By LOUISE RADNOFSKY

Catholic bishops said Friday night that they would not support the Obama administration’s proposed compromise on a controversial rule that requires most employers to fully cover contraception in their workers’ health plans.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had led opposition to the regulation, issued a statement saying that they didn’t believe their concerns were addressed by a new policy offered by President Barack Obama on Friday morning to allow religious employers who object to the use of birth control to turn over responsibility for covering it to insurance companies.

Under the new policy, religious employers that don’t want to offer contraception could exclude it from their policies. Insurance companies instead would be required to provide access to contraception for plan participants who wanted it, without explicitly charging either the religious employer or worker.

The shift is intended to ensure that women working at religious hospitals, schools and charities who want to use contraception can obtain it in the same way as women who work for secular employers. It also means the cost of providing the coverage for those women is likely to be spread across all policyholders by insurers.

The bishops had earlier expressed cautious optimism about the announcement, saying that it was “a first step in the right direction” but that they would have to study it.

In their later statement, they said they still had “serious moral concerns,” noting that the proposal didn’t contain provisions for religious employers who self-insure, meaning the employer takes on the underlying risk of covering employees’ health care.

The bishops also said that the current structure of the proposal meant that if an employee and insurer agreed to add contraception coverage to a health plan, it would still be financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the employer.

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President Obama on Friday announced a new policy that no longer requires a broad swath of religious organizations to provide employees with contraception coverage in health-insurance plans. Laura Meckler discusses on The News Hub. Photo: AP

“These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection… is unacceptable and must be corrected,” the statement said.

The White House declined to comment.

Under the health-care law passed in March 2010, insurers must cover preventive care at no out-of-pocket cost for consumers. The Institute of Medicine recommended that all forms of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration be included on the list of covered services.

The bishops also said that they were unlikely to be satisfied by changes that affected only religious employers, since they still had “grave” objections to the overall mandate, which includes the morning-after pill and sterilization.

The later statement came after leading members of the conference reviewed the proposal, among them president Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the two men who chair its committees on doctrine and what the church calls “pro-life activities,” the cardinals Donald Wuerl and Daniel DiNardo. Archbishop Dolan will be elevated to the rank of cardinal next week.

President Obama telephoned the archbishop to tell him of the announcement Friday morning. The bishops said they hadn’t been previously consulted about the proposal.

“We note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions….The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is… to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services,” they wrote.

It isn’t clear what effect the bishops’ objections will have on the Catholic community, which had already been divided in its initial response to the proposal, and to the health-care law as a whole.

Several Catholic organizations praised the administration compromise after it was announced, including the hospitals group the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Donald Wuerl is a cardinal. In an earlier version of this article, he was incorrectly identified as a bishop.

By MELISSA KORN

We asked a group of leading business thinkers what books make their must-read lists. Fiction, nonfiction, even drama made the cut, each offering an oft-surprising business lesson. Here are some of their top picks:

Warren Bennis, management professor, University of Southern California; Author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare

“Falstaff was sent to help Hal become ‘kingly’ – [he was] the first executive coach of all time. Falstaff tell Prince Hal that if you want to lead people, you better understand their world. I read it at least every other year, and always learn something.”

HarperCollins

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind

“It’s about a rookie taking on what is probably the most significant, complex job in the world [U.S. President] – a leadership development story.”

***

Sally Blount, Dean, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama

“Fukuyama lays out a comprehensive, yet simple framework for understanding how humans join together for collective action and what they seek to achieve from the process of participating.”

***

Tom Davenport, Information technology and management professor, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

“William E. Dodd was appointed to the important post [of Ambassador] largely because there seemed to be no one else available. It’s not clear whether a more able hand could have done anything to stop Hitler, but the book illustrates the perils of settling for mediocre job candidates.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

“An early peek into the ethical and intellectual property issues we will face as we enter the world of genetic medicine. Lack’s cells have been used for a variety of medical and scientific purposes, though neither she nor her family received much benefit. Life sciences firms will have a much tougher time in the future with securing biological material for their own purposes.”

***

Ray Fisman, professor of social enterprise and co-director of the Social Enterprise Program, Columbia Business School

Used by Permission of the Estate of Arnold Lobel and HarperCollins Publishers

“Cookies,” from Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel

“Frog knows his weaknesses. He understands that he’s an impulsive little amphibian. The only way he can commit to not eat all of the cookies is to foreclose opportunities by feeding them to the birds. “Cookies” serves as a beautiful parable for recent work in behavioral economics on various mechanisms for tying one’s own hands in the face of temptation.”

Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, by Peter Moskos

“If someone in [from] The Wire decided to do a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard, this would be his thesis. It highlights the complicated business of designing incentives and structures for an organization that has an incredibly challenging objective.”

***

Glenn Hubbard, Dean, Columbia Business School, former chairman of U.S. Council of Economic Advisers

Penguin Press

The Judge: A Life of Thomas Mellon, Founder of a Fortune, by James Mellon

“The essence of entrepreneurship and seeing opportunity in uncertain times.”

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

“While Kennan is not a businessperson, the book illustrates well how the mind of a deep strategic thinker evolves from a mix of formal training and real experience.”

***

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, business administration professor, Harvard Business School

Albert Watson

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

“Instead of clichés about leaders, Isaacson provides a nuanced portrait of Jobs as he wanted to be seen and Jobs as he appeared to others. His life was [is] part inspiration — showing that it’s possible to stretch, soar, and innovate with courage — and part cautionary tale about all the ways in which perfection is unattainable.”

***

Roger Martin, Dean, University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management; Author, of Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL

The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice, by Elliot Eisner

“[The book] is Eisner’s defense of qualitative research techniques in the face of a world that favors quantitative techniques. It is brilliant because it demonstrates convincingly that for many research endeavors, qualitative techniques are in fact more rigorous than quantitative techniques. It is about the field of research into education, [but] it is utterly applicable to the world of business, which needs to swing the pendulum back from mindless quantitative crunching to qualitative appreciation.”

***

Jeffrey Pfeffer, organizational behavior professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business, author of Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

“What is amazing is not just that people are greedy and prone to engage in ethically questionable activities; the big lesson is how people can reach unimaginable positions of power and essentially be (a) incompetent, and (b) not willing to do even the most mundane and trivial parts of their job.”

***

Viking

Robert Shiller, economics professor, Yale University; co-creator of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker

“It teaches lessons about human nature that would offer many insights for business. It is about human conflict, and how it is resolved.”

Write to Melissa Korn at Melissa.Korn@wsj.com

Caring for an elderly relative isn’t just costly and time-consuming—studies show it could even harm your own health. Now, some companies and nonprofits are rolling out free and low-cost professional help for family caregivers.

Genworth Financial, a large long-term-care insurer, and AARP, the membership group for older Americans, on Thursday introduced a new service for AARP members through which the families of older adults with dementia and other illnesses can assess their needs and develop a care plan—either online, over the phone or in person with a registered nurse. (Genworth already has marketed long-term-care insurance with AARP’s logo for nearly five years.)

The program’s fees vary depending on the service used, starting with online access all the way up to an in-home assessment and help finding local home-health aides, facilities or other medical providers to match those needs.

Improving Dementia Care

Separately, service provider Home Instead Senior Care has started training its home-care workers in new techniques and strategies to improve care for dementia patients—and is starting to offer the same instruction at no cost online and in person to family caregivers.

“Families need help keeping their loved one safe and mentally engaged and stimulated, and managing difficult behaviors,” says Jeff Huber, Home Instead’s president.

To that end, Home Instead developed a life journal, designed to collect information about a patient’s history “to create a much more effective caring experience,” he says.

The financial toll on family caregivers who are 50 or older averages $303,880 a person in lost lifetime wages, pensions and Social Security benefits, according to a June 2011 analysis of U.S. Heath and Retirement Study data by the nonprofit National Alliance for Caregiving and others.

The toll on one’s health also can be significant. Taking care of a family member with Alzheimer’s disease could make your own health-care bills increase by an average of $4,766 a year, according to a separate study that the National Alliance for Caregiving released in November. It also found that family caregivers make visits to emergency rooms, doctors and hospitals at higher rates than others the same age.

Unpaid Caregivers

More than 43 million Americans serve as unpaid caregivers for adults who are 50 and older (the age at which you can join AARP), and nearly one in four say they have a difficult time coordinating care, according to a 2009 study by the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with AARP, which has some 40 million members.

The new service, formally known as AARP Caregiving Help and Advice from Genworth ranges from $12.99 for six months of online access to $149 for a phone assessment, a service plan and six months of online access, to $489 for an in-home consultation. Adding the “service finder” option—which includes researching local availability, providing quality ratings, negotiating discounts and coordinating the start of care—brings the phone total to $295 and the in-person bill to $665.

Genworth has offered the assessment and matchmaking service to its long-term-care policyholders for four years. Ralph Cummins, a 51-year-old marketing consultant in Richmond, Va., sought help from the insurer in late 2010 when his mother was facing knee-replacement surgery, which would require a short stay afterward at a rehabilitation center, at the same time that she was caring at home for his father, who had cancer.

Genworth provided information on rehab centers, pinpointing the closest one to his parents’ home, and also in-home health-care providers.

“I only had to make about five phone calls instead of 100 phone calls,” Mr. Cummins says. “I would have had no idea where to start. It was overwhelming.”

Home Instead Senior Care, for its part, is trying to help caregivers—both its own 70,000 paid workers and the public—better meet the needs of people with Alzheimer’s.

“Rather than trying to force Alzheimer’s patients to live in our world in the here and now,” Home Instead’s Mr. Huber says, “we need to meet them in the past.”

For example, one of Home Instead’s clients in Omaha, Neb., where it is based, had served in the military. To persuade him to take a bath—something Alzheimer’s patients often have an aversion to—his caregiver told him a general was coming for inspection and he needed to get ready. He immediately took a bath, Mr. Huber says.

Prolonging Time at Home

Such simple strategies, he adds, can help people with Alzheimer’s prolong their time at home as well.

By the end of this year, all of the company’s 600-plus franchised locations expect to offer Alzheimer’s training for caregivers. And in May, it plans to post an online course at the Help for Alzheimer’s Families website, which already has other resources.

These new programs come on top of free services offered by the U.S. Administration on Aging’s Eldercare Locator, which connects older adults and families to local agencies, and the nonprofit National Council on Aging’s BenefitsCheckUp site, which provides screening for more than 2,000 public and private programs.

More good news: The U.S. Tax Court ruled last year that in-home personal care can qualify as a deductible long-term-care expense if it is prescribed by a doctor for a person who meets the definition of “chronically ill.” Taxpayers generally can deduct such costs as medical expenses if they exceed 7.5% of their adjusted gross income.

—Email: familyvalue@wsj.com