In Foothill
Church v. Watanabe, (ED CA, Aug. 25, 2022), a California federal
district court held that the California Department of Managed Health Care
(DMHC) should have taken steps so that objecting churches could be exempt from
the Department's requirement that health insurance policies cover abortion
services. DMHC argued that only health care plans are subject to its
regulation, so exemptions will be granted only to plans, not to employers.
Subjecting plaintiffs' Free Exercise claim to strict scrutiny because the DMHC
rule is subject to a system of individual exemptions and thus is not
"generally applicable," the court said in part:
[T]he court assumes without deciding that the Director’s
understanding of the scope of her regulatory authority, that she is limited to
regulating health plans, is correct. Nonetheless, nothing in the statutory text
explicitly precludes her from fielding requests for exemptions from religious
claimants. Likewise, nothing appears to preclude the Director from directing
the religious claimant’s plan to submit a revised evidence of coverage document
comporting with the religious claimant’s belief to the DMHC for approval. The
Director’s authority to give orders to a plan does not foreclose the authority
to consider requests for those orders from others. In the end, the Director is
still regulating the plan.
... The Director’s denial of the Churches’ request for
exceptions to accommodate their religious beliefs, based solely on the fact
that those requests did not originate with a plan, was not narrowly tailored to
serve a compelling interest.
ADF issued a press release announcing
the decision.
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