Ohio businessmen sue over health care requirement

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A law­suit chal­leng­ing part of the fed­eral health care over­haul on behalf of two Catholic busi­ness own­ers in Ohio argues a require­ment for con­tra­cep­tion cov­er­age con­tra­dicts their reli­gious beliefs and vio­lates their con­sti­tu­tional rights.

The Amer­i­can Cen­ter for Law and Jus­tice, an anti-abortion legal group, sued the fed­eral Health and Human Ser­vices, Labor and Trea­sury depart­ments and their lead­ers Thurs­day in U.S. Dis­trict Court in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., on behalf of Fran­cis Gilardi Jr. and Philip Gilardi. The broth­ers run pro­duce pro­cess­ing and trans­porta­tion busi­nesses in the west­ern Ohio city of Sid­ney and have about 400 employ­ees between their com­pa­nies, Fresh­way Foods and Fresh­way Logistics.

The broth­ers have excluded con­tra­cep­tives, ster­il­iza­tion and abortion-inducing drugs from their com­pany health insur­ance for the past decade but would be required to pro­vide that cov­er­age start­ing this spring or face crip­pling fines and penal­ties — total­ing more than $14 mil­lion annu­ally — under the health care rule, the ACLJ said.

“The gov­ern­ment is requir­ing them to enter into a con­tract and to pay for things that they find morally objec­tion­able, and they just want to be able to con­tinue what they’ve been doing,” ACLJ senior coun­sel Edward White said Friday.

Offi­cials in Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion have said their goal is giv­ing women access to impor­tant care, not lim­it­ing reli­gious free­dom. The Depart­ment of Jus­tice said Fri­day it had no com­ment on the Gilardis’ case.

The broth­ers are seek­ing a rul­ing that the man­date is uncon­sti­tu­tional and an injunc­tion block­ing the man­date from apply­ing to them.

The ACLJ said the case is the fourth sim­i­lar chal­lenge it has filed to the health care law, in addi­tion to fil­ing sup­port for oth­ers’ chal­lenges, in the hope that one of the cases will even­tu­ally lead to a U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion on the issue.

In one chal­lenge, Ohio’s attor­ney gen­eral was among seven who filed a law­suit seek­ing to block the con­tra­cep­tion cov­er­age require­ment on the argu­ment that it vio­lated the rights of employ­ers who object to the use of con­tra­cep­tives. A fed­eral judge dis­missed that case last year, say­ing they didn’t have stand­ing to file it and not­ing that Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion agreed to work with reli­gious groups to try to address concerns.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Jan 25 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.