“The Newlands sincerely believe that the Catholic faith does not allow them to violate Catholic religious and moral teachings in their decisions operating Hercules Industries.”
Joshua Rhett Miller
FoxNews.com
7/27/2012
The Catholic family that owns a Colorado-based company won a court victory in their battle to stop the Obama administration from requiring them to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception, a mandate they say violates their religious beliefs and First Amendment rights.
Hercules Industries, a Denver-based heating ventilation and air conditioning manufacturer that employs nearly 300 full-time workers, got an injunction in federal court which stops enforcement of the controversial ObamaCare mandate. The company’s lawyers said they needed the injunction immediately because if the mandate is enforced, it must begin immediately making changes to its health plan, which renews on Nov. 1.
The case is similar to ones brought by Catholic-based colleges that have refused to provide employee insurance with such coverage, except this time, it is a secular corporation.
In his order, Colorado District Judge John Kane said that the government’s arguments “are countered, and indeed outweighed, by the public interest in the free exercise of religion.”…
The article continues at Fox News.
Update: There is more to ObamaCare than meets the eye
Healthcare costs are escalating dramatically under ObamaCare simply because there is a lot more to government-mandated healthcare than meets the eye. This is why the bill required more than 2,000 pages. As those pages unfold, more requirements are uncovered, which have financial consequences…
…If a person wants a treatment or does not want a treatment, the doctors can only provide treatment that the government is able to afford or fits the standard of treatment that fits the government rather than the patient…
Read the whole thing.
Update 2: Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law says The New York Times.
Update 3: Obamacare’s contraception mandate loses in Colorado court
Update 4: Another Obamacare Mandate Runs Afoul of the Courts
If the supporters of Obamacare thought its legal troubles were over after the recent Supreme Court ruling, they learned otherwise last week. On Friday, Senior Judge John Kane of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado issued an order forbidding the government from taking action against a company called Hercules Industries for refusing to provide contraceptive coverage to its employees. The injunction is specific to Hercules and only applies while its lawsuit, Newland v. Sebelius, is litigated. Still, it is significant because it is the first such order against the contraception mandate and it protects a family-run enterprise whose owners merely seek to operate their company in a way that reflects their religious beliefs.
Included among Obamacare’s Byzantine tangle of provisions is a set of benefit requirements whose ostensible purpose is to assure that we all receive “proper” levels of medical care. Once these directives had made their way through the bowels of the HHS bureaucracy, a regulatory edict emerged commanding all health care plans to provide what the Beltway regulators refer to as “preventive services.” These include contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization. This mandate motivated 43 high-profile Catholic organizations to file a coordinated series of lawsuits against the Obama administration last May, and it also provided the impetus for the lawsuit filed by the owners of Hercules Industries….
