Can Catholics Cooperate with the New Health Insurance Law?

Fr. Paul CB Shenck

Originally Published in The Catholic Witness

Most people are aware that the new health insurance regulations, called the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” of 2010 (ACA) contains certain provisions objectionable to Catholic moral teaching. Specifically, the ACA requires that health insurers and most employers include birth control, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs in their coverage. The Catholic Church, as well as many other religious traditions, condemn these as direct attacks against innocent human life, and so find them intrinsically evil and morally objectionable. So Catholic employers and employees, as well as individual subscribers, are wondering, “What am I to do?”

This is a valid and essential question. How can Catholic employers cooperate with the government’s requirement (known as the “HHS mandate”) and not violate the Church’s teaching and their own consciences? Without restating the moral objections to the HHS mandate, which have been thoroughly covered in publications by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, I hope to offer some advice and direction to Catholics confronted by this moral dilemma.

We first need to review the principles that govern cooperation with evil. Each and every day, we have some intersection with wrong doing, even if we do not intend or purpose to do so. For example, we make a deposit in a bank, which then makes a loan to another bank, which then loans to a construction company which is outfitting an abortion clinic. Another example might be buying a shirt from a retailer which outsources manufacturing to a foreign company that buys from a producer who exploits poor workers. We cannot always know these connections, and even if we do, we sometimes cannot avoid them. The question is, do we willingly assent to the wrongdoing, voluntarily participate with it, and intend its ends? If the answer to that question is “yes,” then we have immorally cooperated with evil. But if the answer is “no,” then we can begin to sort out what we can and cannot cooperate in.

Let’s apply this to the HHS-mandated insurance coverage. You are a Catholic employer or employee and your insurance coverage now includes the morally objectionable provisions. The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) has stated, "... temporary compliance under protest by selecting and financing 'prepackaged' insurance plans designed by a third party may be licit on these conditions: (1) there are no alternatives that meet the employees’ health care needs and do not contain objectionable coverage; (2) a sufficiently weighty reason can be demonstrated, taking into account the proportion between the goods intended (e.g., the provision of adequate health care coverage to employees in need) and the harms expected (e.g., undermining of religious liberty); and (3) scandal is avoided by conveying the employer’s opposition to the evils and making known his or her moral convictions, and, most importantly, by the employer’s ongoing engagement in prudentially appropriate efforts to combat the injustice and secure due protection for religious liberty and conscience...”¹

In other words, with no other option than to deprive one’s employees, one’s family or one’s self of adequate health care (not to mention a job in the event the company is subjected to bankrupting fines), a Catholic might temporarily subscribe to or provide this coverage while making it plain to employees and providers that the coverage is objectionable. I recommend writing to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, objecting to the mandate, notifying the health insurance provider, and making known your objections to employees receiving the benefits. In each case, you should make it known that you are only cooperating temporarily while a legal resolution is being sought. Catholics should also support the efforts being made to secure the right to life and religious liberty by civil and religious liberty agencies.

It is sad and distressing that the federal government has abandoned its role and responsibility to defend and protect innocent lives and the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of religious freedom and conscience. By resolutely opposing the HHS mandate, making known that objection and working to secure those rights, Catholics and all conscientious people can help to reinstate those national ideals.

(Father Paul CB Schenck is Diocesan Respect Life Director, is founding chair of the National Pro-Life Center in Washington, D.C., and is certified in Health Care Ethics with the National Catholic Bioethics Center.)

1 J Haas, PhD, J DiCamillo, E. Furton, PhD, M Hilliard,PhD, T Pacholczyk, PhD . (2014). Health Insurance Options and the Ethics of the HHS Mandate. Ethics and Medics, 39(2).