Cato Event Podcast

Two years ago, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court ruled that regulations implementing Obamacare’s “preventive care” mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) for certain closely held corporations. Employers with religious objections to some of the contraceptives that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) required them to cover had to be exempt from that regulation. They thus joined churches and their “auxiliaries,” which HHS had exempted from the contraceptive mandate after public outrage at the scope of the initial regulation. But what about nonprofits that HHS considered insufficiently religious to merit exemption? Religious schools, charities, and the like were instead offered an “accommodation”: These employers had to give the government information about their insurers and sign forms allowing their health plan to provide contraceptives. The only justification for this differential treatment was that employees of organizations that aren’t houses of worship ar