Title: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
Headings: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014)
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014)
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Content: Starting in 2014, all companies who failed to offer their employees health care plans that met all aspects of the ACA, including the contraceptive mandate, where charged a daily one-hundred-dollar tax penalty for each affected employee. If a corporation instead chose not to offer any healthcare plans to employees, the corporation was charged a 2,000 dollar fine each year for each employee it failed to insure. However, the HHS regulations included exceptions for certain corporations. Under the HHS regulations, non-profit religious organizations, such as religiously-affiliated hospitals, were not required to meet the contraceptive mandate. On 12 September 2012, Barbara and David Green, along with their children Mart Green, Steven Green, and Darsee Lett, filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on behalf of their family-owned company, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. The Hobby Lobby Corporation included over 500 stores that sold arts and crafts supplies throughout the United States. According to Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, all of the stores that he had founded, including the first store opened in 1976, incorporated his Christian beliefs into their everyday functions. In 2012, Green and his son Steven, who was the president of the company, maintained ownership of all of the Hobby Lobby stores. The Greens filed their suit against the director of Health and Human Services, or HHS, Kathleen Sibelius, and challenged the HHS contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act. The Greens argued that the contraceptive mandate of the ACA violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, or RFRA, and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The RFRA prohibited the national government from substantially burdening individuals exercising their religious beliefs.