Like many churches in California, La Mesa’s Skyline Church wants to be able to provide its employees with a health insurance plan that does not cover abortion services.
State law already allows churches and other religious organizations to offer health insurance that excludes coverage for contraceptives such as the birth control pill, but a state health care agency recently determined that there is no exception for abortion coverage. In other words, every health insurance plan in California must cover abortion services, regardless of religious belief.
That ruling has drawn the ire of religious freedom advocates who say the state's position conflicts with federal laws that protect health insurance providers who do not want to cover abortion.
Skyline Church and Alpine Christian Fellowship of El Cajon are part of a group of seven churches and a church-affiliated Christian school that have filed a discrimination complaint against the state with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights.
The complaint says the state’s Department of Managed Health Care is discriminating against health insurers that want to provide churches with abortion-free insurance plans, in violation of the federal Hyde-Weldon Amendment, which prohibits such discrimination if a state is receiving federal funds.
Skyline Church did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.
The churches “believe that abortion is a grave moral evil and object to being morally complicit through the provision of insurance coverage for abortion to their employees,” said the complaint, filed by the Life Legal Defense Foundation on behalf of the churches.
Though the churches do have the option of not providing health insurance plans to their employees, that option relegates church employees to “second class citizenship,” said Dana Cody, executive director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation.
“When [churches] want to provide a benefit to their employees and they can’t because the government is making them violate their conscience, the employee is the one who suffers, not the church,” Cody said.
For the state Department of Managed Health Care, which recently told health insurance carriers that they must provide coverage for abortion in all plans, this is a matter of protecting women from discrimination. In an August letter to health insurance carrier Anthem Blue Shield, DMHC Director Michelle Rouillard wrote that California's Knox Keene Act of 1975 “prohibits health plans from discriminating against women who choose to terminate a pregnancy. Thus, all health plans must treat maternity services and legal abortion neutrally.”
When Catherine Short, legal director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, wrote a letter to DMHC pointing out the conflict between the agency’s interpretation and federal law, DMHC Director Rouillard replied that “DMHC carefully considered all relevant aspects of state and federal law in reaching its position,” and that the state’s Knox-Keene Act “requires health plans to cover abortion as a basic health care service.”
In an interview with La Mesa Courier, Short pointed out that the state is putting itself in a precarious position that could result in the loss of federal funding.
“California has known what the rules are and has now decided it’s blowing off the rules,” Short said.
This is not a matter of discrimination against women, she said, because they will continue to have access to abortion regardless of whether Skyline and the other churches choose to offer health insurance.
“The question is who is going to pay for it,” Short said — the employees, the church, the state or someone else. “A lot of times the employees themselves don't want to be subsidizing abortion.”
Life Legal hopes the federal Health and Human Services department will act quickly to resolve the complaint, but until then, church employers are stuck with two options: pay for health insurance plans that subsidize abortion, or leave employees to buy their own individual health plan — which, under current California law, must cover abortion services.
—Reach Jeremy Ogul by email at jeremy@sdcnn.com.
