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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
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January 20, 2012
A statement by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
In August 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an interim final rule that will require most health insurance plans to cover preventive services for women including recommended contraceptive services without charging a co-pay, co-insurance or a deductible. The rule allows certain non-profit religious employers that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraceptive services. Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services. This rule is consistent with the laws in a majority of states which already require contraception coverage in health plans, and includes the exemption in the interim final rule allowing certain religious organizations not to provide contraception coverage. Beginning August 1, 2012, most new and renewed health plans will be required to cover these services without cost sharing for women across the country.
After evaluating comments, we have decided to add an additional element to the final rule. Nonprofit employers who, based on religious beliefs, do not currently provide contraceptive coverage in their insurance plan, will be provided an additional year, until August 1, 2013, to comply with the new law. Employers wishing to take advantage of the additional year must certify that they qualify for the delayed implementation. This additional year will allow these organizations more time and flexibility to adapt to this new rule. We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support. We will continue to work closely with religious groups during this transitional period to discuss their concerns.
Scientists have abundant evidence that birth control has significant health benefits for women and their families, is documented to significantly reduce health costs, and is the most commonly taken drug in America by young and middle-aged women. This rule will provide women with greater access to contraception by requiring coverage and by prohibiting cost sharing.
This decision was made after very careful consideration, including the important concerns some have raised about religious liberty. I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services. The administration remains fully committed to its partnerships with faith-based organizations, which promote healthy communities and serve the common good. And this final rule will have no impact on the protections that existing conscience laws and regulations give to health care providers.
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President Barack Obama and his senior aides were more than a little concerned before he announced his controversial decision requiring Catholic hospitals and universities to provide contraception in employee health plans.
Obama — in recognition of the issue’s sensitivity to the church — picked up the phone to personally break the news to two influential Catholic leaders: New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Sister Carol Keehan, head of the largest Catholic health association in the country and a pivotal supporter of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
The president’s tone was polite but not contrite, a person briefed on the calls told POLITICO: He explained that while his health care law exempted Catholic churches from the requirement, he wouldn’t carve out other Catholic institutions even though the Vatican views artificial birth control as contrary to the will of God.
Aides say Obama’s move, which has sparked thunderous denunciations as he prepares to address the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, was motivated by personal conviction and his long-held belief that all health plans need to provide birth control to women.
But the January decision was also a hard-headed election-year calculation with acute political risks — a bow to the concerns of womens’ rights groups that could alienate white Catholics, many of them critical independent voters in battleground states.
The handling of the issue offers a hint of Obama’s approach to governing and campaigning in 2012: When confronted with a position close to his heart — and dear to the base — Obama is increasingly inclined to side with people who will vote for him even if it means enraging those who might, but probably won’t, vote for him.
“Who are we going to really lose over this? Ron Paul voters?” asked a senior aide to a Senate Democrat, who thinks the administration should have handled the situation more quietly by punting a decision until after Election Day. “Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. … Catholics who don’t believe in condoms aren’t going to vote for Barack Obama anyway. Let’s get real.”
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CATHOLIC REPORTER : We cannot--we will not—comply with this law. Catholic bishops are saying they will not comply with this law. Will you stand with your fellow Catholics in resisting this law or will you stick by the administration?
Pelosi: First of all, I am going to stick with my fellow Catholics in supporting the administration on this. I think it was a very courageous decision that they made, and I support it.
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Blessed John Paul II loved the Christmas season. Guests in the papal apartment during his pontificate found the seasonal decorations up early in Advent; and, following Polish custom, they stayed up until Feb. 2, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. The Christmas meal was traditionally Polish. Every year, John Paul would call his lay friends in Cracow, all assembled in one apartment, and they would sing Polish carols together for hours, over the phone.
Thirty years ago, however, the season took on a more somber tone. For on the night of Dec. 12-13, 1981, the Polish state, through the Polish army, invaded Polish society and imposed martial law throughout the country. There was no provision for martial law in Poland’s communist legal code, so what the Jaruzelski regime declared was, technically, a “state of war.” It was a fitting phrase, if unintentionally ironic.
On Christmas Eve, John Paul II placed a lighted candle in the window of the papal apartment, a gesture of solidarity with an international initiative begun in Switzerland by two clergyman, to protest the communist attempt to crush the Solidarity movement. The papal World Day of Peace Message for Jan. 1, 1982, condemned “the false peace of totalitarian regimes” and at the Angelus that day, the Pope asked everyone to pray for Poland, for what was at stake there was of great importance, “not only for a single country, but for the history of man.”
With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, it now seems clear that the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 was not an act of strength but one of weakness, by a regime so incapable of commanding the allegiance of those in whose name it claimed to rule that it could only compel obedience by violence. It took some time for this to become clear in Poland, a country frequently burdened by crushed hopes; John Paul’s second pastoral pilgrimage to his homeland, in June 1983, did a lot to raise the spirits of his countrymen—who rallied their energies such that, by 1987, the Pope could spend his third pilgrimage home laying the cultural and moral foundations for a post-communist Poland, which was born two years later in the Revolution of 1989.
Two days after the imposition of the “state of war,” President Ronald Reagan hosted a lunch at the White House for the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. As I report in The End and the Beginning, it was Cardinal Casaroli who, over the course of a 90-minute discussion, took the Realpolitik view: however unfortunate martial law might be, there were likely reasons of state that compelled General Wojciech Jaruzelski, concerned about a possible Soviet invasion to crush Solidarity beneath Red Army tank treads, to behave as he did. And it was Ronald Reagan who, speaking in the tones of John Paul II, was the voice of moral outrage over this latest usurpation of Polish liberties. As the historical record now makes clear, John Paul and Reagan had it right, and the veteran Vatican diplomat had it wrong: there was no invasion threat in December 1981 (although there had been one in December 1980); the Jaruzelski regime was a hollow, if brutal, shell; the power of moral conviction, aroused, could be an effective antidote to communist tyranny, forging hitherto unimagined and effective tools of resistance; there was nothing permanent about the post-Yalta division of Europe.
The lessons, 30 years later? Solidarity’s triumph ought not be universalized as a one-size-fits-all model for coping with tyrants. Still, John Paul II’s instinct for reading history through cultural lenses has much to commend it. Politics and economics are important. What drives history over the long haul, however, is culture: what men and women cherish, honor, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives, and their children’s lives, on.
The truest realism, therefore, is one shaped by truths and ideals, not only by calculations of power. If you doubt that, ask General Jaruzelski.
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"The only thing needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" -Edmund Burke.
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Emphasis on the word men, mine for obvious reasons...
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