Need medicine? It's up to your boss's religion

Republicans are trying to attach an amendment to the highway funding bill this week that could deny countless women and men access to all sorts of lifesaving healthcare, simply based on the stated beliefs of their employers.

The Right is claiming to stand up for the religious liberty of employers, but this attack is really meant to unravel healthcare reform from within. They want to give employers the power to impose their own religious beliefs on their employees, getting in between Americans and their doctors and taking life and death decisions away from the people who should be making them.

The vote in the Senate this week is just the start.

Republican leaders in both the Senate and the House have signaled that this is an election year fight they want to have, and they will be pushing for such utterly extreme legislation repeatedly.

Tell them, "NO." Join our emergency petition now to stop far-right congressmen from giving your employer the power to deny you important healthcare.

Imagine your employer could deny you access to healthcare altogether on the grounds that their religion was opposed to modern medicine and they believed prayer was the best medicine. No exaggeration -- that's how far this amendment by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) goes.
The Obama administration announced a reasonable accommodation on this issue, providing that in the Affordable Care Act mandate for contraception coverage, religiously affiliated institutions that object to contraception as a matter of religious doctrine did not have to pay for that coverage for their employees -- instead, insurance companies would cover the cost.

That compromise satisfied the majority of those critical of the mandate before it included that exemption, and has been widely hailed as striking the right balance between religious liberty and women's access to important healthcare.

The GOP and its Religious Right allies have not only moved the goal post with their new overreaching proposal, they have abandoned any pretense that their concern was ever really "religious liberty." This is about the Right's ongoing war on women's health ... about primarily male lawmakers and institutions making decisions for women about their bodies ... about giving employers undue power over their employees' lives ... about granting special privileges to the Religious Right that says the rules shouldn't apply to them ... and it's about trying to destroy healthcare reform.