Queen's bishop to mate in two

Jizo statue—representing an unborn child—at the Hasedera temple in Kamakura, Japan. By Don Lee, from the website Sacred Destinations.

I think I may have the crude outlines of a solution to the problems of America's Catholic bishops, currently facing potential martyrdom in that they may be forced by an unfeeling government to buy insurance that covers the abomination of birth control pills, with no co-payment, for the employees of Catholic institutions that have a lot of non-Catholic employees, such as church-owned universities, hospitals, and charitable foundations.

An unfeeling federal government, I should say, because as we have repeatedly noted [jump]
28 equally unfeeling state governments already force them to do this, as certified legal and not an impedance to the free exercise of religion in Catholic Charities et al. v. New York State, whose last appeal the Supreme Court declined to hear in 2007.  The bishops have managed to reconcile this with their tender consciences for reasons they have not revealed. They haven't, say, relocated Fordham University to Florida.

Then again, they have also learned to live with a federal mandate from 2000 requiring employers to offer birth control as part of preventive care for women—Joan McCarter thinks they may be OK with this because you can force the employee to pay for the benefits, whereas those provided by the Affordable Care Act must be free to employees.

Like some "primitive" peoples or, say, small children who are afraid to let somebody else use their spoon for fear the somebody else will infect them backwards in time with their germs, the bishops are afraid they will be retroactively polluted by the pollution of their money as it flows into the hands of the merchants of destruction who supply contraceptive agents, "some of which may be abortifacients" especially if you define abortion in the very special R.C. way to mean anything that works at a point in time when Mr. Sperm and Ms. Egg may already have been introduced.

I now have access to some data, thanks to Balloon Juice, on how and how much money is actually involved, from a Guttmacher Institute study:

the addition of the full range of contraceptive services and supplies without cost-sharing to a plan that currently includes no coverage at all would cost about $37 per member per year for an HMO and $41 for a PPO. Notably, the study estimates that PPO enrollees today pay about one-third of this amount in cost-sharing.

But this is not clearly related to how much money the insurance company has to spend. For instance,

every dollar invested by the government for contraception saves $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures for pregnancy-related care related to births from unintended pregnancies. In total, the services provided at publicly funded family planning clinics resulted in a net savings of $5.1 billion in 2008.

while for private insurers,

it costs employers 15–17% more to not provide contraceptive coverage in employee health plans than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of pregnancy and indirect costs such as employee absence and reduced productivity.

If premiums reflected these differences, as insurance premiums are supposed to do according to the theory we all learned in high school, then a policy that did not cover contraception would be more expensive than one that did; and in that case the amount the bishops could be said to contributing to pay for contraception would be a negative number.

Thus if the bishops wanted not to pay for these Satanic devices, all they would have to do is pony up the larger amount that a program without the Satanic devices would cost; i.e., if the savings of a family planning program add up to $4 a year (a conservative estimate), the R.C. hierarchy could pay $4 more, deducting minus-$4 from their charges.

What's that you say? That employees might go ahead and get contraception anyway? No doubt they might! But not a penny of the Church's minus-$4 would go to paying for it, would it? Everybody would be happy.