Does he think we're stupid?

He thinks we're stupid, doesn't he?

Well, are we?

A lot of people think Obama gave in to the Catholic Church regarding the HHS mandate.

He didn't.

From a USCCB news release Friday Feb. 10:

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated "preventive services" prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially.
Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS's nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider.

So, major points summarized:

• Pregnancy is NOT a disease
• The current mandate violates all existing federal conscience law
• Obama moved his mandate from religious institutions to insurance companies, which means religious institutions will still be paying for (though one step removed) abortions, abortion inducing drugs and contraceptives, and sterilizations

Did I miss somewhere in the Constitution where it gives the President the power to mandate a group of people to buy something for themselves or for others? I always thought Congress was the branch that wrote law....hmm, maybe I missed something.

Some people are backing off now because they think Obama backed off. Yeah, let's go after those rotten insurance companies! Who cares if they have to offer all that stuff for free! Free stuff! Free stuff!

The point is that Obama thinks he can force whatever group he wants to do whatever he wants. Sounds more like a dictator than a president, doesn't it?

 

If we don't speak out, he'll get away with it. It's obvious he thinks he can do it....are we stupid enough to fall for it? Again, this is not about the Catholic Church alone -- this is about all who value freedom. It's about all who believe we are a democratic republic, in which we have a say, not a nation where one man can dictate who pays for what and how.

 

He thinks we're stupid, doesn't he?

 

Well, are we?