Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a leading advocate in the Obama administration for employees to receive free methods of birth control as part of their employers’ health insurance policies, including contraceptives, sterilization and morning after pills. Since nothing is really free, it will be employers or their insurers who get stuck with the bill, no matter what the moral beliefs of the insurers themselves or the employers who pay the insurance premiums may be. One rationale offered by the Obama administration is that preventing pregnancies is much cheaper than providing pre-natal and post-natal care. The value of life is reduced to dollars and cents by the stroke of a government pen.
Based on the same kind of top down cost-benefit analysis, Sebelius admitted in congressional testimony that, if Congress approved the IPAB bureaucracy’s recommendation for Medicare to reduce its reimbursement payments to seniors for dialysis procedures, seniors may well be left unable to receive this life-saving treatment:
Mr. Chairman, as you know, any cut in services, certainly cost shifting to beneficiaries, could mean huge reductions in care that seniors would have the opportunity to receive.
Is it any wonder that some individuals question why free birth control should be an absolute right while a life-saving procedure for seniors such as dialysis may be on the chopping block?
Saving the best for last, this brings us directly to the third area about which the Obama spin machine is misleading the American people. It has to do with Obama’s war on the First Amendment, evidenced most recently by his insistence that insurance companies, if not employers themselves, communicate with the insured employees about the availability of mandated benefits as to which the insurance companies and/or the employers may have moral objections to providing. This is a double assault on First Amendment rights of the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech, forcing individuals to violate a core religious belief or face a penalty for disobeying the government mandate and forcing such individuals to communicate publicly and affirmatively about the availability of the government-mandated benefit in their insurance plans irrespective of their religious beliefs.
The Supreme Court has stated that the “right of freedom of thought protected by the First Amendment against state action includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all…The right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of the broader concept of ‘individual freedom of mind.’”
The issue is not whether women have the right to obtain and use contraceptives and other methods of birth control. Of course, they do. The issue is also not whether women have the ability to obtain contraceptives and other methods of birth control for free. They do – from organizations such as Planned Parenthood, free clinics or other charities that are advocates of birth control. Moreover, the government can decide to directly subsidize those who cannot afford birth control as a matter of public policy. But the Obama administration has declared war on the First Amendment by coercing individuals to become the instruments for communicating and implementing the Obama administration’s ideological point of view that such individuals find morally repugnant.
We will continue to track the Obama spin machine during the course of the presidential campaign and expose its mendacity.
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I was affiliated with a Catholic Hospital for years. They took in everyone, insured and uninsured until they had to close due to lack of funding. They did not provide abortions or contraception but they did more for the poor than any other hospital in the area. Now obamanation wants these organizations to go against their religious beliefs to pay, directly or indirectly for these things. This is unconstituional, but than again didn't our president say that he wanted to make changes and the constitution was getting in his way.There are plenty of organizations out there that provide these services.
Unfortunately, our taxes are already funding organizations that provide these services, so even though we may be against them, we have no choice in this venue. But, Catholics(I am not Catholic) should stand firm in their beliefs and our constitutional rights. Obama's manipulation of words, the insurance companies will pay for it, what a joke! Who's paying the insurance? Companies will stop providing insurance, but than again, that's what Obama wants, everyone on Obama care, except him,his family and all the other crooked polititians.
Q: Do you know why Obama Hates Asprin ?
A: Because they are white and they work.
I agree with Obama's call for fairness. Those that currently pay no taxes should begin. It is also unfair for anyone NOT paying taxes to have any say on how tax revenues are spent. Therefore, I propose that if you don't pay taxes, for whatever reason, you should have no vote – no say – in how those monies are spent. Period. Watch the politicians scramble to get it right after their entitlement votes are no more. Suddenly, they'll all call for prudence. We all have to run our homes with the money we take in. None of us decides to add a room or renovate the kitchen unless the money is already there. This government sets itself up to what it wants to be and THEN determines how much it needs to operate rather than operating within its means. Time to clean house, before we end like Greece.
Luckily, every American pays taxes. State taxes, sales tax, real estate tax, payroll tax, etc. We won't end up like Greece because we control our own currency and can adjust our monetary policy depending on economic conditions.
"We won't end up like Greece because we control our own currency and can adjust our monetary policy depending on economic conditions." So did the soviets.
There are slight differences between the economy of the Soviet Union and the United States. One is our entire economic system. Another is that we have, by far, the largest economy in the world.
We're too big to fail, whew, boy am I relieved. Thumbs up!
Too bad those differences between us and the soviet union are getting slighter by the day.
Every nation in history rises and falls, though there is not much evidence that we are in a decline. While China is currently scary now, Japan was just as scary in the '80s and Europe was ten years ago. Now our economy is improving and Europe's is having its issues.
We also have (and continue to have) one of the most capitalism-based economies on the planet. There are few nations in the world that are as opposite to the Soviet economy as we are. Any notion to the contrary is hyperbole.
FYI. I just read on another site that Obama's budget includes $800 million to Arab spring countries and $1.3 billion to Egypt, which has just elected the Muslim brotherhood to control and done away with the constitution in favor of Sharia. Keep the money in the US and help those here that need help!
His ideology is a lethal blast in expansion over America.