Tracey: Religious views shouldn’t exempt hospitals from insurance mandate

You’d have to live underground to miss the debate over the Affordable Care Act —… You’d have to live underground to miss the debate over the Affordable Care Act — specifically, its mandate that employers insure birth control.

Doctors and feminists are calling this a victory for women’s health, but the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops claims that the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt Catholic hospitals and universities — which, according to the Official Catholic Directory, comprise 12 percent of all the hospitals in the United States — from this requirement is a threat to religious freedom. Pro-life Catholics especially view the lack of exemption as part of a broader assault on their values by the President’s pro-family planning agenda.

Obama — or rather, the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Health and Human Services — isn’t requiring Catholic hospitals to cover birth control out of spite, to challenge their values or to force them to conform to pro-choice views. It’s much simpler and much less devious than that. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers are required to cover preventative medicine for their employees, and whether the Vatican approves of birth control or not, modern medical institutions — including the Department of Health and Human Services and the independent nonprofit Institute of Medicine — considers it preventative care. Catholic hospitals are forced to cover birth control for the same reason they’re forced to cover STD testing and cancer screenings.

Religious opponents of birth control coverage depict the Pill as having one purpose and one alone: to allow women to have sex without consequences. But in fact, hormonal birth control is used to treat endometriosis, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. Taking hormonal birth control lowers a woman’s risk of ovarian cancer and cysts. It’s used to treat low estrogen levels, which are associated with poor bone health, and excessively heavy menstrual bleeding, which is associated with increased risk of anemia.

Even when used for its “traditional” purpose, birth control is preventative medicine. Although obviously not an illness, pregnancy is very much like an illness for insurance purposes: If you contract it, you must shell out for a lot of expensive and time-consuming doctor’s visits or risk serious illness and death.

Religious institutions that oppose premarital sex may declare that they don’t want to pay for a woman’s sexual immorality, but unless Catholic hospitals refuse to cover prenatal care if the pregnant employee is not married to the father of her child — needless to say, probably not what Jesus would do — they’re paying for it anyway. Because prenatal healthcare — to say nothing of the astronomical costs of a hospital birth — is hundreds of times more expensive than birth control, refusing to cover the latter ultimately costs your insurance company, and anyone whose taxes subsidize it, a great deal more money. According to the Guttmacher Institute, unintended pregnancies cost U.S. taxpayers $11.1 billion dollars a year, and that’s only factoring in public insurance costs for prenatal and first-year infant care.

When a religious organization has immense power and influence — for example, it controls 12 percent of the hospitals in the United States — and that organization is subsidized by the government, the government has a responsibility to ensure that the organization prioritizes the well-being of those it serves over the propagation of its religious tenets. If the Catholic hospital system decided it was immoral for a female doctor to examine a patient’s breasts for cancerous lumps and adulterous for a male doctor to do so, could we really allow the hundreds of thousands of women they employ to go without breast cancer screenings? Would that be considered a matter of religious freedom?

You’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and you might as well do it where most practitioners of the faith you’re supposedly disenfranchising actually agree with you. Sixty-three percent of Catholics support insurance coverage for birth control, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some point in their lives, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Just because the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops chooses to neglect the healthcare needs of its own parishioners doesn’t mean the government’s moral obligation is to neglect them as well.

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu