Only because I mentioned Notre Dame’s reaction to changes to the ACA before do I bring this to your attention:
Notre Dame has decided to ban “abortion-inducing drugs” from third-party-provided insurance plans. It will also begin providing coverage for “simple contraceptives” in the university plan.* The move was announced in a letter from its president, Father John Jenkins, to the university community on Wednesday. …
Many students and faculty were angry when Notre Dame indicated it would end coverage for birth control, arguing that it would create an enormous financial burden for them. Likewise, many conservative Catholic alumni and community members were outraged when the school agreed to continue coverage, pointing out that the use of birth control is against Church teachings; one advocacy group called it “a dark time for Notre Dame.” The latest decision likely won’t leave critics on either side happy, since it limits access to certain drugs but reaffirms the decision to allow coverage of birth control—and moves coverage under the authority of the university, rather a third party.
Notre Dame sees this latest move as a compromise. It will discontinue the government provision of drugs through a third-party administrator, and it will also provide funding for natural-planning options. While ending access to all contraception “would allow the university to be free of involvement with drugs that are morally objectionable in Catholic teaching,” Jenkins wrote in his letter, it would place a burden on many people who rely on the school for health-care benefits. [The Atlantic]
They say that a good compromise leaves no one happy, and that’s a good thing. It occurs to me there’s another positive to compromises that leave everyone unhappy – it gives everyone a chance to evaluate whether those portions of their policy preferences that are implemented actually lead to positive results, and, analogously, if the opposition’s implemented portion lead to negative results.
In other words, it’s a very crude laboratory experiment.
But there is a constraint: this only works in situations where people connect their policies with projected tangible results. Notre Dame is connected with the Catholic Church, a religious institution, and it’s never been entirely clear to me if the ban on abortion, which apparently is not mentioned in the Bible (according to this HuffPost article), is called for as a propitiation of Jehovah, the Christian God, or as some sort of positive result in American life. The latter would be testable; the former, from my point of view, just gobbledygook.
It also requires honest search for truth, rather than blind adherence to rules, and perhaps an interesting argument over whether some particular change in society is good, bad, or just random.
In any case, I really only meant to mention that the University of Notre Dame continues to do the dance of compromise in connection with the ACA.
