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.
