Trump's new rule would give birth control veto power to all bosses, not just religious groups

Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson) · Wednesday, May 31, 2017, 4:48 pm

Donald Trump isn’t going to stop with endangering contraceptive coverage for women who work for religious groups, or “closely held” private businesses like Hobby Lobby. According to a draft regulation obtained by Vox, Trump plans to let any employer get out of providing coverage for the key preventive care just by claiming a religious or moral objection:

“It’s just a very, very, very broad exception for everybody,” Tim Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University, told Vox. “If you don’t want to provide it, you don’t have to provide it.” [...]

The Trump administration’s draft regulation would allow any employer to request an exemption based on moral or religious objections. This would widen the exemption to apply to any company from a small, religiously affiliated business to a large, publicly traded company.

Universities that provide students health coverage are considered employers for health insurance purposes and could also seek the same exemption. Employers could cite any religious or moral reason for their exemption.

The potential effects are huge:

More than 20 percent of US woman of childbearing age had to pay money out of pocket for oral contraceptives prior to the Obamacare mandate, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That shrunk to less than 4 percent a few years after the mandate took effect.

But seriously, what does Donald Trump care about women, their right to preventive care, their out-of-pocket expenses on birth control, or the general idea that employers should provide coverage for all the care people need and not get to pick and choose? And mark this one down, please, for your long list of responses the next time Ivanka manages to get a reporter to write a puff piece about her softening influence on her father.

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