A year ago today, the Supreme Court handed down Hobby Lobby. There, famously, the Court extended a religion accommodation to a business corporation, freeing it from the legal obligation to include coverage for certain contraceptives in its employee health plan. At the time, the Court strongly implied that the impact on employees would be “precisely zero.”
Yet today, a full year after the Court issued that statement, Hobby Lobby’s employees are still not receiving coverage. As we explained in a previous post, the Obama Administration has not yet implemented the solution that the Court suggested in its opinion, perhaps because of understandable difficulties defining what counts as a closely-held corporation (that definition matters because the Court limited its holding to such entities). Moreover, any solution that is ultimately provided cannot be retroactive, according to the Court’s own doctrine. And Hobby Lobby may well have stopped providing contraception coverage even before the Supreme Court ratified its ability to do so.
Citation
Richard C. Schragger, Micah J. Schwartzman & Nelson Tebbe, Hobby Lobby’s Bitter Anniversary, Balkinization (June 30, 2015).