Mankiw Calls Out Obama on a "Change" in Policy

President Obama has announced that he will no longer require the Catholic church to pay for health insurance that covers birth control. Instead, the insurance companies will be required to cover birth control. It's one of many shell games that go on in government, but because the world's greatest economics textbook salesman plays for the Republican team and not the Democrat team, he is allowed to call out this shell game and does:

Semantics at the Highest Level

Consider these two policies:

A. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.

B. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance. The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.

I can understand someone endorsing both A and B, and I can understand someone rejecting both A and B. But I cannot understand someone rejecting A and embracing B, because they are effectively the same policy. Ultimately, all insurance costs are passed on to the purchaser, so I cannot see how policy B is different in any way from policy A, other than using slightly different words to describe it.

Yet it seems that the White House yesterday switched from A to B, and that change is being viewed by some as a significant accommodation to those who objected to policy A. The whole thing leaves me scratching my head.