The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 26 accepted an appeal of health care reform’s contraception coverage mandate. The cases that will be heard are Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius. (Kathleen Sebelius is named as a litigant in her capacity as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary.) The cases were consolidated and one hour was allotted for oral argument.
The question revolves around whether corporations have the right to religious freedoms; and whether the owners of corporations have religious rights that can be desecrated when the government forces them to manage their companies in certain ways.
The case will be argued probably in March, and a ruling issued in the summer of 2014. The Supreme Court took up the appeal partly because there was a split among federal appeals courts.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, No. 12-6294 (10th Cir., June 27, 2013), temporarily lifted the requirement that the craft-store chain provide contraceptive coverage for their workers, sparing them from having to pay penalties. The owners argued that their company should not have to observe the health care reform requirement because it imposed on their (the owners’) personal religious rights.
In the Conestoga case, the Mennonite owners of a Pennsylvania company were told by the 3rd Circuit that they could not avoid the contraceptive coverage mandate by arguing that avoidance is an exercise of their religious beliefs. The latest opinion was Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, 2013 WL 3845365 (3rd Cir., July 26, 2013).
The health care reform law requires employers with 50 or more workers to cover preventive care (including contraceptive services for women) without cost-sharing, which generated religious objections from some employers.
This is the second time the Supreme Court will hear a dispute stemming from the health care reform law. On June 28, 2012, a 5-4 majority concluded that the mandate that individuals be covered by health insurance or pay a penalty is congressional power authorized by the U.S. Constitution. A negative outcome in that case would have had far more crippling effect on the law as a whole than a reversal of the administration’s contraceptive policy. It did, however, negate the law’s mandate that states expand Medicaid programs and as a result, 25 states have refused to expand that form of coverage.
But, observers note, a reversal on contraceptives (while not as damaging to the entire law as a negative ruling in National Federation of Independent Business Et Al. v. Sebelius), would be another in a long string of setbacks, which includes an embarrassing roll-out of the health insurance exchange enrollment website; the termination of thousands of low-cost, low-coverage individual and small-business policies; the suspension of the employer pay-or-play mandate; and adamant opposition to the law from Republican lawmakers as well as from substantial portions of businesses and the voting public in general.
For more information on the preventive care and contraceptive coverage mandate, see Section 370 of The New Health Care Reform Law: What Employers Need to Know.