Bye-bye birth control. Donald Trump may not be following through on all his campaign promises, but giving bosses the right to deny women coverage for birth control? Trump is here for that. Trump is rolling back the Obamacare rule preventing religious employers from imposing their beliefs on workers’ health coverage. Because even after President Obama bent over backward to ensure that religious groups were not—heaven forbid—directly paying for women to decide whether and when to become pregnant, some groups were outraged that they didn’t have the right to withhold care from their workers.
This is not a minor issue.
Last week, Senator Patty Murray of Washington and 13 other Democratic senators warned Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, to cease efforts that could “undermine access to affordable preventive services, including contraception, for women.”
“Women saved more than $1.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs for birth control in 2013 alone,” the senators said Thursday in a letter to Mr. Mulvaney. “Access to affordable preventive services, including contraception, is a critical part of women’s health care.”
Women’s rights groups are preparing legal challenges:
If the Trump administration does not adequately explain and justify the rule, she said, it could be challenged as “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law. In addition, [Gretchen Borchelt of the National Women’s Law Center] said, women could challenge it as violating a section of the Affordable Care Act that broadly prohibits discrimination in health programs that receive federal funds.
Ms. Borchelt also pointed to a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act that says the health secretary shall not issue any rule that “impedes timely access to health care services” or “creates any unreasonable barriers to the ability of individuals to obtain appropriate medical care.”
But moments like this are exactly why Trump nominated and Mitch McConnell changed the rules to ram through a Supreme Court pick like Neil Gorsuch.