I’m really grateful that the bishops decided to make a stand on their right to religious liberty because until they did that I did not know there was controversy and discussion going on all over the country on the rights of patients and the mergers of Catholic hospitals with other hospital and health care businesses:
What began in Sierra Vista, a town about 80 miles southeast of Tucson, as a quiet merger between the Sierra Vista Regional Health Center and the Catholic Carondelet Health Network has turned into a religious and ethical standoff over patients’ rights.
SEVERSON: What the merger means is that Sierra Vista, a rural, secular hospital, must now abide by the Catholic ethical and religious directives which prohibit certain procedures. So physicians can no longer do abortions, even when the mother’s life is in danger, and they can no longer perform sterilizations or provide contraception.DR. ROBERT HOLDER (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): I would say that the majority of the medical staff is not really happy with the fact that this is occurring and the way it came about. It was hard for us, thinking long term, how this was going to work out practically.
SEVERSON: Dr. Bruce Silva, another ob-gyn at Sierra Vista, says Catholic directives often go against health care decisions he and his patient think are best.
DR. BRUCE SILVA (Sierra Vista Regional Health Center): The person who makes that decision is not me and the woman. We can make that decision, but then it has to be okay’d by someone else who puts their belief systems and their ethics on me and on my patients, which I just don’t think is right.
SEVERSON: Right or wrong, the Catholic Church takes its directives very seriously. Last year, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix cracked down on this hospital, St. Joseph’s, after a doctor terminated the pregnancy of a mother who had developed pulmonary hypertension, which has a high mortality rate among pregnant women.
DR. HOLDER: It was not an either-or case. That baby was not going to survive because the mother was not going to survive, so the decision is that you let both die or you terminate the pregnancy so the mother can live, and to me that’s a no-brainer.
BISHOP THOMAS OLMSTED (speaking at Catholic Diocese of Phoenix December 21, 2010 Press Conference): In this case, the baby was healthy and there were no problems with the pregnancy. Rather, the mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St. Joseph’s medical staff and ethics committee decided that the healthy eleven-week-old baby should be directly killed.
REVEREND THOMAS WEINANDY (US Conference of Catholic Bishops): If you directly said the mother could not live unless we aborted the child then that would be contrary to Gospel values and the teaching of the church.
DR. HOLDER: We were advised to send that person 80 miles away to another hospital because there was a heartbeat, and that was a very difficult situation for me to manage.
DR. SILVA: Some people will define abortion if a baby has a heart rate, and you terminate that pregnancy—it’s an abortion. But there are times, for instance, with a pregnancy in the fallopian tube, where babies will have heart rates but that baby can’t survive there. It’s impossible. So there are some places where they do not allow you to terminate that baby. This is the real problem is that it’s defined differently by different bishops, who are the ones that decide how your hospital is going to run.
Sierra Vista Regional Health Center declined to be interviewed, but the circumstances here are not unique. Catholic hospitals have become the largest nonprofit health care provider in the US, with over 600 hospitals. This year, one in six patients will be cared for in a Catholic hospital.
SEVERSON: Sierra Vista’s new directives posed a very real problem for Jessica Graham, who was going to have her second baby by c-section at Sierra Vista and then get a tubal ligation, or have her tubes tied. She and her husband didn’t want any more children.
GRAHAM: So I said, can you tie my tubes while I’m in surgery for a c-section? And when I got pregnant that was the option and that was the plan. Then it changed during my pregnancy when they did the merger here.
SEVERSON: So Jessica was forced to have a second surgery in another city, which could have created problems.People get infected, people can get bowel injuries. You can have a reaction to the anesthetic that can kill people. People die from tubal ligations every year—now very, very, very rarely, but why undergo that risk?
REV. WEINANDY: The fact that they can’t get, receive sterilization or abortions at a Catholic health care facility is not a form of suffering at all. It’s a matter of fact that we are protecting them from evil things that could happen to them.
SEVERSON: Doctor Silva says his Sierra Vista patients can’t get the standard of care they deserve and that some simply can’t afford a second operation at another hospital. He says when he worked at a Catholic Hospital 20 years ago, tubal ligations were permitted.
SEVERSON: Another concern for the protesters outside Sierra Vista is what happens with their end-of-life wishes if the Catholic Church doesn’t agree with them.
DR. SILVA: They talk about the fact that all of your end-of-life wishes will be observed unless they go against Catholic teaching. The problem is what does that last line mean?
In Washington. In Illinois. In Kentucky.
Interesting that a live controversy over mergers between Catholic health care companies and secular health care companies gets absolutely no attention, while a rule change on birth control that offends and enrages church leaders causes a “firestorm”. This actual health care controversy is going on right under our noses, has the potential to affect millions of people, and yet all we hear are outraged church leaders and birth control.
This piece out of Seattle asks that we “re-examine the role of faith in health care delivery”, given that:
consolidations and mergers have resulted in a situation in which nearly 18 percent of all hospitals and 20 percent of all hospital beds in health systems nationwide are owned or controlled by the Catholic Church. In some isolated areas, the only hospitals available are Catholic-run. Non-Catholics are increasingly finding themselves in situations in which the only health care available is subject to care restrictions dictated by the Catholic hierarchy.
Now that the bishops started this fight, I’m sure they’ll be happy to include patients and the broader public in a much bigger and more inclusive discussion that includes the rights of patients. Let’s re-examine.
Southern Beale
And it’s even bigger than this. We have Evangelical church organizations like the Salvation Army operating soup kitchens, threatening to close up shop if the city wants to interfere with their anti-gay policies.
This is what those phony “libertarians” mean when they say churches should provide our social safety net, not government.
Jeff Boatright
If they want to play in the secular world, then they have to pay. Pay to play. Tax them if they bill patients, insurance companies, or the government. Tax them because they are a business, providing services for fees. Tax them because they make the same real estate deals as other property owners. Tax them because they make the same investments as other capital owners. Tax them for what they are: A large conglomeration of healthcare, property, and investment businesses.
Benjamin Franklin
You’re correct, Kay. The religious liberty issue being discussed is going to help, since patient rights will have to be part of the discussion. I say, create a blind trust for the religious hospitals, to assuage their delicate conscience.
Mark S.
I assume this bishop has a medical degree and examined the patient. He couldn’t possibly have been talking out of his ass, especially since there is a woman’s life at stake.
Oh, never mind, caring about the woman’s life is “contrary to Gospel values.” I’m sure they can cite the chapter and verse where Jesus says something like that.
Southern Beale
Do they get any government money? They shouldn’t get a penny. Starve the beast.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
I want to talk about this, too. Are advanced directives being followed? What does “unless it’s against Catholic teaching” mean?
States have been pushing advanced directives (living wills) for 20 years. What about that?
srv
Years ago, Austin turned over their hospital to one of these organizations and then the Bishop wrote the city council “we’re going to shut down the family planning/reproductive services”
Austin then had to spend north of $10M to move/operate those services.
This is old news.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
Where are the libertarians? Oh, that’s right. They’re Republicans.
Benjamin Franklin
@Kay:
Hospice, pulling the plug….do they transfer the terminally ill, as well?
How do they feel about the ‘Right to Die’. *rhetorical question alert
Davis X. Machina
It is possible to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to shelter the homeless, to clothe the naked, to visit and ransom the captive, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead — the corporal works of mercy — without forming health-care conglomerates.
No employees, no mandate. No mandate, no problem.
kay
@Southern Beale:
Notice, too, they were doing sterilizations 20 years ago, so this is new policy.
Yutsano
@Kay: But it’s not teh ebil federal gubmint oppressing you, so that makes it perfectly okay. Never mind the fact that their patron saint hated all religions with a passion.
@Southern Beale: Catholic hospitals accept both Medicare and Medicaid. They should therefore abide by the rules of those payment systems.
Monkey Business
Simple problem, simple solution.
Problem: church-affiliated heathcare providers will not allow for certain courses of treatment that disagree with their religious faith.
Solution: any healthcare provider that maintains tax exempt status or accepts local, state, or federal money in any form must provide patients with the full range of treatment options available to them, regardless of the views of the parent organization.
CarolDuhart2
Charles Darwin Memorial. Humanist Hospital. New Thought Sanitarium. Ecumenical Infirmary. It’s time to have at least one place where it’s all science-based or ecumenical for freedom of care.
BTW, one way to really test the bishops is say this: If the state or state-regulated entities pay to the hospital and it’s faith-based, it has to provide free care.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
It means that Catholic Bishop Death Panels are coming to a hospital near you. If you want to die they won’t let you, except if you need an abortion in order to live, then they’ll make sure you end up dead.
Everything the Right complains about is projection. Everything.
Chris
Yeah, I remember when the Pope came to DC last, he delivered a similar line when it came to academic freedom (the topic was about Catholic universities and whether they should or shouldn’t carry certain books in contradiction with church teachings). It was essentially “academic freedom is VERY important. But we can’t allow it to overrule Catholic teaching…” or something like that. It’s the same preaching in virtually every sphere: “we respect your conscience, except when we don’t want to.”
beltane
@Kay: I would assume this means that advanced directives will not be followed. Catholic teaching is quite explicit about the need to prolong the vestiges of life with all technological means necessary. If a patient wants his or her wishes respected, they should avoid being treated at a Catholic hospital.
kay
@Benjamin Franklin:
They have directives on all of it. More than 70 of them. I think end of life care is something people really care about, and would appreciate being informed on, if it’s somehow going to be handed down from on high.
They have to know this before they go in. They’re carefully writing these advanced directives under the assumption they mean something.
srv
Old 2001 article:
kay
@beltane:
They actually have directives, very specific, that were revised several times, the last time in 2011. They cover all health care issues.
I did not read them all, but that was the issue in Schiavo, so I would think people would be interested to know what the deal is.
The Other Chuck
It is time to go Henry VIII and nationalize the whole fucking church. How many divisions has the Pope?
Comrade Dread
@Mark S.: Nothing in the gospel, but all humans are conceived with original sin and are subject to damnation apart from the salvation that comes through Christ.
As I understand Catholic teachings, the only way to obtain salvation is through faith in Christ as demonstrated by keeping the sacraments, the first of which is to be baptized into the Catholic church.
Which is why they baptize as infants, it is extending God’s grace and salvation to the babies to ensure that their souls will go to heaven eventually.
So, given that theological underpinning, given a choice between a mother (who has presumably already been baptized) and an unborn infant (who is not and would presumably be damned if it died beforehand), they will choose the unborn infant.
Protestants who place a greater emphasis on salvation through faith and a personal decision have various theories about what happens to babies who pass away before they are able to make that decision. The theory I’m most familiar with is that they are extended grace until they are intellectually and morally aware enough to be able to comprehend the salvation message.
The Other Chuck
@Comrade Dread:
Yup. Before the whole notion of God became to me as quaint as unicorns and faeries, this was the fundamental evil that drove me away from the church. The whole notion of a God that condemns his creation to everlasting torment by default makes Satan, who just runs the place after it was given to him by said God, look like a fucking piker in comparison.
kdaug
What business does a Church have in running Hospitals?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
So, basically, once you enter a Catholic hospital, you become Catholic. Start telling that to all of the evangelicals. Talk about a straight up modern example of why Madison and Jefferson wanted the government and religion to not mingle, but they never thought about business and churches.
Chris
@Southern Beale:
We’re refighting the Civil Rights Act, in every possible way.
Fifty years ago is was hugely controversial that in addition to ending government-practiced segregation, the feds also wanted to make it illegal for businesses providing services to the public (restaurants, apartment buildings, any employers, etc) to discriminate racially, and a ton of people saw it as government overreach. Opponents of civil rights played up the shit out of that – among other things, it allowed the hardcore segregationists to reach out to other allies, e.g. people who were moderate or lukewarm on civil rights.
We’re seeing the same thing happening now with women’s rights and gay rights. Religious conservatives are realizing they’re just not going to be able to stop these things de jure, and they’re trying to protect their right to stop them de facto.
Brachiator
The Church is playing 12 dimensional chess, 14th century style. To find a way to enforce church dogma about birth control over both Catholics and non Catholics is a brilliant move. To get Tea Party Fanatics and the GOP mainstream to go along with this is even more amazing.
Have we seen Ron Paul and other libertarians explain how bowing to the strictures of a particular religion is compatible with individual liberty?
Al Qeda operatives must be bashing their heads into a table, now. “What, you mean all we had to do was buy some freakin’ hospitals in order to be able to impose Islamic law?”
@CarolDuhart2:
I don’t think this is any test at all. The bishops are essentially saying that religious dogma supercedes secular law.
The Other Chuck
@kdaug:
Knights Hospitallar, roughly 1200 AD? Long tradition.
It’s their prerogative, but if they’re not serving the health care needs of the community, perhaps they need to be broken up and sold off to someone who will.
The Moar You Know
I think removing tax exemptions for religious organizations is a needed step at this point in American history.
Donut
@Jeff Boatright:
Modifying (or at least taking a serious look at it) tax exempt status for religious non-profits is probably one of the better tacks that could be taken, though with a little more sophistication to the presentation of the argument (no offense intended to Jeff Boatright).
The most salient bit of this supposed fight is that if the Church or other large religious organizations don’t want to fight over it, then they should be open to an end to feeding at the trough of everyone else’s tax dollars, and/or pay taxes of some kind themselves – at least on certain activities.
Edith
I’m really glad you’re talking about this Kay. It’s been on my radar for awhile. There was an article in some medical journal a few years ago talking about the ethical issues doctors in Catholic hospitals face. I wish I could remember the name of the journal off the top of my head, but I’m at work and don’t have time to search for it.
For instance, in one hospital, doctors with pregnant patients with ectopic pregnancies were prohibited from even dicussing the possibility of using methotrexate versus removing the fallopian tube. They weren’t even being allowed to refer heir patients to another provider. The idea of fully informed patient consent is a cornerstone of modern medical ethics. This Catholic hospital was forcing its doctors to break professional ethics codes.
There was another doctor who worked at a non-Catholic hospital who felt the doctors at the Catholic hospital were breaking the law (EMTALA) by transferring unstable women experiencing miscarriages so that the women could get the D&Cs they needed.
The worst case was a second trimester miscarriage. The baby’s arm was sticking thorugh the cervix. The woman was weeks from viability, but because there was still a heartbeat, the hospital would not allow the D&E. The women developed sepsis with a fever of 110, and had DIC so bad she was bleeding from her eyeballs. They still wouldn’t approve the abortion, so the doctor deliberately snapped the umbilical cord during an exam so he could save her life. He then quit.
I know of one other case that was reported in SELF magazibne years ago, when these mergers first started happening. In that case, a very poor women went to an OB for care because the baby had stopped moving. There was no fetal heartbeat. He scheduled her for a D%E at the local hospital, not realizing the policies had changed since the merger. He was told to wait until she developed a fever because then her life would be in danger and it would be allowed. He ended up driving her to another hospital on his own time in order to protect her health.
It upsets me to no end that we have to let some busy-body pharmacist refuse to hand over a pill prescription because of their “deeply held beliefs”. What about doctors working at Catholic hospitals who have to violate strongly held beliefs about their responsibilities to their patients and professional ethics because their employer had their head up their ass. What about a conscience clause for them?
Benjamin Franklin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
middlewest
So I’ve been told over and over and over again by touchy-feely liberal “True Christians” that the religious war on science is nothing more than an extremist minority, and if atheists just shut up and stop criticizing religion, the “True Christians” will make all our problems go away.
Hmmm… It almost seems like “True Christians” are completely full of shit.
Angry Egilsson
Great post Kay.
This is yet another reason I am a former catholic, and not a current catholic.
What about the right of fundamentalist muslim institutions(or whatever religious entity) to deny benefits to women for healthcare, jobs, education, whatever? Is Mitch McConnell fighting for that too, or is this just a catholic law? How would you even craft this legislation so it’s not bigoted?
It’s ridiculous, and it amazes me republicans want this fight.
The Other Chuck
My deeply-held belief is that I should be allowed to burn the whole hierarchy of the church to the ground. Why am I being forbidden to express my beliefs?
aimai
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Heh. Start a rumor that if you give birth in a catholic hospital the automatically baptize your baby in the Catholic religion and if you die there they give you extreme unction whether you want it or not. The Evangelicals will break with the Catholic Church in a fetal heartbeat.
aimai
Nutella
This makes my hair stand on end:
So every ignoramus of a bishop makes medical decisions and forces doctors to follow them.
It’s un-American, to say the least. And a gross violation of the hippocratic oath for the doctors!
kdaug
@Yutsano:
According to doubting Thomas, so did Jesus himself.
swbarnes2
Isn’t the next step that Catholic hospitals refuse to treat women for a broad range of problems, on the grounds that they might be pregnant, and the treatment might cause an abortion?
When you are talking about a bunch of people who said “No, we really will let you die rather than give you an abortion”, the “no, they wouldn’t do that, that’s too much” arguement goes out the window.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Other Chuck:
To some degree our bitter Red/Blue cultural division here in the USA is the very distant echo of the partial and incomplete character of the English reformation. You can thank Hank for that.
Donut
@The Moar You Know:
Here is one problem (which just occurred to me, so apologies if someone else already pointed this out), but if there are a lot of mergers going on in the health care sector and Catholic hospitals and health care orgs are gobbling up competition, and with the Baby Boomers set to put a strain on the Medicare system in the next 20 years, this means the Church could end up being one of the biggest recipients of Medicare dollars (if they aren’t already … I don’t know, honestly, how much Medicare $ they already control). Kind of scary to think of that, because an awful lot more people are going to want to make end-of-life decisions that are counter to Church teachings. It’s sort of baked in the demographic. Jeeebus…
ETA – anyone out there with actual working knowledge of the health care sector who wants to chime in on this and correct assumptions, please do. I am pretty clueless about this stuff and one can’t rely on common sense alone.
aimai
@Edith:
I’d like to point out that patients, and by that I mean women, are very badly informed about why this is happening. I lurk on a board that is basically a mommy board of pregnant women. Tons of them–and I mean tons–have had miscarriages (and abortions but they never admit that). The ones who had miscarriages were routinely denied D and C’s and told they had to wait until their bodies expelled the dead fetus “naturally.” Sometimes more than two weeks would pass during which these women were carrying around the dead fetus and risking sepsis and death. They don’t seem to know that this isn’t actually a good idea, medically. Their doctors and hospitals are not telling them there is another choice and there may not be a choice. But they don’t know–you can tell because of the online discussions about miscarriages include lots of misinformation, people who have had D and C’s but who don’t know the term, people who have been denied them and thought there was a medical reason that it was not necessary to have the D and C.
aimai
General Stuck
There is a political undercurrent to this whole issue with the GOP braintrust, as well as with many rank and file goopers. At least the ones that can walk and chew gum at the same time. As the protestant gawdbotherers have long since accepted most birth control, this hyper aggressive effort to fight tooth and nail over this issue, is also grounded in demographics.
It’s the Pat Buchanan effect, and many of the base sense it, if not able to consciously articulate it, that anything that slows down white population growth, is another death knell for them electorally into the future.
While Richard Land the other day, admitted his flock does not have the same concerns with most birth control, they are with Catholics in the religious liberty battle, even though many evangelicals rate catholicism only a half peg above Mormons and Scientology.
Bunk. Land, like a lot of white wingnut leaders with a finger on the pulse of electoral demographics, is worried that too many white women are not producing enough white wingnut babies to keep up with minority increases in population. It is about power and control of the like minded, and per usual, you have to peel away the onion to get to what they are also up to.
The Other Chuck
@aimai:
Hell, you don’t need unfounded rumors: they’ve been known to steal the babies of unwed mothers and then claim the baby died shortly after birth. There is no crime the church won’t commit to perpetuate its power or exercise its warped sense of morality.
The Bobs
@beltane: Of course the entire time the person is being kept alive against their will they are being billed for some very expensive treatment.
geg6
@Kay:
Or if they refuse to call themselves that, they are still huge Ron Paul supporters. You know, Ron “Honest Rape” Paul, who is also a forced birther.
Fuck libertarians. Every single fucking one of their hypocritical asses.
Comrade Dread
@The Other Chuck: Which is why I’m not Catholic and lean more towards the Protestant belief I outlined that involves personal decision and culpability.
Of course, I’m currently struggling with the concept of hell as commonly defined because I find it difficult even accounting for personal choice that anyone would justly deserve eternal torment without reprieve or a chance for mercy.
I know some argue that personal choice is still involved at that stage and that the gates of hell are locked from the inside, but I can’t imagine anyone continuing to choose damnation after experiencing it.
Off topic, most denominations don’t believe that Satan runs hell, but that he’ll be cast there and subjected to the aforementioned eternal torment.
hueyplong
FWIW, my wife advises clients executing health care powers and directives that she can’t assure them their wishes will be respected if they end up in Catholic hospitals.
JC
Meddling religious old men, interfering in the freedom of choice of a patient and their doctor.
What the hell – and THIS is religious liberty?
Come on, media!! Wake up!!
The STORY is right there! The story is patients being DICTATED TO by old men with a crazy religious hang-up!!
THAT’S THE STORY!
beltane
@Edith: Those cases you described are barbaric to the point where they could almost be construed as attempted murder on the part of the hospital. They are the butchers of women, that is all.
geg6
@The Other Chuck:
Or, as I say to all my religious friends and relatives to their absolute shock that I’d say this aloud, god is an asshole and hardly worth talking to, let alone worshiping.
Benjamin Franklin
@Comrade Dread:
Here’s another conundrum for you. If the God of the Bible exercises perfect justice, how does one square a lifetime of sin against an eternity of punishment?
Scale fail……
trollhattan
Good gawd, Orrin Hatch (R, No Coke for You!) has doubled-down on Jon Kyle’s “not intended to be a factual statement” and upping it to 95% abortions for good measure.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/14/10407234-hatchs-not-so-factual-statement
Blimey.
slag
@Monkey Business:
Why do you hate them for their religious freedom? Terrorist.
Thank you for this post, kay, as this is a trend that we desperately need to reverse! In the meantime, I’ll just pray to Louis Pasteur that I don’t have a medical emergency while I’m stuck out in the sticks somewhere.
scav
@The Bobs: multi-tasking. They’re buying their way to their heaven using the bodies of others and making their current lives a little more heaven-like with the green stuff while they wait!
The Bobs
@aimai: “Sometimes more than two weeks would pass during which these women were carrying around the dead fetus and risking sepsis and death. ”
And I thought I couldn’t get any angrier about this.
pseudonymous in nc
@beltane:
i.e. ka-ching.
I’d like to know what the situation w/r/t end-of-life directives is in Canada’s Catholic hospitals under their single-payer healthcare.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
When a Catholic hospital system merges with a more secularized rival (or a rival system claimed by a different sect or religion), what determines whether the post-merger entity is “Catholic” or not? Is it a function of which system was larger, pre-merger (i.e. cuius regio, eius religio), or does a 1-drop rule apply in determining Catholicism?
We are going to need a Peace of Westphalia for the healthcare system before this is over.
WaterGirl
My only hope is that this turns the way the Komen situation did and the result will be a lot of rocks being turned over with a lot of ugliness beneath them that we all need to know about.
Note: I am so angry about this that I don’t care enough to fix the poor sentence construction. The nuns are probably turning over in their graves.
beltane
@swbarnes2: It would be preferable that they did not treat women at all than that they continue to treat women in a cruel and inhumane manner.
Yutsano
@trollhattan: Orrin is about to have his butt primaried in Utah. He needs to stat showing some wingnut bona fides. I wonder what the odds of getting the mayor of SLC to run against the winner of that primary are.
harlana
this…is not…what…church…is…supposed to be for
(headdesk)
Donut
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
S/he who has the money has the power. If the Church buys out the assets of a secular non-profit or for-profit, the assets transfer to the Church (I would think).
The Other Chuck
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
The Catholic hospital chains don’t do partial mergers. They take over the whole board and install the red beanie set.
kay
@Edith:
I saw that, where it goes back to the first wave of mergers in the 1990’s.
I had a bad delivery once. The birth, as they say “fell off a cliff”, with no warning and I had a perfectly normal delivery prior. I don’t think one knows how crazy that is until it happens, everyone freaking out and running around, it’s terrifying how fast it goes bad.
Everything came out fine in mine, but reading about that woman in the article my palms were starting to sweat. They wanted to move her EIGHTY MILES?
rikryah
once again Kay, you keep me informed about stuff that the MSM has no interest in. I wish you would forward this to Steve Benen at the Maddow BLog, and to Rachel Maddow herself. She, or Melissa Harris-Perry, are the only two I could see actually taking this on as a story.
Edith
aimai,
I know that a lot of women don’t know that they are receiving sub-standard care. That’s part of what makes me so angry. Full and informed consent is such a basic part of medical ethics these days. I wonder how is it that these hospitals don’t get sued. They are violating stnadrds of care produced by ACOG. They are violating basis medical ethics. The only explanation I can come up with is that women don’t know they are receiving sub-standard care. Me, I’ve had enough bad experiences with doctors that I always order my medical records, look things up on-line (reputable sites only), and get second opinions. Most people don’t know to do that.
Svensker
@kdaug:
Hon, are you serious? You may dislike the churches and the missions (like Salvation Army) but they are out there working with the poor, the sick and the indigent. And, mostly, they are non-profit. Many of the other hospitals are for profit, so good luck getting non-emergency treatment if you don’t have insurance or bucks.
You — or I — may disagree with how they organize themselves and what they believe, but they’ve been doing some heavy lifting in that area for years. You may want to replace them, but so far, I haven’t seen too many non-religious group setting up non-profit hospitals (or missions that care for street people, for that matter).
It’s not a perfect world. We don’t all agree on everything. How we decide to operate with the least amount of friction is what having a civil society is all about.
kdaug
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yup.
Not as bad as the Mormons, though.
They’ll baptize you after you’re dead. Posthumous Mormonism.
Ferd of the Nort
Sarah Palin was RIGHT!
Death Panels in Red Hats!
harlana
whatup? will the insurance company pay for the additional surgery (the tubal) which could have been done during the c-section, i wonder?
beltane
Just out of curiosity’s sake I wonder what the Muslim teaching on saving the life of a pregnant woman is. I believe that in Judaism, even of the most orthodox variety, the life of the mother always takes precedence over the life of the fetus. There does seem to be an unpleasant undercurrent in Catholicism which implies that a woman who is physically unable to carry to term is better off dead so that her husband can be free to marry someone of better breeding stock.
liberal
@Brachiator:
Libertarians believe that only governments can coerce.
harlana
btw, my hairdresser’s wife had a tubal and ended up getting pregnant anyway – because of that, insurance company would NOT pay for anything, prenatal, the delivery or otherwise. sooo, basically, they were punished for trying to do the right thing.
geg6
@Benjamin Franklin:
Believe me, there are NO benefits to being Catholic to begin with. Especially if you are female.
Villago Delenda Est
And every one of these bishops is an MD to boot, right? So they’re making an informed choice based on medical science and best practices, right?
Oh, wait. Lost my head there. Sorry.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Donut:
Oh, so there are practical limits to how much they can gobble up? Thank goodness the world of business and finance has never invented something like a leveraged buyout.
FlipYrWhig
This is very disturbing, and something I’ve heard very little about until now.
kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
I have to say, from a purely political view, NO ONE is going to like that doctor’s statement. NO ONE.
Which makes me wonder why the bishops picked this fight. They seem a tad vulnerable to me.
Amir Khalid
@beltane:
I am not an ulama, but I believe it’s the same as in Judaism.
Brachiator
@aimai:
Deja Vu all over again. Women, the poor, nonwhites. Always fair game for authoritarians.
It brings to mind again, the response of Carrie Buck, who had been sterilized “for her own good” because she was supposedly mentally unfit. I cannot add to her eloquence, so I leave her the last word.
trollhattan
@Yutsano:
Really? Is he considered RINO by the purity police now? The Overton window must be somewhere over the Pacific by now.
The Ancient Randonneur
While the effing mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging atavists were were worrying about the non-existent threat of sharia law in the US, the Roman Church was quietly taking over our healthcare system. They are the death panels.
Good grief, a bunch of old men in dresses and they don’t even put on a decent drag show. I was right to renounce that hideous cult 45 years ago.
FlipYrWhig
@beltane: When I just now was talking to my wife about the story, she speculated that the Church probably favored the fetus over the mother because there was still a chance it might turn out to be male, whereas the mother had already lost her chance at that.
Martin
Oh dear. Google is opening the door to human/frog marriage. Santorum is going to run with this.
geg6
@The Other Chuck:
Pretty much what they did to me, only they didn’t feel any need to lie about the baby dying. I was forced, against my will, into a Catholic home for unwed mothers where I was told that I would have the child, like it or not, and then give it up for adoption after giving birth in a Catholic hospital. I got no say in the matter whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada.
beltane
@Amir Khalid: Thank you, I suspected this was the case. If we had Islamic hospitals in this country I would prefer to be treated there instead of a Catholic hosptial.
Comrade Dread
@Benjamin Franklin: Which is essentially rephrasing what I said I was struggling with regarding the accepted traditional concept of hell.
patrick II
The rights enumerated in the constitution are the rights of an individual person. The rights of non-governmental institutions are derived from the rights of the individuals. Individuals who join those institutions may restrict their own rights voluntarily. When they decide to join a church and abstain from the use of contraceptives, or joint a gated community and not paint their house green, it is voluntary.
The exception to that is law, which we are compelled to follow.
To say that restricting the rules the Catholic Church may enforce on people non-voluntarily is an infringement on religious freedom is exactly backwards. Religious freedom belongs first to the individual, and the impingement of an individuals freedom by the church is as antithetical to religious freedom as a gated community forbidding green paint outside of it’s own voluntary community.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
You already know the answer to this. Only White Christian Property Owning Males are entitled to “individual liberty”. All others do not qualify, and therefore have no rights at all.
Fuck the serfs.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
You have freedom, the freedom to die.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Lordy, I’ll bet they also ignored St. Ronaldus’s 101st bday to double their crimes. The wingers who watch such things must be all aflutter.
Is there a ConservaGoogle yet?
Mark S.
@Edith:
I wonder the same. I imagine they settle these quickly and quietly. I don’t think many juries would go for their “woman as incubator” defense.
kdaug
@Comrade Dread:
If you believe in an immortal soul and life after death, don’t you also have to believe in life before birth?
ETA: And the resultant question – did your newborn soul come from Heaven, or from Hell?
Martin
@trollhattan:
Yep
Mike G
@Kay:
They’re defending the “freedom” of the hospital to do or not do whatever it wants. Because it’s a business, and it gets priority over an individual in liberpublicanism.
I’ve heard libertarians expound at length why abortion should be outlawed based on the “fetus’s individual rights” or somesuch.
What a cynical, sociopathic ideology – you just pick your favorite in every transaction and declare that your favored party should be allowed to do whatever they want no matter how much it screws over the other party — in the name of “freedom”.
Citizen_X
Can we start talking about the bishops imposing Catholic Sharia Law on patients now?
I mean, what’s the difference?
FlipYrWhig
@patrick II: Agreed, it turns the “free exercise of religion” completely on its head.
kay
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s the priest.
It’s just a bizarre and really chilling way to look at it. If the mother is tanking there are by definition “problems” with the pregnancy. I can’t imagine approaching maternity care like this, where ‘the mother” is somehow separate from “the pregnancy”.
The mother was dying. Other than that, the pregnancy was going great.
His words don’t change the physical reality of this situation. It’s abstract to the point of lunacy.
Martin
@Mike G:
Libertarianism does often seem to resemble Calvinball.
beltane
@Citizen_X: Sharia law seems to be far more humane when it comes to maternal health, that’s the difference.
Martin
@Citizen_X:
Well, one is a bit darker than the other.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
@Comrade Dread: It was the unrelenting sadism inherent in religion that put me off of it as a child. I could not imagine back then that anyone could be so cruel as to just shove someone in the oven and “walk on by”, as Saint Nooners of the Immaculate Martini would say.
I’m much older now, and know that most of my fellow humans are not only capable of such acts but would enjoy them. Still doesn’t mean that I subscribe to such bullshit.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
You’re not the only one — Rob Bell basically got run out of his church for proposing the idea that it’s impossible for both a loving God and Hell to exist, so there must not be a Hell. Theologically, of course, he’s right — there’s virtually nothing in the Bible to support the idea of Hell as a place of eternal punishment. But obviously it’s not what the fundies wanted to hear.
scav
@Martin:
Less and less, if we include the pesky laity. Growth areas are Africa and possibly Asia and there’s still a large base in Latin America. Dear Dear Dear.
Mnemosyne
@kay:
Don’t forget, these are the same people who say that if you have the opportunity to save one of a pair of conjoined twins by separating them, it’s immoral to do the operation and both should die instead, because you’re not allowed to decide that one person’s life is more important than the other.
Kyle
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
In the case of Catholic Healthcare West (changing their name to ‘Dignity Health’), they are moving to a non-Catholic ownership structure. The member hospitals will keep their religious affiliation as-is (Catholic or non-Catholic), with the non-Catholic ones adhering to a ‘statement of common values’ which AFAIK will not impose Catholic restrictions on medical procedures.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
When a brown to black man becomes Pope, all Hell will break loose.
Culture of Truth
“First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.”
SenyorDave
@FlipYrWhig: My dad grew up in NYC, and lived in a very Catholic neighborhood (we’re Jewish). He told me that many of the Catholic women would go to Jewish hospitals to have their babies, because they knew if there was a problem in a Catholic hospital, they would always try to save the baby’s life even if it would kill the woman. And that included cases where there was no realistic chance of the baby surviving. I suspect things haven’t changed much in that regard.
jibeaux
You know, I always wondered when they ask you on emergency forms what your preferred hospital is, why you’d put something other than “closest”. Now I know. I feel very grateful that Catholic hospitals are not the norm here.
Benjamin Franklin
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly. But how do you get people to follow the precepts without that fear?
Well. they could inspire the laity to serve God out of love, but that seems
too extreme.
beltane
The bishops are really doubling-down on this. Today, the bishop of Sioux City proclaimed that Christians (not just Catholics) need to oppose birth control “violently”. Can’t we please, for once, be like the Europeans and treat these assholes like the irrelevant freaks they are? Their only authority is moral authority and the only way they retain moral authority is if we cede it to them. The choice is ours, not theirs.
muddy
@aimai: Besides the risks of sepsis, it is a terrible thing psychologically for someone to continue to carry a failed pregnancy. I knew a woman whose baby died and they made her wait for days. She just was expected to hang out with what was essentially the corpse of her child inside her . It was sick.
Martin
@beltane:
They think the GOP has their back:
kay
@Kyle:
Which is great and a nice compromise, but why then is compromise forbidden in the case of birth control and the health care law?
Why are we always hearing about how “money is fungible” when it’s convenient? Is money no longer fungible? I always thought it was a nonsense argument, so I’d be thrilled if that were true.
If a legal partition is okay for a merger, then a legal wall or partition should be okay in all cases. Either that, or some Dignity money is migrating over the Catholic hospital.
Villago Delenda Est
@beltane:
These assholes seem to be insistent on creating an anti-clerical backlash along the lines of late 18th century France.
Bring it, boy buggerers. Bring it.
Nutella
@Svensker:
And if a few women, or even a few thousand women, are murdered by these fine institutions that’s no big deal. It’s not a perfect world, hon. Let Svensker explain it to you.
Using a patronizing diminutive while sneering at people for caring about women’s health care? Nice.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: Well, the USian Evangels will certainly not be flocking so eagerly in support of the papal banner at that point, that’s for sure. The red behatted ones might be so busy juggling their manpower shortage they’ll have other things on their mind. (remmberz, that’s why they had to keep the differently sexually expressed ones so desperately, a mighty bulwark I guess against the differently melanined and differently gendered.)
What is up with the calls for disobedience to both military and civil authorities?
kdaug
@beltane:
I’ve made my choice.
Mark S.
@beltane:
Here’s one better:
They of course invoked the Holocaust and Martin Luther King. As Jesus said, “No greater love than this, to lay down your life for a sperm cell.”
trollhattan
@Martin:
Zounds, and here I thought I was making teh funneh.
Na-gah sign up, but if I did my first word search would be “santorum.”
Lori
Add to that what the Catholic-run hospitals do to pensions. Unlike regular businesses, religious hospitals are not required to buy insurance for their pensions. So they don’t. (Yeah, re-read that: THEY DON’T INSURE THEIR PENSIONS.) So the huge number of nurses, nurses aides, janitors, technicians, etc. that work for the hospitals and *think* they have a secure pension for their retirement are actually at severe financial risk. Non-religious businesses with pensions are required to insure them through the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp: http://www.pbgc.gov/
gelfling545
@kdaug: “The Church” as such, does not. Many hospitals, before health care got where it is now, were started by religious orders (largely of women) as a charity and were largely staffed by the members of these orders. Since the religious orders are considered (and consider themselves to be)under the authority of the Church, its directives are law even though the actual delivery of health care is something that was never dreamed of in the early days and involves the receipt of government payments instead of complete reliance on private charity. It is, in effect, a survival from another age under a modern facade.
Martin
@trollhattan: Let’s just consider that a rider to Rule 34.
aimai
@Svensker:
YOu haven’t seen many non religious groups serving the poor? What about Planned Parenthood? And Catholic “Non Profits” don’t serve the poor without payment–the non profit part refers to their tax and compensation structure at the top level, not their payment structure at the bottom. You are as liable for your bill at a Catholic hospital as you are with the dirty jews treating you (sarc). the Shriners, on the other hand, really do work for free.
aimai
daverave
A few years ago when I was fighting against the Catholic hospital down the street from me that was tearing down a semi-historic residential neighborhood in order to expand, I became quite familiar with their hypocritical mindset. This hospital was part of “non-profit” Catholic Healthcare West. CHW has just this month become non-catholic (but still “non-profit”)and changed their name to Dignity Health so that they could start merging with non-catholic hospitals. Did you know that despite being non-profit, CHW, like many catholic hospital systems, often banks around a Billion dollars per year in what they call revenues over expenses (what everyone else calls “profit”)? How does that make them a tax-free non-profit?
At the time I was looking into it, CHW had over 5 Billion bucks in the bank earning interest income and paid its CEO over $5 million per year and most high end admins at least a cool million. I’m convinced that the reason they have abandoned their Catholic roots is because the secular management team was beginning to look bad with their Team 1% Greed in a hospital system that was started by pious nuns offering free care to indigents. Now the Greed Gates have been opened and they can pay themselves what they have always deserved!
kdaug
@gelfling545:
As @The Other Chuck: said,
Leeches and prayers.
Worked well in the Black Plague.
Can we move on now?
WaterGirl
@geg6: I think you shared that with us one other time, too. My immediate response has been the same both times, anger and tears. What happened to you is just so wrong, I don’t even have words. Just a sense of impotent outrage and tears.
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne: I’ll have to check his book out.
My primary struggle isn’t reconciling a God who is love with hell. I mean, John 3:16 pretty much does that, God loves the world so much that he sent his son to bear our punishment so we didn’t have to die and go there.
My main struggle is reconciling a perfectly just God with the idea of hell, because I have a difficult time conceiving how it would be just to assign eternal and unending torment day after day without satisfaction for the sins most of us are guilty of.
Rafer Janders
DR. SILVA: They talk about the fact that all of your end-of-life wishes will be observed unless they go against Catholic teaching. The problem is what does that last line mean?
It means that we’ll do what the patient wants, unless we’d rather do something else, in which case we’ll do what we want.
So, technically, when we say “all” of your end-of-life wishes will be observed, we really mean “some.” The ones we’re OK with. Not the ones you’re necessarily OK with.
lou
@Svensker:
Well, there was Acorn. But Briebart, O’Keefe and friends certainly got rid of that. And they’re working really hard on Planned Parenthood.
There are also groups like Heifer International, Partners in Health, Doctors without Borders, to name some that I support.
Benjamin Franklin
@Comrade Dread:
You are obviously a person of conscience. It wasn’t my intention to belittle your dilemma.
Martin
@daverave:
They’re not a non-profit. They’re a not-for-profit. Slightly different. But the point of a not-for-profit isn’t to zero their books at the end of the fiscal year, but to not return money to shareholders, and any extra money goes into what is usually the equivalent of an endowment fund.
Insurance companies are required to carry likely future obligations on their balance sheets – called statutory reserves. That allows them to retain premium payments and savings to offset those future expenses. It’s what allows insurance companies to not routinely go bankrupt every time bad shit happens (though they do occasionally find themselves facing greater obligations than planned – Katrina, as an example). Hospitals can do the same under the same principles. If they are providing care and know that a certain amount of care will never be repaid, they have to carry that expected obligation, and they need to have a fund reserve in order to cover those costs. Further, because capital expansion is either impossible or really damn expensive without use of reserve funds, they’re allowed to retain funds for planned capital expansion – such as building a new hospital or replacing equipment, etc. To a decent degree all of this is documented on their balance sheets, so they can’t exactly just run a giant slush fund.
Not a defense of the excessive salary, though.
gelfling545
@Villago Delenda Est: I do wonder if this is their last gasp as other than a marginal influence or a quaint tradition. I wonder how many of the “simple faithful” will look at this, following on the heels of the hideous scandals & decide that enough is enough.
Comrade Dread
@Benjamin Franklin: No worries, I didn’t take it as such.
Besides, I post comments on the internet. I have a very thick skin. :)
Brachiator
@kdaug:
leeches can sometimes be useful, in a pinch. Prayers, not so much.
@gelfling545:
If the GOP wins the White House, or does very well with Congress in November, it might be more than a last gasp, unfortunately.
Emma
@SenyorDave: I was just speaking yesterday to someone my own age who was told this when she was about to have her first child thirty odd years ago. The person who urged her to go to Jewish doctors? A nun.
Jrod
Hey Catholics, care to defend this one? Let’s hear your excuses for why you just have to keep supporting and tithing to a church that pulls this shit? Explain to us heathens how, as bad and corrupt as this is, you still have to remain with the church because… what? You can’t just find another church that isn’t forged of pure evil because… why?
Seriously, let’s hear it. I could use a decent laugh after reading this deeply depressing post.
flukebucket
I always get a kick out of the guys who explain hell by saying that even though God is loving and merciful He also has to be a just God. And then go on to explain to you that in order to be just He has to torture you forever and ever because you didn’t accept the free gift of salvation.
What the hell kind of just is that?
And they will say, His ways are not our ways and I will say no shit Sherlock.
Jrod
@Svensker: Yes, the decent laity have done the heavy lifting of working with the poor. And the old guys in funny hats co-opted that work so they could push their medieval agenda on as much of the country as they can manage.
By your standards, the man who rapes children and works to keep women as breeding chattel is A-ok just as long as he gives some money to charity. You know, literally, those seem to be your standards.
I think those standards are horseshit.
Churchlady320
Oh, never mind, caring about the woman’s life is “contrary to Gospel values.” I’m sure they can cite the chapter and verse where Jesus says something like that.
Oh no – Jesus never said one word against the value of women. Quiet the contrary to that “contrary”! Same with gay rights, etc. – his entire message was to change the focus on “tribal religion” of punishment and exclusion. That is what made him so dangerous to the powerful of his time. So when the zealots appropriate the Bible, make ’em cite chapter and verse because their silence is the BEST indictment of their foolish certainty you can get.
Mark S.
@flukebucket:
He’s an all-loving god in a Ministry of Love type of way.
Donut
@kay:
My wife had preeclampsyia with our first kid, so that’s pre-hypertension. The little girl was breech to begin with, so we already had a c-section scheduled. But then we went to the last regularly scheduled check-up, and the OBGYN frowned upon taking my wife’s blood pressure. She said, “let’s check it again when we are done and you’re a little more relaxed.” Twenty minutes later, still too high. We were told in no uncertain terms to immediately head to the OB emergency triage to have my wife admitted for observation. No. Fucking. Around. You don’t mess with that condition – and again, my wife was pre-high blood pressure. My wife went into labor shortly after we got there, probably from the stress. Transporting a woman who is full term 80 miles is freaking insane. That could easily kill both mom and baby.
Jay in Oregon
Here’s a clue that you may be on the wrong side of an issue; if Chuck Colson (of the “Watergate Seven”) is arguing your case for you—and lying his ass off in the doing—then you need to check your assumptions.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/14/charles-colson-still-repeating-a-lie-he-knows-is-a-lie/
geg6
@WaterGirl:
It is wrong, but I wasn’t alone in that boat. I often wonder exactly how many young women were held there at Rosalia Home. How many of them, like me, were there because they wanted an abortion and were stupid enough to tell family members that and how many wanted those children but were forced to give them up?
Either way, it’s a horrid thing. I think about it all the time now that this garbage with the Church is in the news. It’s not as if I want to meet the child (who would be 35 now), because I really don’t. But I may never get over all the suppressed rage created by the six months I spent there. When I was treated for depression a few years ago, my psychologist said she didn’t blame me for still being pissed after all these years and that it was healthier to be vocally pissed about it than to just forget about it as so many people seem to think I should.
Comrade Dread
@Jrod: I don’t think that was remotely what they were saying.
They were saying that it’s better that those charitable or health institutions exist (regardless of their flaws) than if they didn’t exist, and while it would be great to institute some reforms, it is still a net positive that the institutions do exist and alleviate some pain and suffering in the world.
Interrobang
As far as I know, although there are Catholic hospitals here in Canada, they’re required to provide the same standard of care as everyone else. If there are services they will not provide (and at least in my city, this is normal; sometimes you go to the Catholic hospital, sometimes the university hospital, and sometimes the other hospital, and it seems to be kind of random as to which you might end up at), you just wind up at another facility.
In my hometown, there are University, St. Joseph’s, and Victoria hospitals. (Guess which one is the Catholic hospital?) I’m pretty sure they have a well-established division of labour, such that any crisis pregnancy case probably goes either to University (the teaching hospital) or Victoria (where there’s a NICU and a large children’s hospital).
Since they’re all under the same umbrella service provider anyway, it really doesn’t matter. Locally we don’t have any Jewish hospitals (not enough Jews here, I guess), but I’m guessing the situation is about the same in places like Toronto, where they do.
My GP just sent me on a referral to a long-term care centre affiliated with the Catholic hospital, but she’s also had no problems talking with me about birth control and maybe (voluntary) sterilisation, so I really don’t know.
That said, access to services outside of the populous provinces (and especially in the Maritimes) is absolutely atrocious, likely to be religiously-biased, and needs to be stamped on. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA as if the Harper Misgovernment would ever do that! I kill myself!*)
________
* Unlike the Harperoids, who’d happily have a theocrat do it for me.
cmorenc
@beltane:
What happens if a patient in terminal decline winds up being taken to a Catholic hospital (or one with similar prolong-life-no-matter-what policies) due to some acute incident, and upon discovering that the facility/doctors at that facility are refusing to honor the patient’s health care directives, wants to transfer to another hospital that presumably will honor them? What if instead of the comatose patient directly, the request is made by a person whom the patient clearly (while competent and lucid) gave health care power of attorney to?
I worry about this because there’s a significant probability that sooner or later, I could potentially be faced with this regarding my 90-year old mother who is currently still reasonably healthy for a woman that age, but is nonetheless clearly and progressively declining into ever-increasing frailty, both mentally and physically. I have health-care power of attorney for her and she’s made a directive explicitly stating she doesn’t want heroic efforts to keep her alive etc, and I have confidence her current primary care doc would honor that, but nevertheless I’m not sure if there’s an acute incident at the managed-care facility she’s living at whether she’d be taken to a hospital he practices at, or whether he’d be her physician-in-charge at wherever she might be taken (if something happened, she’d likely be immediately taken by ambulance and already at whatever hospital before I got the call from the facility).
seandr
If the church intervention results in substandard medical care, it seems to me they have opened themselves up to malpractice lawsuits.
Jrod
@Comrade Dread: I think charities and hospitals would exist without the Catholic church. You know, because of the many non-Catholic charities and hospitals that exist.
In fact, the issue here is that non-Catholic hospitals, which were presumably doing a fine job without the divine blessing of the Pope, are being forcibly turned into Catholic hospitals, apparently for the sole purpose of winnowing down a sinful woman’s options when it comes to her own body. Why the fuck should anything think of this as a good thing? Why the fuck should anyone support this?
It seems to me the actions of the church here are not doing a goddam thing to decrease suffering; quite the opposite. They are actively and deliberately increasing the suffering in the world. That is today’s Catholic church. Fuck the excuses. Facts are facts.
daverave
@Martin:
Thanks Martin for the explanation. I figured that any expansion costs would have to come out of those funds but didn’t know about the statutory reserve aspect. Several billion should cover that adequately.
WaterGirl
@geg6: Count me as solidly in your corner. I don’t see how anyone could just forget about it, and I don’t see how any caring person with a conscience could tell you that you should.
You seem remarkably sane and whole, to me, so at least they didn’t break your spirit. I can see how all this recent news could drudge all of that up again.
I suspect I could learn to live with the terrible thing that was done, no doubt in the name of god, by the people who imprisoned you against your will. But the family that put me there, I don’t know that I could ever get over that.
And now I am back where I started, except that the anger seems to be winning out over the tears. What they did to you is just so wrong.
IrishGirl
@Kay: Ya know every Libertarian I’ve talked to in the last 5 years have all been Republicans in Libertarian clothing….what the hell happened?!
IrishGirl
@Donut: I was pre-hypertension too in both of my pregnancies. In my first I had placenta previa…I told my husband at the time, that under no circumstances am I to be taken to a Catholic Hospital.
Here’s another gem of a Catholic Hospital nightmare…I know a Catholic family that has 6 kids, all at a local Catholic Hospital. After the last one, they left a sponge inside of her that caused very serious infection and took a very long time and lots of money to heal (including another surgery to take the darn thing out). The family did not sue the Hospital because….yes, you guessed it…..they couldn’t do that to a Catholic Hospital. These kinds of people are runner ups in the Darwin Awards contest in my book.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Sounds like an interesting book. Thanks for the ref.
No clear reference to Heaven, either, if you consider both the Old and New Testaments. But then again, the fundies (and many others) would not want to hear that, either.
MCA
Wow. Thanks, Kay, for posting this.
When my wife was pregnant with our daughter 7+ years ago, she had a heterotopic pregnancy (exceedingly rare, it’s one normal, uterine pregnancy with an ectopic twin). Not surprisingly, it wasn’t noticed in ultrasounds, etc., and the discomfort she experienced was chalked up to other, more usual suspects. One day, at about 12 weeks, she semi-collapsed in pain and managed to drive her self to the hospital in agony. Eventually, they found the ectopic, about an hour before it would have ruptured her fallopian tube. We and our doctors were faced with the choice of doing as non-invasive a termination of that ectopic pregnancy as possible, with a 70/30 chance of saving the uterine pregnancy but possible complications, or terminating both in more traditional manner. Fortunately, today I have both a wife and a daughter. My wife was a minor celebrity around the hospital for a few days after they terminated the ectopic, with a constant parade of med students stopping up to check out the charts of such a rare case.
What I took out of the story Kay posted is this: had we either lived or been travelling in an area where a Catholic hospital was the closest option in an emergency in early April 2004, I would today have neither a wife nor a child, because they would have intentionally allowed her fallopian tube to burst, killing both of them.
Well, fuck that. 501(c)(3) status is a privilege, not a right. You want to receive it when entering the world of provision of health services, receiving payment from Medicare and Medicaid, and being in a decisionmaking nexus with the health and life decisions of private citizens, then you need to provide the services they demand. Fuck your conscience. If you didn’t want to confront some of these religious objections to various treatments, you shouldn’t have gotten into the game in the first place. Medicine care has nothing to do with religion.
I can acknowledge there’s a place in society for a religious institution to minister to the people through medical services. But when they enter the complex world of running open to the public, full-service hospitals, and accepting private and public insurance and aid to pay for those services, they’ve crossed an indelible line into the world of public policy and commerce.
batgirl
@Edith:
I found this abstract in PubMed.
It is scary. My mom begged my sister-in-law, who is Catholic, not to use a Catholic hospital for her pregnancies, that the hospital would put the life of her fetus over and above hers and she just laughed at her “crazy mother-in-law.” Her mother-in-law isn’t so crazy I’d say.
Mayken
@The Moar You Know: Yes! This!
Mayken
@Edith: That’s a very good point! Why is it ok for the Catholic church to force doctor’s to violate their deeply held ethical beliefs about patient care for, ya know, actual real live patients. But it’s not ok to hurt the fee-fees of the bishops? With whom most of their so-called flock disagrees I might add.
kdaug
@MCA:
Believe whatever you want. Just leave me and mine out of it.
RalfW
I’ll say it here and anywhere, my religious liberty as a Unitarian Universalist is being trampled every freakin’ day:
I can’t marry my partner in Minnesota in my own church (yes, we can have the service, but the minister can’t legally sign the papers he can sign for the straight couples in our congregation).
If I were in an accident anywhere these 600 hospitals operate, I better not end up at one. I want the plug pulled if I’m in a persistent vegitative state. But a la Terry Schaivo, I suppose there’s now 600 hospitals where that’s a no-no. Even though in my faith tradition, ending the suffering for me and my beloveds is an appropriate and moral goal of pulling the plug.
These f-wads think that their religion is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. But there’s about 5.65 billion people on this earth that would like to differ. But to crap with their liberty, eh?
Edith
Hi Batgirl,
That link is similar to the one that I read, but it isn’t the same one. My apologies, I’m not very good with HTML, so I can’t post the link, but I found the article on PubMed. It’s called “When There’s a Heartbeat: Miscarriage Management in CAtholic-Owned Hospitals”. It was published in the American Journal of Public Health,Oct. 2008. The full article is free on Pubmed if anyone wants to read it.
batgirl
The Catholic Church imposing its religious beliefs on large parts of the US population, whether they are employees or medical patients, is not religious liberty but a denial of the religious liberty of their employees and patients.
batgirl
@Edith:
Anyone who wants to read the article Edith mentions, click here.
Thanks Edith
Another Halocene Human
REV. WEINANDY: The fact that they can’t get, receive sterilization or abortions at a Catholic health care facility is not a form of suffering at all. It’s a matter of fact that we are protecting them from evil things that could happen to them.
Somebody punch this guy in the dick. Pref., the husband of a woman who’s died because of pronouncements by dipshits like him.
This is even worse than those home birth nazis. At least those people are genuinely ignorant and deluded. This guy just likes to roll the dice on women’s lives because I guess they’re dolls and not real people.
Edith
and I re-read it and realized I’d mixed up some of the details (in the interest of full disclosure). The stories are all pretty horrifying though. The ectopic pregnancy thing I must have read elsewhere.
RalfW
Oh, and I’ve hear from a reliable source that Catholic priests in training, doing their hospital chaplaincy, can’t even visit the wing of a public (ie: non-Catholic) hospital that provides abortion (even if the hospital only performs emergency abortions to save the life of the mother) because they cannot be seen to have possibly, incidentally, and while doing their rotation talked to a woman who had an abortion.
Those women are to be shunned, avoided and treated as if radioactive.
From what I understand, in the very near future, no Catholic priests in training will even be allowed to do their chaplaincy at any hospital that performs even one abortion annually.
They want total separation from it. It is cult behavior to be that afraid to be in the same building where abortion might happen. They cannot possibly let a young, impressionable trainee have compassion for a woman and family in crisis such as have been described above of ectopic pregnancy, etc.
Nope. Turn away. Never see that women (and babies) actually die because of their cultish obsessions.
I don’t like to Catholic-bash, many in the pews are decent, loving people. But their leaders are really around the bend. And trying to take us with them.
Another Halocene Human
@Kay:
Or just looking the other way. Swing a dead cat in a libertarian convention and you’ll hit enough atheists for a minyan, but since you won’t hit that many with ladybits and they’re all too young to be worrying about end of life directives, I think you’ll hit a whole lotta “meh”. FYIGM, and all that jazz.
Another Halocene Human
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Q.F.M-F.T.
Another Halocene Human
@The Moar You Know:
Amen.
Svensker
@Nutella:
Oh, bugger off. I’m a woman and I’m pissing mad about all this crap. Fuck the bishops. I want their pencil noses out of my crotch, thanks very much. And my position on the Catholic Church at this point is that there are some inspiring Catholic thinkers (Aquinas, anyone?), and that there are thousands of Catholic laity and non-laity who have done wonderful work over the years and who still are, but that the organization itself is corrupted and sick and needs to get the fuck out of everyone else’s business until they get their own very sick shit together.
That said, some people are saying (which is what I responded to): who needs religious hospitals? And I’m pointing out that religious organizations that hold ideas that many of us don’t like at all, also fill a large gap in social services for the poor. So wishing them away without something to replace them is just dumb, cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The problem we have is that in a civil society with a mix of secular and religious providers of important services, we need to find a way to work together. I’m hoping that can be done.
Edith
I also found the study with the information about ectopic pregnancies. http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/ibis_rh_-_nwlc_qualitative_study_report.pdf
Another Halocene Human
@rikryah: I wonder if Science-Based Medicine would talk about this, or if it’s too “controversial”.
They’ve taken on all sorts of loons, but the RCC is a beast of a different color.
The issue of standard of care is very, very important, however.
Svensker
@aimai:
I realize that “non-profit” doesn’t mean no money. And, of course, there are non-religious groups who do lots of stuff. But religious organizations really do provide a fuck ton of services to the poor. In my neighborhood in sockalist Toronto there’s a Sally Ann, a Yonge Street Mission (similar in theology to Sal. Ann), and a Korean Methodist, a gay Anglican, and a who-knows-what Baptist church that provide housing, meals and job training to the street people here. If there are any secular groups operating, I don’t see them.
The Mt. Sinai Jewish Hospital is considered the best in the city — but since we have single payer, we don’t have to worry about theological problems.
The Catholics operated a “non-profit” hospital in NYC until last year (or maybe the year before), but it finally closed and was going to be condos, but who knows now. It was the last hospital in the city where they would treat you on a non-emergency basis whether or not you had the funds.
Another Halocene Human
@Svensker:
Sure. But as soon as they accept gov’t grants, they have to accept gov’t rules.
SA never had a problem with affirmative action, but they still wanna hate on teh gheyz. Too bad, they don’t get a dime of my money any more, not even in their stores.
Svensker
@Jrod:
Um, geez, I seem to have written something I didn’t mean to write. Where is everyone getting this? My writing fail, obviously.
No, those are not my standards.
Mayken
@slag: Yeah, this is why there are parts of the country to which I will not travel. That and being bi-racial and having a child who is not white keep me out of a very large swath of this country. It bugs the crap out of me not to feel free to travel in my own country because of the color of my skin and the fact I have lady parts. Sigh!
kdaug
@Svensker:
Wasn’t “some people”. It was me.
Didn’t respond because I wasn’t sure if “Hon” was as in “Your Honor”, or a diminutive phrase.
You just answered that.
Aquinas, Galileo, Brache, Segan… who’s counting?
Another Halocene Human
@muddy: Miscarriage libel! You know only elective abortions cause psychological trauma!
Mayken
@pseudonymous in nc: Not for nothing but most US Catholic hospitals are run pretty close to the bone financially so I don’t really think they are making buckets over prolonging life. OTOH if their delicate little fee-fees won’t allow them to oblige people’s wishes, then they should give the end-of-life care for free if the patient has an advance directive.
Also, too, they should never charge any woman of child bearing age for any “care” involving her reproductive health.
Another Halocene Human
@Jrod:
According to RCC doctrine, suffering on earth gets their evil popes into heaven sooner.
Another Halocene Human
@Svensker: Svensker, what we’re saying is, that’s fine and they’re free to do that, but why are we subsidizing them?
makewi
Damn those Catholics for building successful hospitals. Meddlers.
swbarnes2
I think in the end, the Catholic church’s, and a lot of other conservative’s thinking on the matter can really be summed up as “You have sex, you deserve what you get”. Die from an ectopic pregnancy, die from cervical cancer, it’s what women who have sex deserve.
It’s not hard to explain why a bunch of celibate bishops think this, it’s a little harder to explain why other conservatives do. I think conservatives don’t think that people other than themselves deserve to breathe, let alone that they deserve health care, safe work environments, the right to vote, etc. If poor people do something slightly pleasurable, conservatives scream that it’s not allowed. They really think that sex is too good for everyone but them. That explains the women who take a day off from picketing the abortion clinic to get their own abortion…they weren’t breaking the rules by having sex, because they deserve sex, and they deserve not to have an unwanted pregnancy. Other people just don’t.
makewi
This is why it’s impossible to have a sane conversation with people on this blog. You go right to tourrets arguments thinking it’s normal.
kdaug
@makewi:
What the hell is a successful hospital?
makewi
@kdaug:
Which word are you having trouble with?
kdaug
@makewi: Which part of “Sell all of your possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow me” are you having trouble with?
makewi
@kdaug:
So you think that they just shouldn’t operate hospitals then? Or they should operate them but just not well? Interesting.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@makewi: If the hospitals are refusing necessary and life-saving care to women, then they are already not operating well. Do you think hospitals should get a pass on the whole saving lives bit just as long as some jackass in a funny hat said so? Because frankly, I won’t shed a tear if people who run hospitals like that are replaced with people who are more interested in saving lives than with perpetuating 7th century notions of procreation.
Are there any other businesses which should get a pass on doing their fucking jobs because some decrepit old kiddy-diddler likes to see people suffer? Like maybe the post office should burn the mail of anyone who’s known to GASP have sex that doesn’t lead to pregnancy? Maybe Wal-Mart should just beat their customers with 2x4s if they try to buy any book but the Bible (in Latin, naturally). Maybe pharmacists should refuse to dispense prescriptions for birth control? Oops, bad example.
@Svensker:
They are the standards of the Catholic church you love so well. They just are. That’s the the church stands for: women are chattel, and if they step out of that role they deserve to suffer and die. That is Catholic doctrine! The fact the you don’t think so doesn’t mean shit, because the Catholic church is not a democracy.
If you support the church, you support such ass-backwards primitive bullshit. Equivocate all you like, but you know it’s true.
kay
Makewi, I think people should be aware that a Bishop is making decisions regarding health care rather than a doctor.
People deserve to know that.
Your sentimentality and hurt feelings are NOT actually what’s important
here.
It isn’t 1956. They’re entering into these mergers because they cannot survive without them.
What that means for PATIENTS and the PUBLIC is important.
I would avoid a hospital where if a delivery goes terribly wrong they’re consulting the Bishop.
I can’t avoid it if I don’t know it’s going on.
makewi
@kay:
Catholic hospitals are not the only hospitals who have these sorts of policies relating to abortion. In fact, I suspect you know quite well that most hospitals have very restrictive policies regarding abortion. Your anti religious bias is showing in this instance.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@makewi: You think most hospitals prefer to let women die rather than to abort life-threatening pregnancies?
I’m calling bullshit. Let’s see a link to some proof.
Mnemosyne
@makewi:
Really? Most hospitals say that a life-threatening pregnancy can’t be terminated until the woman is running a fever to prove that the failed pregnancy has gone septic and caused a systemic infection? Most hospitals refuse to end an ectopic pregnancy until the fallopian tube has burst and the woman requires emergency surgery?
Name a few. Heck, name one.
Mnemosyne
Here’s how you can tell what’s really on makewi’s mind — she reads these two statements:
… and she thinks that the Bishop who never saw or examined the patient — a man who is not a medical professional of any kind — should be allowed to overrule the actual doctor on the scene who saved the patient’s life.
That’s the kind of irrationality we’re dealing with.
Mnemosyne
And since the Bishop seems a little confused about how human reproduction works, an 11-week-old fetus (medically, still an embryo) is not the same thing as an 11-week-old baby.
Svensker
@Baron Jrod of Keeblershire:
I don’t love the fucking Catholic Church. I’m a born and raised Protestant and the Catholic Church to me has always been “those weird guys in the funny outfits.”
I believe there are lots of things wrong with the Catholic Church and have been since the beginning. So what else is new? Large, powerful institutions tend to go off the rails, frequently and often spectacularly. The Church also has had some great thinkers and has performed and still performs some very good works. Doesn’t mean they’re not hella wrong right now.
But I still don’t see why I can’t recognize the good they do/have done while criticizing the wrong. Er, baby/bathwater, if you kwim.
kdaug
@makewi:
Yup.
Angry Egilsson
@makewi: Makewi, to what extent are tax-exempt organizations crowding out non-subsidized entities in a competitive economic environment?
Maybe they have an unfair advantage, which should be removed so real for-profit hospitals can use the miracle of free enterprise to their advantage?
Shouldn’t this be your concern?
Tehanu
I’m so angry reading this, I can’t even leave the comment I want to leave. Fuck these panty-sniffing child-raping bastards!
Some Loser
@Svensker: Lets expand on that bay/bathwater metaphor you hinted at!
You see, the Catholic Hospitals are the babies, and the Catholic Church is the bathwater. Catholic Hospitals are doing terrible, inhumane things, and the Catholic Church supports these horrible terrible things. So we are intentionally throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the problem is both the baby and the bathwater.
See, it is very easy to understand.