Obamacare’s birth control mandate’s big day in court

If an employer wants to deny birth control coverage to an employee, the Obama administration says the objection must be fully disclosed.

Under a new clarification posted on the Department of Labor’s website, employers have up to 60 days after adopting or changing a plan to give employees “a description of the extent to which preventive services (which includes contraceptive services) are covered under the plan.”

The Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision could have impacts beyond birth control — and that has some LGBT groups worried.

In response to Supreme Court’s decision, several major LGBT advocacy groups, including the ACLU and GLAAD, on Tuesday announced they are dropping their support for a proposed federal law that would attempt to protect LGBT people from workplace discrimination.

The Hobby Lobby decision wasn’t the Supreme Court’s last word on birth control.

Late Thursday, six justices signed onto an injunction that allows Wheaton College, a religious university, more flexibility to not comply with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. It led to a scathing dissent from the court’s three female members.

Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois, doesn’t need to fill out paperwork in order for insurers to cover the cost of its employees’ birth control, the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 order.

But the court said women will still be able to get contraceptives without co-pays or cost-sharing, as the law requires. Still, the college will not face a penalty because it did not fill out the required form.

Monday’s Hobby Lobby decision was a blow to Obamacare’s effort to expand women’s access to reproductive care — but, in truth, a minor one. Relatively few employers are likely to stop covering birth control, and even for those that do, the Obama administration might develop a workaround.

More importantly, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t touch most of Obamacare’s reproductive health gains. “Obamacare is the biggest increase in access to reproductive care in decades,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, told me the day after the Supreme Court ruling. Here’s why that’s true, even after the Hobby Lobby decision.

The full implications of Monday’s Hobby Lobby ruling remain hazy.

AP may be overstating the Supreme Court’s orders.

On Monday, Justice Alito, writing for a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court, decided that closely-held corporations are people — or close enough to people — to enjoy religious protections.

On Sunday night, HBO’s John Oliver anticipated the ruling. “If corporations want to be people, they should have to take the rough with the smooth,” he said. “Female companies, you only get to make 83 cents on the dollar, Sorry Wendy’s. I guess Burger King just worked harder. And there are also the little annoyances of being human. So Mr. Peanut, I hope you enjoy attending your friends’ shitty improv shows.”

After the US Supreme Court’s hugely controversial ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby on Monday, 90 percent of American corporations will no longer be required to pay for insurance that covers contraception (though many likely will choose to anyway). American women who suddenly won’t have insurance-subsidized contraception won’t be alone globally — as this map shows, the world is pretty divided on whether governments should pay for birth control.

Using data from Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies, Slate put together a map of where almost every country in the world stood on public provision of oral contraceptives. They divided the world into three categories: “the pill is free” (blue), “partial subsidy” (purple), and “no subsidy” (orange). Here’s how the globe looks, adjusted for today’s ruling:

Alito suggests that the Obama administration could take a play from its own handbook and could extend an “accommodation” offered to religiously-affiliated employers like universities and hospitals to a large number of private companies.

Some background is helpful here: The Obama administration has already extended an “accommodation” to religious nonprofits — like hospitals and universities with religious affiliations — to bridge the divide created by the contraceptive mandate. The way the accommodation works is by requiring the insurer to provide birth control, without passing that cost on to the company. Insurers recoup their losses through reduced fees to the government. There are some regulatory hurdles here, but they are ones that the Obama administration has already grappled with in laying the ground rules for how the accommodation works.

Today’s Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby has left a lot of people upset. Many people are taking SCOTUS to task for, what they believe is, a step in marginalizing women’s rights. And because we’re in the age of social media, people can voice these opinions and throw them on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Unfortunately, those people are shouting at the wrong people and are yelling at SCOTUSblog. SCOTUSblog is not SCOTUS’ blog or social media arm. The only relation the two have with one another, is that SCOTUSblog reports on SCOTUS.

Kate Pickert at Time Magazine makes an important point about what the post-Supreme Court ruling for Hobby Lobby employees means:

The point of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate was to increase access not just to birth control pills or diaphragms, but also extend coverage to all types of FDA-approved contraceptives. Insurance coverage can be especially important for women making a financial decision about whether to use an IUD (which is both the most effective but has the highest upfront costs, sometimes upwards of $500). Hobby Lobby is extremely unlikely to cover IUDs given the objections it voiced in court, but to say it doesn’t cover any birth control is not the case.

Via Todd Zwillich:

In the Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sam Alito did suggest that Obama administration could increase access to birth control in ways that would not violate corporations’ religious liberties. Alito specifically pointed to the compromise worked out with religiously-affiliated colleges and universities — where the insurer, rather than the employer, pays for contraceptive coverage — as one such path forward.

It’s easy to downplay the weight of the 2014 election. Nate Silver called it “the least important election in years,” and it well might be. Republicans might gain the Senate, or they might not, but either way they’ll hold the House and a Democrat will remain in the White House. Legislative gridlock will persist.

But today’s 5-4 Supreme Court decisions are a reminder that the 2014 election could prove one of the most important in decades. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 76. Stephen Breyer is 70. John Roberts could decide he wants to live his dream of being a Hollywood sound engineer before it’s too late. (Silver, I should say, mentions the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy in his piece.)

The Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 split that “closely-held” corporations cannot be compelled to cover birth control in their insurance benefits.

Some spectators are concerned that this outcome will permit corporations to deny other services based on religious beliefs. For example, some Jehovah’s Witnesses reject blood transfusions, and Scientologists might be opposed to providing mental health services.

Today’s Supreme Court decision against Obamacare’s birth control mandate comes in at at a hefty 49 pages (95 if you count the three dissenting opinions). If you’re looking for a more pocket-sized version of the ruling, here’s the decision summarized in three key points:

The Supreme Court also put some restrictions on who its ruling applies to, saying ruling that only “closely held” corporations can be protected under RFRA, the religious freedom law. Since about 90 percent of companies are, however, closely-held, its unclear how much of a difference that distinction makes in the ruling’s scope.

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion for the contraceptive mandate case, ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby. The ruling holds that the government cannot require “closely-held” corporations to provide birth control. The decision was split 5-4.

Justice Kennedy joined Alito and the other conservative justices, but also wrote his own opinion. Three justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) offered dissents. Those are available following the majority opinion in this document.

Protesters on both sides of the Hobby Lobby case are rallying at the Supreme Court.

Those opposed to the birth control mandate are touting religious freedom: