Catholic church brouhaha shows need for Obamacare repeal

    If you ever needed proof of the need to repeal Obamacare, look no further than the brouhaha over whether or not the Catholic church should be forced to offer birth control in its insurance plans.
    For the record, I support birth control. Although I don't believe making it more available wouldn't do much to reduce the illegitimacy rate, on the off chance that it would I am more than willing to support government programs to hand out free birth control through every health department in America.
    What I don't support is any plan that would force a church that is opposed to artificial birth control to purchase it, even if I think that church is wrong. In fact, I'm opposed to forcing anyone to purchase birth control or anything else. Obamacare doesn't allow for the slightest deviation from government mandate. Apparently everyone must now be cookie-cutter alike.
    The problem with our insurance companies and our government is that our government believes that the insurance companies exist in a Harry Potter land, where goods and services can be provided at no cost through the magic incantation of government edict. If the Catholic church doesn't want to pay for insurance, no problem. The government will simply require that anyone insured through the Catholic church be able to apply to the insurance company for birth control, which will then be provided to them absolutely free of charge.
    Since it's so easy, why doesn't Obama just order the insurance companies to offer all medicines for free? For that matter, why not require them to provide free houses to everyone and solve the homeless problem? Does anyone doubt that when the Catholic Church goes out to buy insurance that the insurance companies won't price in the cost of providing this "free" insurance? What a load of baloney!
    You see, each time the government makes demands on insurers, premiums have to go up. Want the insurers to be required to provide more mental health care? Okay, done. Your premiums have now gone up. Want your adult children to be on your policy (more likely if they are sickly, of course)? Okay, done. Your premiums have now gone up. Free birth control, higher premiums. More mandates, higher premiums. Want mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions? Okay, your premiums have just skyrocketed to Pluto and the quality of your insurance has gone to hell.
    Obamacare mandates health coverage. But employers who don't provide it will pay a small fine. Because of government interference, it will be much cheaper to pay the fine than to provide the ever-more-expensive insurance. Eventually everyone is going to be forced into a government "exchange," which is exactly what the socialists want. And the cost or tax on average Americans is going to get higher and higher even as our insurance coverage gets crappier and crappier.
    I happen to believe we need a system that will provide bare-bones health services to every American at no charge. To some degree this is already happening in an inefficient manner. But we ought to be able, as a society, to care for those most in need without tampering with the traditional relationship between employers and their employees, and insurers and their insured. We need room in our health care system for luxury plans, bare-bones plans, partial self-insurance plans and plans that don't cover birth control (or penicillin, or doctors whose names begin with a "Y," or anything else I'd like to exclude).
    What's at stake here is whether we will continue to live as a free and independent people, able to choose how we live our lives, or whether we will be herded along by the Democrats as socialist sheeple.