Story highlights Jeanne Lambrew: The ACA respected religious groups opposed to offering birth control

The new rules place more importance on a boss's belief than on women's health, she writes

Jeanne Lambrew is the former deputy assistant to President Barack Obama for health policy and currently is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. The opinions expressed are her own.

(CNN) The Trump administration on Friday issued new rules making it easier for employers to drop birth control coverage on religious grounds. Besides undermining a carefully drawn policy that has helped 55 million women, these rules threaten to undermine our insurance system and potentially America's public health.

The Affordable Care Act required all new private health insurance plans to provide contraception with no out-of-pocket cost to consumers. When the rules were drawn up, I was among the Obama administration officials who worked to strike a balance between guaranteeing women's access to these and other important preventive services while respecting religious organizations that didn't want to pay for their employees' birth control.

Jeanne Lambrew

These new rules upset that balance and cause harm in several ways.

First, the rules end the broad guarantee of contraceptive coverage for women whose employers have religious objections to it. Under Obamacare, certain religious employers could opt out of paying for that coverage, but women still received the birth-control benefit provided by insurance companies separately.

Now, this separate coverage is not required, leaving many women vulnerable to a large increase in their health care costs. Students employed at large Catholic universities, nurses at religious hospitals or nursing homes, and even employees of bookstores whose owners object to contraceptive coverage may no longer get it.

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