Category Archives: Health Insurance

Phoenix Rally for Religious Freedom

Abortion Ban Passes in Senate, Lesko Bill Down but Not Out

Two important bills went in opposite direction in the Arizona Legislature this week.

Arizona’s Senate voted 20-10 Tuesday to ban abortions of preborn children at 20 weeks. If this bill is eventually signed into law, it would change the current legality of abortion until a preborn child is “viable.”

Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (Tempe left-winger) boasted to reporters that lawmakers are empowered to determine life and death outcomes.

Sen. Steve Smith, Maricopa conservative, disagreed: “I would like to listen to the 50 million-plus children that have been aborted and killed since Roe v. Wade. I would like to listen to what they think of this bill.”

And so did Sen. Steve Yarbrough, Chandler conservative, who said, “There’s a third person in that room. There’s the baby. Who speaks for her, the totally innocent one with no voice? Who has the duty and the right to speak for her? We do.”

The bill now goes across the capital lawn to the Arizona House of Representatives for its deliberation.

The East Valley Tribune story prominently features in its story the views of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest profiteer of abortion deaths. But nowhere is Arizona Right to Life or the Center for Arizona Policy included in the story written by left-wing reporter Howard Fischer.

***

The Arizona Senate Wednesday defeated HB 2625, a bill introduced by Rep. Debbie Lesko, conservative, to protect religious freedom. This bill declares that any entity or individual with a religious objection to paying for objectionable insurance coverage is free to contract with an employer and insurer who want to honor their conscience. The vote was 17-13 against.

Republican Nancy Barton tendered a last-minute “no” vote to keep the bill alive for re-consideration. But no-votes included Scottsdale abortion advocate Michele Reagan, Mesa RINOs Jerry Lewis and Rich Crandall, and Republicans John Nelson, John McComish and Senate President Steve Pierce.

Clearing Up the ACLU’s Distortions about Rep. Lesko’s House Bill 2625

By Catherine Glenn Foster, Alliance Defense Fund

Once again, the enemies of religious liberty have to resort to distortions as they try to convince citizens to jump on their anti-faith bandwagon.

Headlines from the American Civil Liberties Union and its cohorts are flying viral across the Internet with catchy little phrases like, “Use Birth Control? You’re Fired!” Sadly, even the mainstream media has begun to join in this echo chamber of falsehoods.

Where did the enemies of freedom at the ACLU come up with this whopper? At issue is Arizona legislation sponsored by Rep. Debbie Lesko, House Bill 2625. Lesko, a woman, is the one leading this bill, which protects the religious freedom of both women and men. And that’s all the bill does: restore religious freedom to several statutes passed in 2002.

The 2002 government mandates attack the religious freedom of all Arizona citizens by forcing all employers to cover abortion-inducing drugs and other objectionable items related to contraception — even if they must violate their religious beliefs.

HB 2625 fixes that by declaring that any entity or individual with a religious objection to paying for such coverage is free to contract with an employer and insurer who want to honor their conscience. In fact, other religious freedom statutes in Arizona already make the anti-religious mandates unlawful, and HB 2625 simply fixes those statutes to make them comport with existing law.

This is why the ACLU must engage in distortions to get people to oppose HB 2625. The people of Arizona love freedom, and HB 2625 simply restores one of the most cherished freedoms, religious liberty, to its rightful place outside of government coercion.

So how can the ACLU claim that HB 2625 would let McDonald’s fire its employees for using contraception? They’re just following the old maxim that if you say something enough times, people might start to believe it.

The facts, however, are these: Nowhere does HB 2625 create language letting anyone discriminate for any reason. On the contrary, the law puts a stop to government discrimination and restores a zone of freedom that was improperly taken away in 2002.

And the facts are even worse for the ACLU: The existing insurance mandate, which HB 2625 amends, nowhere declares that an employer like McDonald’s cannot fire people for using contraception right now. So, the ACLU’s claim that HB 2625 is somehow removing an existing protection is impossible. It cannot remove a protection that isn’t already there.

Moreover, despite the fact that the laws amended by HB 2625 nowhere talk about firing people for the mere use of contraceptives and do not stop an employer from doing so, there are no examples of any employer in Arizona ever doing such a thing. The ACLU just made it up as yet another fear tactic.

But, some have asked, what of the mandate’s clause targeting religious employers that would be removed by HB 2625? Yes, it would be removed — and for good reason. Any clause that singles out religious employers in this way almost certainly violates both the Arizona Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 9-0 decision in Hosanna-Tabor vs. EEOC. State legislators aren’t targeting anybody; they are removing a clause that did. If the ACLU wants to fault legislators for making state law consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, it is on shaky ground.

Arizona already has other laws that govern employment non-discrimination, and HB 2625 does not amend any of them. HB 2625 only amends language that specifically attacks religious groups so that the statutes will now let religious citizens have their freedom again.

The ACLU may believe its own press releases, but you don’t have to.

Grijalva, Pastor Vote for ‘Death Panel’

Arizona’s two socialist members of Congress — Democrats Ed Pastor and Raul Grijalva — voted FOR the so-called death panels in a House vote Thursday.  The U.S. House of Representatives voted 223-181 to abolish the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a panel of unelected officials who would hold the power of allowing or denying medical treatment under the authority of ObamaCare.

Despite socialist denials, ObamaCare will include rationing. For example, senior citizens could be denied treatment by IPAB due to their age. ObamaCare as structured will contribute to the culture of death in America.

All of Arizona’s Republican congressmen voted against the death panels.

The defeat of IPAB is unlikely to pass the socialist-controlled U.S. Senate. But the Republicans did one of the most important things they were sent to Washington in 2010 to do: fight ObamaCare, a huge, socialist boondoggle which will raise insurance costs and remove personal control of medical treatment for Americans.

Focus on the Family: Obama Pushing what is not ‘Health Care’

Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, says of the Obama mandate against religious freedom …

This mandate elevates contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to the level of preventative healthcare. They are not. Plan B should not be considered equivalent to the polio vaccine. Pregnancy is not a disease. Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in the White House’s “accommodation” reasoning—no matter, frankly, what in the end that accommodation turns out to be—is that religious liberties are not something any president has the legal authority to recognize or deny. As Christians, we believe these rights come from God; but you don’t need to believe in God to recognize such rights are protected for all citizens by the Constitution.

There is a limit to what government can compel us to do—or not do—particularly in matters of faith and conscience. It is in the best interest of all Americans, of every ideological stripe, that this limit, this line, not be crossed.

This is not about politics. It is about more than one government policy. It is about what’s proper—and it is never proper for government to force the people who elected it to violate their consciences.

Obama’s Wild Contraceptives Exaggeration Exposed

Writing on Townhall.com, Amy Ridenour rips gaping holes in last week’s assertion by President Obama that 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives. “And yet, more than half of all women between the ages of 18 and 34 have struggled to afford it,” he claimed. The White House Fact Sheet distributed the same day repeated this.

But the unvarnished truth and the president’s wild claims are two different things:

  • According to the National Health Statistics Report (Number 36, March 3, 2011), only 86.8 percent of women aged 15-44 have ever had vaginal intercourse.
  • Vaginal sex participation rates for women do not reach 99 percent until the 40-44 age cohort, and by then birth control becomes less necessary.
  • Birth control is not expensive; it costs as little as $15 per month.
  • Condoms cost about a quarter, and free condoms are widely available.
  • Women do not bear all the financial costs for birth control. The Planned Parenthood-associated Guttmacher Institute reports that 16.1 percent of women rely on male condoms and another 9.9 percent the man’s vasectomy as their birth control method.
  • According to Guttmacher, 6.3 percent of women rely on methods costing nothing — withdrawal and periodic abstinence.

Obama Keeps the Brawl Going

By Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council …

A headline from the Washington Post declares: “The culture war is back!” Well, I hate to break it to them, but the culture war never went away. Some Republicans may have called for a truce, but President Obama never has. Instead, he is staying the course in his quest to “fundamentally change America.” People are waking up to this not-so-covert mission thanks to a portion of the government’s health care takeover that reveals his total disregard for the First Amendment. It started with ObamaCare, exploded in the military, and 21 days ago, knocked on faith’s front door.

This time, the president took his fight directly to the church. His ultimatum: Violate or vacate. Violate your beliefs and fund potentially life-taking drugs or vacate the social services that help millions of Americans. Or neither, and face millions of dollars in fines. Instead of flinching, the church rallied. Now, backed into a corner by an army of angry Republicans and Democrats, the President is trying to soften the blow. He announced today that his administration would “accommodate” religious organizations by putting the burden on insurers to provide “free” contraceptive pills, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilizations. The president claims that paying for contraception is good business, because it saves the insurance companies money from unintended pregnancies down the road.

Really? If this is such a great cost-cutting idea, why didn’t insurance companies offer “free” coverage years ago? Insurance companies are not charities. They will offset these increased costs by increasing the premiums for religious organizations and other businesses. So where is the accommodation? The main difference is that these contraceptive and abortifacient drugs would not technically be listed as one of the benefits the employer is paying for directly.

Immediately, Congressmen like Chris Smith (R-N.J.) issued statements calling the adjustment a “political manipulation” that only the “most naive or gullible would accept.” The policy is “riddled with doublespeak and contradiction. It states, for example, that religious employers ‘will not’ have to pay for abortion pills, sterilization, and contraception, but their ‘insurance companies’ will. Who pays for the insurance policy? The religious employer.” Even the president’s team acknowledged that it wasn’t really backing off the original plan. “We’re sticking to principle,” officials said. Only now, the problem will affect more than just faith-based hospitals, schools, and charities; the Obama administration is shifting some of the burden to small business owners, who may also have religious objections.

And it certainly won’t come cheap. Initial estimates put the cost of this “free” birth control in the neighborhood of $2.8 billion (not including the cost of more expensive contraceptive methods that would also be covered under the president’s mandate). Meanwhile, the Catholic Bishops have already hinted that they would accept nothing less than a full policy reversal. They know these changes are nothing but accounting gimmicks that just enlist more people in the war on religious liberty. Faith groups would still be subsidizing health care plans they morally oppose, and that’s a gross infringement of religious conscience rights.

Of course, these rights are not the president’s to give or take away.

 

 

Rush: Obama Didn’t Cave!

Today on Rush Limbaugh:

Everybody’s reporting that Obama’s caving on this mandate that the Catholic services provide abortion and all. There’s not a cave here!  There may be an accommodation, but there’s no big cave-in here.  It’s still the government mandating this stuff happen.  They’re just changing the provider. It’s not done by the church. He says he gave them a way out of it by mandating the insurance companies do it, but that’s not the point here.

My point here is, ladies and gentlemen, we are losing freedom and liberty inch by inch.  It’s not being taken — well, in some cases it is, but in most cases it’s not being taken from us in giant grabs.  It’s little by little by little such that people don’t even see it.  It doesn’t even register.  Let me start with the AP version of the Obama story.  “Retreating in the face of a political uproar, President Barack Obama on Friday will announce that religious…”

He’s supposed to do it in five or six minutes now, right in the middle of this program. President Obama “on Friday will announce that religious employers will not have to cover birth control for their employees after all, The Associated Press has learned. The administration instead will demand that insurance companies will be the ones directly responsible for providing free contraception.” And we’re supposed to applaud this?  We’re supposed to think that we have emerged with a big victory here?  Obama can mandate that we buy insurance, and now Obama can mandate what insurance companies must offer — and after mandating what insurance companies must offer, then Obama can mandate what insurance companies can charge for it?

Freedom doesn’t mean anything to this guy!  Freedom doesn’t mean anything to this regime or this administration.  To me, this is breathtaking.  This is an incredible sight to behold here.  So Obama is said to “offer a compromise proposal that is respectful of religious concerns,” and everybody’s applauding today.  Now, look at this.  The right to religious liberty in this context is unequivocal in our country and in the Constitution.  It’s right there in the Bill of Rights.  Since when does a president have the power to threaten to issue a rule gutting religious liberty?  That’s the first thing.  And, by the way, I don’t think any of this a mistake.

Read the remainder here.

 

VIDEO — Chuck Colson: Stand against the Attack on Your Religious Liberty

Cong. Smith: Obama Still Forcing Religious Groups To Violate Conscience

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) released the following statement in response to President Obama’s announcement today that violates the religious freedoms of people of faith and people of conscience.

“The so-called new policy is the discredited old policy, dressed up to look like something else,” said Smith. “It remains a serious violation of religious freedom. Only the most naïve or gullible would accept this as a change in policy.

“The newest iteration of Obama’s coercion rule utterly fails because it still forces religious employers and employees who have moral objections to paying for abortion inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception to pay for these things, because it is still the employers who buy the coverage for their employees.

“Today’s announcement is a political manipulation designed to get Obama past his own self-made controversy and past the next election.

“The White House Fact Sheet is riddled with doublespeak and contradiction. It states, for example, that religious employers “will not” have to pay for abortion pills, sterilization and contraception, but their “insurance companies” will. Who pays for the insurance policy? The religious employer.

“However, Obama has tipped his hand—at the end of the day, he will use force, coercion and ruinous fines that put faith-based charities, hospitals and schools at risk of closure, harming millions of kids, as well as the poor, sick and disabled, that they serve, in order to force obedience to Obama’s will.”

 

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.