminating—abortion coverage altogether.

For its part, the Obama administration recently acknowledged that it can do more to ensure greater transparency about abortion coverage in the marketplaces and has proposed rules to that end—rules that, once finalized, should diffuse future calls for congressional action.

Ultimately, a clear and consistent approach to providing information on abortion coverage will make it easier for plans to do so, and will help individuals to be better informed as they choose and use their health insurance.

Co-Opting Transparency

snip

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.