By Joan Murray
Times Union (Albany, N.Y.), March 15, 2012
How do we ensure health care coverage, including the option of birth control, for all American women without troubling an employer’s private moral beliefs?
The answer is simple: By adopting a single-payer system, also known as universal health care or Medicare for all.
If our government — like those of Canada, England and Australia — were the sole payer of our medical bills, we wouldn’t be having a frenzied debate over birth control in 2012.
And all women who need birth control protection would be covered — whether they work for a Catholic employer or not. Yet in America, many workers have to deal with a convoluted health care system shaped by their employers and the health insurance companies they engage.
With a single-payer system, no Catholic institution would face the discomfort of paying an insurer for a standard health policy that covers birth control. And no woman would have to forgo needed coverage because of her employer’s beliefs.
Just picture all the non-Catholic faculty at Catholic colleges, and the non-Catholic nurses and physicians at Catholic hospitals — not to mention the maintenance and support staff at both — to get some idea of how many people, along with their spouses and dependents, might be denied that coverage — even though their own consciences or religions are fine with it.
Let’s clarify some things. Under the new law, churches, mosques and synagogues continue to be exempt from offering insurance coverage that includes birth control. So if a woman is a parish accountant, for example, she still won’t receive that coverage. The controversial part of the new law is that religiously-affiliated universities and hospitals, which receive tax-payer dollars, must now provide that coverage.
Many of them already do — including DePaul University in Chicago, the largest Catholic university in America.
Here’s how things should work under the new Affordable Care Act: A university — let’s call it Georgetown — would contract with an insurance company — let’s call it Blue Cross — to cover the medical costs of its employees, including flu shots, EKGs, and, if someone needs it, birth control.
It’s not as if a priest is being asked to hand out birth control pills in the rectory. Yet some church officials, institutional administrators and, most notably, politicians are arguing a broad exemption for any religiously affiliated institution.
The Catholic Church — my former church, by the way — argues this on the grounds of its private morality — a morality which, to my mind, seems too often focused on sex. There are many Americans whose private morality makes them believe, just as fervently and conscientiously, that they should be exempt from paying one-fifth of their taxes — the amount that goes to the military and its undeclared wars.
Yet the government obliges them to pay in full. Similarly, Catholic-affiliated institutions should be obliged to abide by the new law and to offer health insurance without cherry-picking the coverage.
If employees of religiously affiliated institutions — and this includes most Catholic employees — wish to have birth control protection, let them discuss it with their physicians. Let it be a private matter, and let it be covered — just as it is by other employers. Women who don’t wish to have that protection need not ask for it. This is simple.
Yet until we have a single-payer system, some employers may attempt to interfere with employee health care, based on their private moral visions. Perhaps this birth-control furor will ignite a demand for a single-payer system. But until we can persuade our elected representatives to provide that system, we must at least make sure that, under the law, women will be able to choose this care for themselves.
Joan Murray is a writer living in Old Chatham.