Revealed: Biden Set To Widen Obamacare Mandate, Force Christian Employers To Cover Abortion, Gender 'Reassignment'

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 13, 2022
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Whether it be the dystopian, top-down, command-and-control COVID lockstep or it be the broader and more fundamental ObamaCare assault of the feds telling employers with twenty or more staff that they must provide health insurance and telling citizens that they must buy health insurance, the corrupt, coercive control grid is upon us.

And Biden appears ready to make it more coercive, perverse, and utterly insulting.

As Tom Tracy reports for Catholic News Service, a legal memorandum attached to a court filing reveals what appears to be Biden Administration plans to force Obamacare-targeted employers to provide health insurance that will cover abortions, “gender reassignment,” and other expenses.

Leadership at the Catholic Benefits Association believes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will soon announce new regulations that may pose an existential threat to religious-based employers including Catholic hospitals.

The Catholic Benefits Association, “provides legal advocacy and litigation in defense of the First Amendment rights for its membership of over 1,000 Catholic employers, including 60 dioceses and archdioceses, numerous religious orders, colleges and universities, hospitals and other ministries,” and its legal help, attorney Martin Nussbaum of Nussbaum Speir Gleason in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has uncovered something that many freedom-lovers anticipated and feared.

Discovery of a 74-page legal memorandum attached to a court filing from a consortium of 30 sexual rights groups last year revealed that HHS has promised to revise its mandates on health plan coverage and performance to include surgical abortion, cross-sex hormones, gender-transition surgeries, gender-affirming cosmetic surgeries and voice modification — along with a host of expanded services dealing with fertility treatments, contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations.

This consortium of "sexual rights groups" is called, “The Leadership Conference,” and, in contrast to the “Leadership at the Catholic Benefits Association,” it is focused on adding more burdens to businesses, insurance companies, and the people who will be forced to pay higher premiums for their insurance should the Biden HHS apply these “broader” coverage edicts.

Writes Tracy:

The Leadership Conference, based in Washington, is a coalition of some 200 member organizations advocating for civil and human rights for women, the LGBTQ community, immigrants and workers and the disabled community.

It’s curious to see that even this reporter does not distinguish between real “human rights” and the leftist rhetoric -- between Natural Rights, and what this 200-member organization is advocating: more governmental infringement on human rights to contract and be left alone…

The proposed HHS regulations would apply to implementation of an Affordable Care Act provision that includes a prohibit(ion) on discrimination based on sex. It will likely apply to all health care providers, clinics, nursing homes, hospitals, group health insurers and third-party administrators of self-funded plans.

Which means pretty much all employers with twenty or more workers, and all Americans who get health insurance on their own.

Adds Tracy:

It is believed that sometime in April, HHS could announce the proposed regulations, which would not only disallow religious exemptions but would have a broad cost and compliance impact on all U.S. employers.

Attorney Nussbaum amplifies:

The memo prepared by the Leadership Conference (the LGBTQ group) provides the best forecast of what the new regulation will say.

And he goes on to add:

The proposed regulation would also apply to all contractors of the previous groups, including my law firm. For Catholic hospital chains it is hard to imagine how broad that group is.

It appears that the Biden Administration is going to impose the requirements for insurance coverage of things like abortion and “gender reassignment” as a follow-up to a move Biden made early in 2021.

Writes Tracy:

In 2021, shortly after he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden issued an executive order declaring his administration would apply in all areas — including the ACA — the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock in 2020 that discrimination based on sex outlawed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers people who are gay or transgender.

The Bostock case is “Bostock v. Clayton County,” a case the Supreme Court decided in June of 2015 in which multiple LGBTQ plaintiffs brought suit against multiple defendants – both government branches and private businesses – for “discriminatory activity” they said was covered by the Public Accommodations portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

As I have noted for MRCTV, that portion did not distinguish between what really IS public (i.e. tax-funded, governmental) and what is private (i.e. private property, private business). In fact, it claimed through its perverse language that any private place open for business was “public property,” even though that is not the case.

Since the SCOTUS found in favor of the plaintiffs, the Biden Administration is ready to push these new “Affordable Care Act” mandates.

Observes Nussbaum:

The forthcoming (HHS) regulation presents an existential threat to Catholic health care because the penalties to noncompliance will likely include private enforcement, class-action lawsuits, ‘qui tam’ actions, which is where an individual can file a lawsuit as if he or she were the United States itself.

And he adds:

The penalties may also include loss of Medicare and Medicaid funding and even imprisonment for noncomplying health care executives.

All of which makes the title “Affordable Care Act” even more laughable. In fact, anyone familiar with economics knows that these immoral impositions also will have disastrous economic effects.

Writes Tracy:

Last year, the Colorado Association of Health Plans, an industry trade group, predicted a 1.5% rate hike in response to the Colorado governor’s announcement to cover gender-conforming cosmetic surgery — reportedly becoming the first state to try to require insurers to provide transition-related care for transgender people as an essential benefit.

And those costs will be pushed onto both individuals trying to buy plans and to businesses providing them for employees. This, despite the 2014 Supreme Court decision in “Burwell v. Hobby Lobby” that, as the 5-4 majority found and SCOTUSBlog wrote:

As applied to closely held corporations, the regulations promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring employers to provide their female employees with no-cost access to contraception violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

It appears that the Biden Administration is going to try to find wiggle room within the terminology of “closely held corporations,” meaning that it will target large incorporated businesses, including employers and the health insurance companies with which individuals might contract if they want to get their own private policies.

All of which brings us to the final point.

The kind of federal imposition is not the matter here. It would not make any moral difference if the feds were mandating that employers and insurance companies provide aspirin or “gender reassignment hormones” to employees or policy holders. The problem – both constitutionally, and morally – arises in the assumption of any political power to tell others how to conduct their affairs as business owners, employees, or private individuals trying to buy insurance.

Not only is there no power in the US Constitution to do this, fundamental ethics – the ethics of free will based on mutual respect for each other’s autonomy – stands against this kind of imposition.

As the Biden Administration prepares, we can see where this is headed. And we can see that freedom in medicine is being driven out of the US.

Related: Abortion-Pusher Emanuel Apologizes For Flagrant Falsehood On COVID Threat To Kids | MRCTV

This is the second time in a week that a news story has inspired a recollection of author F. Paul Wilson’s work.

Many years ago, Wilson – who, for decades, was a practicing M.D. – wrote a short story called “Offshore,” contained in his book, “Aftershocks…” and concerning the efforts of a human trafficker trying to get a patient to a black-market hospital-ship outside US “territorial waters.”

This US was, of course, a dystopia, where the federal government controlled health care.

Dr. Wilson could see what was coming, and now, it’s pretty much here.

Just as Wilson predicted.

Related: Former HHS Sebelius Says the Unvaxxed Shouldn't Be Allowed At Work | MRCTV

 

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