The Supreme Court of the United States will be holding another round of live streamed telephonic oral arguments on Wednesday. This time, the court will consider a controversial section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Pennsylvania . The Court will be considering whether employers should be able to “opt out” of Obamacare’s requirement that they provide health insurance with contraceptive coverage when those employers have a moral or religious objection to providing that coverage. The ACA’s Contraceptive Mandate The ACA’s contraceptive mandate was already challenged in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ; in that case, SCOTUS ruled that a closely held corporation owned by a religiously devout family could opt out of the ACA’s requirement. The current case questions the Trump administration’s effort to further circumvent the ACA’s mandate by creating a rule of its own. The Trump administration effectively opened the exemption upheld in Hobby Lobby even wider. Under the Trump rule, private employers with “sincerely held religious or moral objections” can opt out of providing coverage for contraception. That’s an expansion of both who can exempt themselves from the […]
