Many faith-based organizations (and also businesses with religious owners) consider themselves in a real bind: they want to offer their employees health insurance but have a conscientious objection to covering in that insurance artificial birth control and/or emergency contraceptives that may act by inducing abortions.

Because they aren’t churches, they don’t qualify for the “religious employer” exemption. They might qualify for an “accommodation” for “religious organizations,” but that provision, which will still make them complicit in the provision of all FDA-approved contraceptive services for free to their employees, has not yet been designed. (For details on all this, see IRFA’s memo for parachurch organizations.) No wonder that there are now 30 lawsuits against the federal government, with more than 80 plaintiffs.

There is a way out: the employer could stop providing health insurance but instead give the employees the funds to buy health insurance on their own. The employer’s conscience issues are resolved: the employees get insurance-that’s good; the insurance doesn’t cover products and services that the employer regards as morally wrong-that’s good.

But this solution turns out to be pretty complicated, according to Gary Miller of DePaul University. Writing recently in the Update Newsletter of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, he shows that it could cost an employer as much as $8,000 per employee per year to try to “make them whole” if the employer drops its employee insurance coverage. It’s a complicated calculation that includes the greater cost of insurance bought on the individual rather than group market (even with the new insurance exchanges), the need to add to the salary an additional amount to cover the cost of taxes on the extra salary paid to cover the individual health insurance purchases, the penalty on the employer, starting in 2014, for not providing employee insurance, and more.

And that’s not the end of it, Miller points out. Because the various employees would need to be paid different amounts to be made whole (e.g., employees with children will have to shell out more to buy their own insurance than will singles), the employer would likely run afoul of laws requiring equal pay for equal work.

The only way around that problem would be to calculate the average cost of the former group health insurance and then give that amount to each employee, even though some employees then would come out ahead and others would have to chip in from their own pockets to come up with enough for an individual health policy.

Or the federal government could drop the contraceptives mandate, or expand the “religious employer” exemption to cover all organizations that object to the contraceptives coverage, or find a different way to expand access to free contraceptives. What’s it going to be?