The contraception fight is expanding far beyond Washington, with several states eyeing ways of blocking the new Obama administration rule requiring most insurers cover contraception, or considering rolling back rules that the states themselves already had on the books.
The combination of a hot-button social issue and the calendar for state implementation of the health care reform law’s fine print virtually guarantees the fight will continue for months. Even if the debate subsides in Washington, voters may hear about it in their states for some time to come.
So they’re going into a major election year fighting to cut back on insurance coverage for contraception, because it offends Catholic bishops?
New Hampshire, for instance, is one of 28 states that already have a contraception coverage mandate similar to the new federal rule — but Republican lawmakers there are considering repealing it.
“We didn’t know it was there,†Speaker William O’Brien told the Nashua Telegraph last week. “We don’t want it there.â€
You’d think if the mandate was so all-fired oppressive, someone would have complained.
Lawmakers in several of these states — including Missouri, Louisiana and Oklahoma — have already banned coverage for abortion in plans sold under health insurance exchanges.
But the health care law gave states that flexibility on abortion, explicitly. The contraception picture is more complicated. What, for instance, happens if a legislature prohibits insurers from covering the full range of contraceptives in policies sold through an exchange — but federal rules require it?
Such an approach could grow out of the so-called personhood bills, which give embryos legal rights from the moment of conception, pending in several states that could potentially outlaw emergency contraception because it can prevent implantation of fertilized eggs.
That could force a politically difficult problem for the Obama administration.
A difficult problem for the Obama Administration? The damnfool personhood thing couldn’t even pass in Mississippi, once people understood that it might outlaw some forms of birth control. Do Republicans really want to be the anti-birth control party? Is that not political suicide?