Here’s an aspect of the HHS preventive-services mandate and the “compromise” announced on Friday that has gone unnoticed: It will soon be impossible, because it would be illegal, to be a faithful Catholic in America running a health-insurance company. Friday’s announcement — that health-insurance companies will be required to provide free coverage of contraceptives, sterilization procedures, and abortifacients — entails that citizens cannot operate a health-insurance company in accord with their moral values, if those moral values happen to align with historic Christianity rather than Obama.
Maybe market forces have made it all but impossible to be a major player in the health-insurance industry while holding to these views. But the outcry during the past three weeks about the HHS mandate shows that there are plenty of potential consumers for just such a health-insurance plan. In a free society, shouldn’t an entrepreneuring individual be legally able to run such a business? Not according to Obama.
— Ryan T. Anderson is Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.