Drowning in debt and dividing the country over a radical health-care agenda, the Obama administration appears intent on exacerbating both fronts.
The administration has now decided to dictate the provision of controversial contraceptive drugs to everyone, regardless of cost or conscience, to prevent the “disease” of pregnancy.
Without even conducting a cost-benefit analysis, the administration has decreed that the federal government should pay for or force others to pay for drugs and devices that either prevent fertilization or end the life of a human embryo, as is possible with controversial drugs like the “morning-after pill” and EllaOne.
The dictate thrills the abortion advocates who lobbied for it, such as the billion-dollar “nonprofit,” Planned Parenthood. That behemoth business gets over a third of its budget from government grants — $363.2 million in taxpayer funding, according to its 2009 annual report — and rakes in additional millions on abortion and contraception. (Thankfully, many state and local lawmakers are pushing Planned Parenthood away from the public trough, and as The Tennessean has reported, $335,000 in federal grants to Tennessee that used to fill Planned Parenthood's coffers will now be going to the Metro Public Health Department.
The Obama administration, however, owes the abortion lobby big-time for campaign funding and volunteers.
The Department of Health and Human Services pleased Planned Parenthood lobbyists by mandating the provision of potentially abortifacient drugs virtually without exception. A faux “conscience exemption” would not even exempt, for example, most of the morally opposed Catholic social-service agencies and health-care providers.
The abortifacient contraceptive mandate tramples the First Amendment conscience rights of millions of taxpayers, health-care professionals and insurers who follow ethical standards protecting early human life, such as the venerable Hippocratic Oath.
Radical and costly health-care policies are not only threatening to increase government debt and further burden business; they also threaten to worsen a growing shortage of physicians and nurses, by forcing out of medicine all except those who submit to the administration's abortion ideology.
Currently, 65 million people lack adequate access to primary care physicians. Fifty medical studies have projected critical shortages of physicians. The American Association of Medical Colleges concludes, “If physician supply and use patterns stay the same, the United States will experience a shortage of 124,000 full-time physicians by 2025.”
Millions of patients, notably the poor and those in medically underserved regions, depend for care on religious health-care institutions and professionals whose faith and conscience compel their service. Apart from protection for conscience, nine of 10 faith-based physicians say they would be forced to leave medicine. Yet, the Obama administration eviscerated the only federal regulation that protected the exercise of conscience in health care, and partisans in the last Congress shot down amendments to protect conscience in the Affordable Care Act.
The administration’s allegiance to the abortion lobby and persistent attacks on conscience freedoms calls for legislative action. Visit www.capwiz.com/f2c and urge your lawmakers to cosponsor the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act.
No comments:
Post a Comment