Last week’s all-con­sum­ing out­rage was spurred by a new rule issued by the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion requir­ing that all employ­ers’ health insur­ance plans cov­er birth con­trol with­out a copay. Reli­gious employ­ers – espe­cial­ly Catholic groups – had asked for an exemp­tion, and thought there was a wink-and-nod agree­ment that they’d get the exemp­tion, but then they did­n’t. They did­n’t want to have to pay for birth con­trol, even though many of these groups employ peo­ple out­side their denom­i­na­tion (and thus aren’t bound by out­dat­ed papal bans on birth con­trol) or peo­ple who are part of the denom­i­na­tion but don’t care about out­dat­ed papal bans on birth control.

This morn­ing, rumors swirled of a forth­com­ing “accom­mo­da­tion” from the admin­is­tra­tion, and some were pre­pared to declare it a loss, sight unseen.

But the actu­al pol­i­cy announced seems sat­is­fy­ing to near­ly every­one. ThinkProgress explains:

Under the new pol­i­cy, “all women will still have access to free pre­ven­tive care, includ­ing contraception,” no mat­ter where they work.” How­ev­er, if a non­prof­it reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tion like a Catholic col­lege or hos­pi­tal objects to offer­ing birth con­trol, the insur­ance com­pa­ny will be required to pro­vide the cov­er­age free of charge and the employ­er will not pay for it. Sis­ter Car­ol Kee­han, Pres­i­dent of the US Catholic Health Asso­ci­a­tion and Planned Par­ent­hood head Cecile Richards sup­port the com­pro­mise, the admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said.

…Insurance com­pa­nies will be able to deliv­er birth con­trol at no addi­tion­al charge because the cost of con­tra­cep­tion is far less than the costs asso­ci­at­ed with an unwant­ed preg­nan­cy, the admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial explained. There­fore, “there is no extra pre­mi­um” asso­ci­at­ed with the service.

The new rule will also elim­i­nate the one year imple­men­ta­tion delay that was includ­ed in the orig­i­nal reg­u­la­tion, mean­ing that con­tra­cep­tion with­out cost shar­ing will be avail­able start­ing Aug. 1.

Planned Par­ent­hood and the nun who runs the Catholic hos­pi­tals’ lob­by­ing group prob­a­bly don’t agree on much, but they are both sat­is­fied with this res­o­lu­tion. About the only peo­ple who aren’t: wingnuts like Bryan Fis­ch­er, who declared on twit­ter:

WH “com­pro­mise” total­ly bogus. Now just tram­ples on reli­gious lib­er­ty of insur­ance com­pa­nies instead. It’s a travesty.

Now I know cor­po­ra­tions are peo­ple, my friend, but in what sense does a cor­po­ra­tion have reli­gion, let alone reli­gious lib­er­ty? If he has to work that hard to find a prob­lem with this pol­i­cy, I think we can safe­ly say that the Pres­i­den­t’s skills at 11-dimen­sion­al chess are still sharp.

But I under­stand why there was so much angst on pro­gres­sive blogs and Twit­ter feeds this morn­ing. So often, the White House has a habit of open­ing nego­ti­a­tions by giv­ing away the store, or accept­ing a com­pro­mise that’s too weak, or that fails to advance a pro­gres­sive vision, or lay the foun­da­tion for future pro­gres­sive vic­to­ries. In many cas­es, I can see why those com­pro­mis­es were prob­a­bly the best deal to be had, but it still leaves a bit­ter taste in pro­gres­sive voters.

In this case, they nego­ti­at­ed the pol­i­tics clev­er­ly by stak­ing out a strong posi­tion to begin with, let­ting the con­ser­v­a­tive noise machine work itself into a tizzy, then announc­ing a com­pro­mise that takes noth­ing away from the peo­ple being insured, acknowl­edges the con­cerns of reli­gious groups, and forces the con­ser­v­a­tives to either make clear that they sim­ply object to any­one hav­ing birth con­trol at all, or to make argu­ments so absurd they can be ignored. I hope there’s a broad­er polit­i­cal les­son here.