Bishop Lori knocked it out of the park today. An excerpt:
Taking just one example of “essential health benefits”—prescription drugs—the state may define this category to require coverage of cancer drugs, AIDS drugs, and other life-saving treatments. But HHS has no quarrel with a state that decides not to require coverage of drugs like these. By contrast, HHS requires that state to cover drugs that, according to respected medical studies and the drugs’ manufacturers, may increase women’s risk of suffering from breast cancer, stroke and AIDS.
In this context, the rigid mandate to cover sterilization, contraception, and abortifacients is especially absurd. How would HHS respond to the claims of cancer patients that they are entitled to “free access” to cancer drugs, which can mean the difference between life or death? How would HHS respond to a state that did not include such life-saving drugs as an “essential health benefit”? Whatever HHS’s response is, we know it would have to be something far less than HHS’s full-throated demand for “free access” to contraceptives in every state and in every plan. Again, under the mandate, the world is turned upside down.
You can read his entire testimony by clicking here:
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