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Here's the official statement from the USCCB: (as of late evening, February 10)

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the "preventive services" regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated "preventive services" prevent disease, andpregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral:insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS's nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

·It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

·It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider.

·Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protectionfor key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer's plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today's proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

I am not able to post much over the next two days.  Comments are open for discussion.  Consider these questions:  

(1) Is there a substantive difference between an employer being forced to buy coverage for a drug/procedure, and all insurers being forced to provide them at no cost to all people covered by their plans?

(2) Set aside the question of whether or not the rule is, as a policy matter, a good idea or a bad idea.  It was pretty obvious before that the rule was one that called for civil disobedience:  a Catholic hospital (for example) could not follow both the rule and its conscience except by shutting its doors.  Is that still the case?  Has this change created any plausible argument that Catholic institutions do not have the moral duty to disobey the law or shut down?  

(3) If religious institutions ought to have exemptions from insurance requirements, does it necessarily follow that individual employers (say, the owner of a hardware store or a fast-food chain) ought to have right-of-conscience exemptions?  Assume that the beliefs that motivate a request for exemptions are sincerely held.  

(4)  What about self-insured religious institutions?  And are there any health insurers that are religiously affiliated?  (I know we have our life insurance policies through the Knights of Columbus, so there are certainly some kinds of insurers that are religiously affiliated).  Does their conscience matter?

(5) Is this whole debate just a particularly clarifying way of getting to the heart of the question:  What is insurance for, anyway?  

I would have taken pictures, but that would have annoyed the kids more.  They weren't too happy about being left in the lobby of the community center with nothing but a foosball table and a few dollars for the snack machine, even for the twenty minutes it took me to go in and cast a vote in the straw poll and second a nomination for the delegate to the next step.  I offered to bring the kids in with me so they could view democracy at work, but they preferred to argue about the merits of Pop Tarts vs. Famous Amos cookies (which my eleven-year-old, amusingly, pronounced as "famous ammo" cookies).

It was nothing — nothing — like 2008 in there.  In 2008, the caucus was standing-room-only packed, mostly with Ron Paul supporters.  This time, there were about a dozen tables, one for each precinct in the Senate district, and around each table were folding chairs — as few as eight (mine) and as many as 25.  People sat and chatted amiably about candidates and issues.  I saw all ages represented, almost as many women as men, and (while I didn't stop to take a detailed census) it was a fairly racially diverse crowd as well.  Probably not quite as diverse as the neighborhood we all live in, but more than I had expected.  I got the impression that the younger people were skewed more toward Paul and the older people more toward Romney.

My precinct table only had eight people, but three of us were toting toddlers.   I thought that was interesting.

"What do you have to say?" the gray-ponytailed man next to me asked as I took my seat awkwardly, shifting the two-year-old in the sling.  I said I came more to listen than to talk, which was true.  Unfortunately, I had that thing going where I had three kids out in the next room and one kid wriggling on my lap.  I'm sitting here with my fingers on the keyboard trying to record here the comments I heard people articulating, and I just realized I can't reproduce them because, I think, my higher brain functions were all going to keep tabs on the kids.   I did form impressions, though.

Santorum:  respected, intelligent uncompromising, but not judged by my tablemates to be electable because of the perception of being too religious.  

Paul:  similar to Santorum in that he is principled and uncompromising, but judged by my tablemates to be more electable because his principles do not come quite so obviously from a religion.  

Romney:  part of the problem, emblematic of the broken system that is the collusion  of big government and big money; but could probably get the job done.

The fourth candidate might as well have been called "He Who Shall Not Be Named" because nobody even mentioned him.

Not that the table was uniform in its judgments — there was one guy who steadfastly insisted that all the candidates were equally awful, and he wrote in "Arne Carlson" for his straw-poll vote.  

That is about as far as I got before I judged I had made the kids suffer enough (okay, before I heard the five-year-old wailing because she didn't have any bubble gum) and bowed out.  But I'm really glad I showed up.  One of these days I may actually offer to be the delegate — I might have done it this time, but our family's going camping that weekend.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when it turned out that Santorum was such a clear winner in Minnesota.  I mean, I guess it makes some sense now that I think about it — I mean, it's not like the character of the state as a whole is representatively reflected in the sample that is "people who actually show up to a party caucus."  The state as a whole tends to vote Democratic pretty reliably, and I'm in the center of the metro area, so I never expect any segment to lean conservative — I reflexively expect to see moderate-to-left views most of the time, since that is what I am surrounded by.

UPDATE.  Here's a decent and probably-accurate summary of why it isn't that crazy that Santorum swept Minnesota.  I would just like to point out that Romney won the state's caucuses in 2008, though, when there were still more socially conservative candidates in the field, so it's not like they reliably yield the most conservative option.