Mourdock: Health Insurance Plans Shouldn’t Have To Cover Cancer

by Stuart Shapiro

Indiana Tea Party darling and Senate candidate Richard Mourdock was asked about requiring health insurance plans to cover contraception.  Not surprisingly, he said no.  More surprisingly he went further:

Democrats are hammering Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock over his statement that employers should not have to cover cancer in their insurance plans if they don’t want to.

Mourdock, the state treasurer, argued in a newspaper interview last week that not only should employers not have to cover health care services that they oppose, such as contraception, but they also should be exempt from paying for anything they do not want to include, based on costs.

Kudos to Mourdock for saying what he really believes.  Now let’s see if Indiana voters agree with him.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.