Catholic Hospitals Turn on Obama

Despite being a key advocate for the president’s health care reform, the Catholic Hospital Association announced Friday that it is opposed to President Obama’s requirement that church-affiliated employers provide free birth control to their female employees. Religious backlash pushed the president to compromise on the rule, making an exemption for religious employers—but not nonprofits, like hospitals, that may operate in conjunction with religious groups. The hospital group wrote a letter to the Health and Human Services department, saying they’d initially found the president’s compromise to be “a good first step” but realized upon further examination that carrying it out would be “unduly cumbersome” and “unlikely to adequately meet the religious liberty concerns” of its members.