'Profoundly unfair': Supreme Court upholds Trump administration's religious exemptions to Obamacare birth control mandate

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down another decision on the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare—this time, expanding exemptions to the ACA’s birth control mandate for employers who object to it on religious grounds.
National Public Radio reports, “The U.S. Supreme Court has made it more difficult for women to get access to birth control as part of their health plans if their employer has a religious or moral objections to contraceptives. The opinion upheld a Trump Administration rule that significantly cut back on the Affordable Care Act requirement that insurers provide free birth control coverage as part of almost all health care plans.”
BREAKING: Supreme Court sides with Trump effort to let more employers out of health care law’s no-cost birth contro… https://t.co/jHZ8Hg8kEn— The Associated Press (@The Associated Press)1594217913.0
One of the dissenters in the 7-2 ruling was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote, “That simplistic approach has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections.”
As Ginsburg notes in her dissent, today's decision means that between 70,500 and 126,400 women will "immediately lo… https://t.co/yGiyhaturt— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern)1594217833.0
Sotomayor condemned the decision for its “inherent injustice” and asserted, “This sweeping result is profoundly unfair. The Court is not only wrong on the facts, but its error also risks upending antidiscrimination protections for many employees of religious entities.”
Kagan writes separately, joined by Breyer. She thinks the Trump administration has statutory authority to gut the c… https://t.co/hbc9SWy241— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern)1594217714.0
SCOTUS' decision allows a religious employer like a church to ignore employment protections if it believes employee… https://t.co/4qI4d1xjUJ— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern)1594217026.0
Justice Clarence Thomas, however, expressed a very different view, saying, “We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defect.”