In January 2012, President Barack Obama finalized his regulation banning employers from offering their staff health insurance unless it paid the entire cost of birth control.

The penalty for providing coverage without birth control was set at $100 a day per worker — more than 15 times as much as the penalty for offering no coverage at all.

This mandate was not part of the Obamacare law passed by Congress. It probably wouldn't have passed if the controversial proviso had been included. In the time since, the mandate has been battered by litigation. A unanimous Supreme Court recently rebuffed the Obama administration's efforts to impose it on religious nonprofit organizations. The parties and government have tried to negotiate a compromise that respects religious freedom but have not yet found one.

That task now falls to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, he is about to create a broad exemption allowing most employers easily to sidestep the mandate.

That's a good start. But Price's next step should be to abolish the mandate altogether. It was never necessary to accomplish Obamacare's stated mission. In fact, because its penalties favor birth control over insurance coverage, the mandate somewhat undercuts that mission.

The left side of the culture war, which this mandate was designed to please, will not take the Trump administration's action lightly. It is already trying to frame this move to let employers decide which health benefits to offer as a blow to employees' freedom — imposing bosses' beliefs on workers.

By that logic, you'd be entitled to complain if your boss imposed his belief on you that you don't deserve a million-dollar bonus this month. In truth, employer health plans are simply part of the terms of a worker's job — opulent or stingy, however the case may be, but nothing to do with the imposition of beliefs.

There is no freedom to compel others to offer you better compensation for your job. That's the opposite of freedom. Even where government compulsion is necessary and justified, which in this case it demonstrably isn't, it is ludicrous to the point of being insulting to call an imposition "freedom."

By the same token, it was clear from the outset that the mandate would restrict the freedom of employers, big and small, who had religious objections to it, and who rightly resented government demands that they disobey the tenets of their faith.

Once the mandate is gone, as we hope will be soon, everyone will be free to make their own decisions. Employees will remain free to buy and use birth control as they choose. Most employers will continue to provide it even though not obliged to. After all, 65 percent of all employers and 85 percent of all large employers did so before Obamacare. They chose what they believed best for attracting employees.

We referred above to Obamacare's "stated" mission. But the mission of some parts of it, including the birth control mandate, was of course not as stated by the Obama administration. It was not to ensure than everyone had access to an essential element of health coverage. No one who wanted birth control was incapable of obtaining it even before Obama's meddlesome and overweening statute was foisted on the nation.

No, the real rather than stated purpose of the mandate was to force employers who lived according to their faith into a humiliating and unprincipled capitulation to the arrogant forces of secular left-liberalism. It was a little act of tyranny, a disgrace to those who perpetrated it, that cannot be expunged too soon.