Listen live: Supreme Court hears arguments over whether companies can limit contraceptive coverage

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Obamacare’s contraceptive coverage mandate returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday in a high-profile case that will force the justices to once again consider which businesses may deny their employees access to free birth control. 

The fight over the mandate, included in the 2010 health-care overhaul legislation formally known as the Affordable Care Act, has spanned nearly a decade and two presidential administrations.

It has come to the Supreme Court twice before — once, in 2016, during an election year — though never quite like this time.

As a result of health precautions taken in the midst of the spreading coronavirus, Wednesday’s oral argument will be the third in the history of the court to be broadcast live to the public. The audio feed will be available at 10 a.m. ET on this page. 

The two previous cases that came to the Supreme Court over the coverage mandate concerned whether Obama administration requirements imposed too harsh a burden on employers with religious objections to providing or facilitating contraceptive coverage. 

Wednesday’s case, the first to reach the Supreme Court under President Donald Trump, asks the opposite question: whether Trump administration rules released in 2017 provide too wide a carve-out for religious and moral objectors to deny women coverage. 

The stakes in the latest case are higher than the previous two, according to Nelson Tebbe, a law professor at Cornell Law School who studies constitutional law and religious freedom. In those cases, female employees whose benefits were at stake still retained coverage, via third parties, after their employers gained exemptions. 

“This is a very different kind of religious exemption because it does not provide alternative coverage for female employees or female dependents of male employees,” Tebbe said. Possibly more than 100,000 women stand to lose their contraceptive coverage, he said. 

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/listen-live-as-supreme-court-weighs-trump-contraceptive-coverage-rules.html