The Department of Health and Human Services’ recent mandate that most employers, even religious ones, must fund contraception in their health plans has been lauded by progressives and will certainly increase access to such services. The ruling significantly reduces the cost of oral contraceptives for potential users. The cost has not disappeared, however. It has merely been transferred to another party.

The new ruling removes a relevant cost from the patient’s decision making.

The result of such a situation is quite clear if one considers a parallel situation in environmental economics. Suppose that a manufacturer emits toxic gases that cause increased rates of lung diseases for those dwelling nearby. If the firm expects that it will not be made to compensate the town’s inhabitants for their suffering, it might continue to emit the gases, even if the gases could be scrubbed inexpensively. This is why classical economic theory generally predicts inefficient outcomes when decision-makers can transfer relevant costs to an unwilling third party, which is what the new mandate does.

Nevertheless, more is at stake than a mere cost-benefit analysis. Contraceptives are increasingly viewed as a positive right — that is, something that the wealthy should provide for the disadvantaged at especially low costs, even when economics predict an “inefficient” outcome. By the same reasoning, we offer public schools and food stamps.

We generally accept this because public provision of education and nutrition are widely considered to be essential for the common good. The majority ignores the few dissenters because food stamps and public schools are seen as such a universal necessity.

Likewise, sometimes the state intervenes in labor markets when nominally “voluntary” agreements are still seen as coerced. For example, few lament the ban on mercuric nitrate in the felt-making industry, even though few could have been forced into felt-making and the cost of felt-making likely rose because of the ban.

One might accept that the government should protect workers’ rights. Some, therefore, have proposed that allowing religious exemptions for contraceptives opens the door to religious exemptions for occupational safety laws.

Banning work that does not include contraceptives in the insurance plan is quite different, however. An individual acting alone can obtain contraceptives, even without his or her employer’s support, whereas an individual cannot unilaterally change an industry practice.

Furthermore, some do not believe that contraceptives are as necessary as public schooling and nutrition. Progressives often advocate tolerance in the field of sexual ethics and to run roughshod over religious employers’ views would hardly be tolerance.

I suppose this means that anything between two consenting adults is fine, except when one of them is someone consenting to work at a Catholic hospital, and the other is a bishop consenting to pay him or her in entirely non-contraceptive goods.

Ed Seyler can be reached at [email protected]