I’d like to bring this debate back to reality a little:
Jenky said the Catholic Church is under attack by the U.S. government….Thundered the prelate, “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.”
That’s a lot of accusations, but I’ve been looking into the current reality of Catholic health care systems in the US, so I’ll just say I have some questions on the one thing he mentioned and that’s health care. As I have noted here several times, the truth is that Catholic health care systems are merging with secular entities (both non-profit and for-profit) all over the country. These mergers raise big questions about access to reproductive health care, but they also should be mentioned within the political debate over the HHS rule on contraception and large employers because mergers are relevant to that debate.
To do that, I’ll show you two articles. One focuses on a wholly Catholic health care system merger and a change in for-profit/tax status, and the other focuses on a Catholic health care system/secular system merger and the concerns about limiting access to those health care services that are forbidden under the religious rules. Both of these issues are huge, right now, in the real world. You’d never know it from listening to the bishops.
This is the for-profit merger idea, where they’re merging and transforming a non-profit Catholic health care entity into a for-profit health care business. Does anything change re: the religious exemptions if we’re now talking about a for-profit hospital? Should the debate on this change?
The nation’s first for-profit Catholic health care venture could make an offer to acquire St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson as early as this week, a deal that could bring millions in tax payments to the cash-strapped city annually, a councilman said.
A for-profit Catholic health care system may make an offer to buy St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center this week that could add millions to city coffers. Ascension Health Care Network, a joint venture between the nation’s largest Catholic health care system and a private equity firm, is also negotiating with St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic and St. Clare’s Health System in Morris and Sussex counties for a potential network of seven hospitals The joint venture between the non-profit Ascension Health and Oak Hill Capital Partners is unique — it will retain each hospital’s Catholic mission while operating for profit. “These will be run as Catholic hospitals,” said Leo P. Brideau, president and chief executive officer for Ascension Health Care Network.
This is the other model, where they merge with a secular for-profit health care system, thereby imposing new rules on health care delivery and, presumably, employees (pdf):
Seventy-six times at Waterbury Hospital last year, women who gave birth via Caesarian section also underwent tubal ligation — otherwise known as having their tubes tied to prevent future pregnancies. Under the merger planned for the city’s two hospitals, those women would be required to undergo the C-section, get stitched up, recover, then visit a separate facility to undergo ligation surgery and recovery.
It’s an extra layer of risk, doctors say, but one that will be necessitated by the merger of Waterbury and Saint Mary’s hospitals with an outside, for-profit company — a deal both hospitals say is paramount to their continued existence. The goal is to build a state-of-the-art, 800,000-square-foot hospital, estimated to cost $400 million. When Texas-based LHP Hospital Group and Waterbury Hospital signed on with Saint Mary’s, they agreed to adhere to Ethical and Religious Directives outlined by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. These guidelines prohibit tubal ligations, abortions and other reproductive procedures. Advocacy groups say the compromises to women’s health go too far.”
Waterbury Hospital has been trying to think of creative ways to maintain all of its current services while also upholding Catholic standards. The hospital plans to ask for state approval to build a separate, “ambulatory” center near, but not inside, the new acute-care hospital. The center would offer tubal ligations, but not tubal ligations directly after a C-section. Abortions would also not be performed. Other, yet-to-determined services would also be provided at the ambulatory center.
On that, I have two questions for the bishops. First, how is it that they are willing to engage in elaborate negotiations and compromises with state and local governments to successfully complete these mergers, but they are unwilling, or, as they claim, unable to manage a HHS rule change? Second, I have been told for 20 years that money is fungible. No impure money or services may mix with or be touched by pure money and services, or something like that. The fungible nature of money seems very elastic and I haven’t really been able to pin down what it means. Why doesn’t that apply in these mergers? If they’re partnering with giant secular health care systems (and they are, in the second piece linked here, despite sentimental and outdated notions to the contrary) surely tainted money and/or benefit is getting past the legal barriers they’re setting up and into (or out of) the pure money coffers. “Fungible” seems endless when it’s used in the political arena, but not when it’s used in the real world, apparently.
These mergers are part of the reality of health care delivery in this country. What does all this mean to us, out here in the cheap seats, in light of the claim of a “right” to broad religious exemptions that was raised when the HHS rule changed? I don’t know, but I think this aspect should probably be discussed since the bishops brought it up and all.
Only the Facts
Speaking of healthcare, only a few days left until ObamaCare is struck the fuck down by SCOTUS.
The Conservative Five of the Supreme Court do what they want, when they want, how they want, and there’s nothing you little fucks can do about it.
Hunter Gathers
You assume that these pedophile enabling creeps actually give a shit. They don’t.
Ben Franklin
Slightly o/t, Kay. Forgive….
Does anyone have even a guestimate of the Vaticans Monolithic wealth?
If 501(c)(3) were inapplicable to their structure, I suspect the deficit would melt.
Kay
@Hunter Gathers:
Well, whether they do or don’t, I think they should have to at least stick to reality.
Ben Franklin
@Only the Facts:
The talk is only the mandate will be stricken……Huzzah !
Single-Payer triumphs.
Only the Facts
@Ben Franklin:
Just like the exit polls were 50/50 in Wisconsin? Right?
Even if the only the mandate is struck down it pretty much fucks the whole law.
And you’re never going to have single payer in this country. N E V E R.
Mnemosyne
I continue to be astonished that, for conservatives, “religious freedom” is an employer’s freedom to impose their religious beliefs on their employees. The employees apparently don’t have any religious freedom of their own.
Of course, if a non-Christian employer tried to, say, tell all of its male employees that they had to wear a yarmulke to work every day, you’d be able to hear the screaming from Venus.
Mnemosyne
@Only the Facts:
And when you come here whining about how you had to file for bankruptcy because your wife got cancer and your health insurance was canceled, so you had to sell your house to pay for chemo, we will laugh and laugh and laugh.
Only the Facts
Especially not with Citizens United when, whenever an attempt at single payer is made, the healthcare industry and the Koch Brothers, ALEC, and others, will drown it with UNLIMITED CASH spent on “Harry & Louise” type ads.
beltane
@Ben Franklin: The Vatican’s wealth could plug the gap both here and in the Eurozone.
Another Halocene Human
Obligatory post: The Bishop’s Letter
The pure arrogance penned by this prince of the church should be enough to persuade any true American patriot to swear off the Roman kool-aid forever.
rlrr
Only the Facts – Winner of the most ironic name award.
Ash Can
@Only the Facts:
LOL! OK, this is hilarious. I call spoof.
dr. luba
What does it all mean? That the brotherhood of the red beanie is absolutely willing that women should sacrifice yet again. That we must bear any burden to uphold their principles.
Same as it ever was.
Medically speaking–forcing women to undergo a second operative procedure to get their tubes tied is no small matter. Besides the simple matter of convenience (it only adds a couple of minutes and little additional risk to the cesarian), thee is a strong possibility that insurance might not even cover a separate procedure. And then there is the matter of a second surgery….and recovery. More time out. Not to mention the medical/surgical risks–not great, but each operation bears risks of bleeding, infection and anesthesia complications.
Hunter Gathers
@Kay:
I don’t think old white men who believe that birth control is a sin are bound by the concept of Reality.
scav
Christian/Catholic + Large Corporations are above the law in these new United States, or at least they’re making their move. An Incorporated Catholic Church would be that on steroids, but so long as they don’t make women wear burqas while shoving instruments up their lady bits unnecessarily or forbidding access to standard practice health care in other instances, they’re not waging war on women.
Forum Transmitted Disease
The president is black.
No, seriously, he is. Black man in the Oval Office. I am not shitting you.
Valdivia
As always Kay, illuminating and great read.
Mnemosyne
@Ash Can:
Taco’s pretty well-known to be a spoof. My all-time favorite was when he couldn’t figure out that a college class and a college major are different things.
BenA
I do find it very funny that the religious right, who are dominated essentially by protestant fundamentalists, are enabling a Catholic take over. I don’t think it will even occur to the morons (and their leadership) until it’s too late.
scav
@BenA: Don’t forget they’re buying a Mormon to do it, this melding of High Finance Theocracy is very odd.
Raven
I local good news, Stewart, a 17 year old blind and deaf black doggie wandered away from her home in Athens 2 days ago and she was just found alive and well!
r€nato
Priestly celibacy is supposedly sacrosanct. Yet, the church is willing to allow married former Anglican priests become Catholic priests, and stay married to their wives.
The bishops can fucking get over their religious principles when it suits their purposes.
Jesus said, “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)
But they were perfectly willing to tolerate pedophiles, hiding them, silencing and shaming the victims and their families.
Fuck the fucking bishops. Fuck the fucking cardinals.
Napoleon
Nuns on a bus:
http://www.networklobby.org/nuns-bus-trip
JPL
Several state have passed bills preventing Sharia law from ever being considered. Isn’t it time that we actually consider who is the real threat to our rights.
Todd
I guess I’ll just work to re-register as a GOPer, and try and get back in with the wingers. I’ll need as much scratch as I can possibly get to a) care for myself and my spouse in our dotage and b) to assist my daughters to get de-patriated.
I guess Sullivan can move back to the UK in shame and Greenwald can whimper in outrage over what will happen to gay rights here in the US, after they kept insisting on those issues being first on the agenda.
Julia Grey
One thing that must happen when these religious-secular mergers go through is that women entering or contemplating entrance to these hospitals be INFORMED of the limitations and possible life-threatening rules they could encounter.
There should be legislation passed immediately requiring these hospitals to make these religious limitations clear to all patients seeking obstetrical or gynecological care of any kind, because you can never tell ahead of time when a situation might arise where the best medical decisions might conflict with their medieval reasoning.
Even if it is unlikely that any such legislation will pass anywhere, I will enjoy seeing these people scream about being required to offer truly INFORMED CONSENT to their patients/potential patients, because it will bring these things out into the open, and that might affect their ability to do BUSINESS.
Women might tend to avoid their obstetrical services if they are warned that the “Catholic mission” requires the medicos to, for example, save the baby and not the mother (official doctrine!) in a square-off between the two, or that they may try to preserve your fallopian tubes at the risk of your LIFE.
someofparts
Okay then. Time for new churches, or religons or whatever. Anything that doesn’t worship the fratboy trinity.
Citizen Alan
@JPL:
THIS! I have said for years now that the only reason the Xtian Right is so outraged over Sharia Law is that they don’t want the competition. Strike out every reference to Allah and replace it with Jesus and most Christians would accept it in a heartbeat and stone anyone who disagreed.
Keith G
I get that it’s politically dicey for the administration to push back on this, but I really think they need to find a way to do just that. Completely false ideas that go unchallenged become accepted truth. This is a problem that has handicapped Obama before.
Ash Can
@Mnemosyne: I’ve always understood a spoof to be someone who’s simply mimicking what a real RWNJ would say, just for gits and shiggles. Like when Sarah Proud & Tall first showed up in the comments here, telling us we were all depraved and going to be condemned to hell. (Then she started warning us we’d spend eternity with tiny devils with Dick Cheney’s face poking us in the bum with tiny pitchforks, and the game became obvious, not to mention hilarious.)
Or maybe Facts is a real RWNJ, and I just can’t imagine anyone being that fucked in the head and still be able to operate a computer. I don’t know.
rlrr
@Ash Can:
I just can’t imagine anyone being that fucked in the head and still be able to operate a computer. I don’t know.
Here’s a real RWNJ at least as fucked in the head as “Facts” appears to be, and can operate (barely) a computer.
kerFuFFler
OT, but simply astonishing. Just about everyday I hear of some new Republican politician’s behavior that sets a new low. Seriously, they must be competing against one another for a prize.
Roger Moore
@Julia Grey:
Not good enough. Informing patients about limitations and rules is meaningless if they’re faced with Hobson’s Choice for medical providers. That includes patients for whom the only provider in their area has those rules- and the kind of mergers Kay is talking about are increasing the number of places where that’s true- or if they’re an emergency patient who is stuck for practical reasons with the provider their ambulance driver takes them to.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Ash Can:
It’s very pro-China. (I figured out a few months ago that you can get it to echo “YELLOW PERIL!” almost on cue).
So I wonder who it works for.
rikyrah
thank you for bringing truth to this topic
taylormattd
@Only the Facts: Shouldn’t you be off using the n-word somewhere?
Chyron HR
@Only the Facts:
I must have missed something. Why did ReaIity Check have to come up with a new, totally different (wink wink), identity this time?
Ash Can
@rlrr: I moused over the link to see the name of the URL. Ain’t no way I’m getting out of that boat.
rlrr
@Ash Can:
Smart move…
rlrr
@Chyron HR:
If he keeps this up, he’ll end up having to call himself Clown_Penis.Fart.
Hunter Gathers
@Chyron HR: These new trolls make me miss Brick Oven Bill, if that’s even possible.
rlrr
@Chyron HR:
If he keeps this up, he’ll end up having to call himself Clown_Pen1s.Fart.
Gin & Tonic
@r€nato: And married men, not previously ordained in any other faith, can be ordained in many (most) of the Eastern Catholic Churches. There is a difference there between “monastic” and “non-monastic” clergy. So the whole celibacy thing is a lot more flexible than you’d be led to believe.
Linda Featheringill
@Raven:
Hooray for Stewart!
Chyron HR
@Chyron HR:
Oh, never mind. It’s because all of his other identities are on record as worshipping Mitt Romney as a messiah (or as the Mormons call him, the “White Horse”), and the greatest (and only) achievement of Romney’s life might be “struck the fuck down” by the SCOTUS. Now the name change makes sense.
NancyDarling
@Mnemosyne: This bloggingheads.tv episode between Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches and Suffolk University Law School professor, Marie Ashe covers the topic of whether corporations have a religious conscience that should be protected by law. If you have a spare hour, it is worth a listen.
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/9866
It is also a wonderful history lesson about Anne Hutchinson and her friend and fellow Quaker, Mary Dyer. It demonstrates the prurience that has always been at the heart of men meddling in women’s rights, be they religious freedom or reproductive rights. Anne was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy. Mary was hung at Boston Commons.
Mary had previously had a stillborn, severely malformed fetus—probably a hydatidiform mole. Governor Winthrop, he of “a shining city on the hill” fame, had the fetus exhumed, examined it and wrote about it for publication in the colony and England. He cited the malformed fetus as evidence of her heresy. Winthrop’s description of the fetus is available at Mary Dyer’s wiki page.
In other news, Michigan legislators are fast-tracking the most restrictive abortion bill in the country. It’s at HuffPo so I won’t link, but here’s the gist of it:
“…the omnibus bill would criminalize all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS for rape victims, the health of the woman or in cases where there is a severe fetal anomaly. It would require health centers that provide abortions to have surgery rooms, even when they don’t provide surgical abortions. It would require doctors to be present for medication abortions and to screen women for “coercion” before providing an abortion, and it would create new regulations for the disposal of fetal remains.” (emphasis mine)
scav
@Gin & Tonic: Well, it certainly wasn’t original — they had to go whip the Irish, Welsh and original English Church back into line with Rome during the early Middle ages. Ger rid of all those married priests and mixed/parallel Monasteries with Abbesses as supreme head. I mean, Rome decides what has always been the sacraments in Eastasia.
NancyDarling
And none of this about Catholic Hospitals is new. In the late 1960s, my sis-in-law was taken to a Catholic ER in Albuquerque with severe pelvic pain. Her doctor suspected it might be an ectopic pregnancy related to the Dalkon Shield and had her moved to a different hospital for treatment.
Gin & Tonic
@scav: Funny thing is that they’ve backed off way more recetly. In the late 19th century, when the Slavs were coming to the US and bringing their married priests, the US-ordained RCC clergy bitched and moaned how they weren’t getting any, and Rome prohibited the Ruthenians and others from allowing married clergy. So they said “screw you” and defected, basically, and within a few decades Rome backed off and once again allowed the Eastern churches to have married clergy everywhere, including the US. It’s all about the membership and the Benjamins, same as it ever was.
kay
@NancyDarling:
Right. But what if there had been mergers, and the different hospital was 60 or 100 miles away?
I live in a rural area and we have one giant for-profit that owns 3 counties. That’s a big geographical area. It’s not religios- affiliated, but what if it was?
NancyDarling
@kay: You are right, of course, Kay. And it is happening here in Arkansas. I think it is St. Johns in Fort Smith that has just merged with a large hospital. I don’t know how close the nearest non-Catholic hospital will be or if there is one left in Fort Smith. Fayetteville is more than an hour away, and St. Johns is very big there. They are all over this part of Arkansas, if not the whole state and also very big in Missouri.
slag
I don’t know, Kay. The relentless privatization of (what should be) public services is just…depressing. Not a fan. And the more I hear about it the less of a fan I become. At this point, I honestly don’t care about efficiency (blaspheme!). My priorities have evolved into being much more concerned with accessibility and justice. And the more these mergers take place, the more privatized our schools get, and the more Bill Gates rules my world, the more I dig my heels in and scream “STOP!”. Christ I’ve become so reactionary.
Let’s tax the shit out of these muthafuckas already.
eyelessgame
@BenA:
Word. Religious makeup of the Supreme Court stuns me every time I see it. Unbelievable.
Cassidy
@Hunter Gathers: BOB had style and wasn’t fueled by spite and cruelty.
NancyDarling
@Cassidy: Cassidy! I haven’t seen a post from you in a while. How goes it? And I essentially agree about BOB. His wackiness sometimes made me laugh out loud.
eyelessgame
Huh. A person I know, a few years ago, needed an emergency C-section that included a lifesaving emergency hysterectomy. Presumably that’s not included in the Catholic hospital ball of tricks either. This is scary shit, this is.
kay
@NancyDarling:
I’m not all that comfortable with the elaborate compromises, either, honestly.
I think it says something when we’re willing to send women who want their tubes tied out to the “ambulatory care center” in the parking lot, which is one of the work-arounds.
Seperate but equal never works out “equal”, which I would think we would know by now. I think women get the short end of the stick if we start partitioning us off into “moral” and “immoral”.
Cassidy
@NancyDarling: I’ve been around, just haven’t had much to say lately. Got a real day job and then the evenings at the YMCA exercising and letting the kids play. Just haven’t had much free time.
Yeah, our current crop of trolls are just glibertarian assholes who want to flaunt their meanness. BOB may have been wrong a lot, but he wasn’t a mean spirited prick.
Bulworth
I thought it was his radical, pro-teh gay, extremist Muzlimist, extreme secularist agenda.
NancyDarling
@kay: What I meant to say at #49, Kay, is that this has been a fact for a long time. We’ve been asleep at the wheel by letting it get this far. It would have been a lot easier to clamp down on them 40 years ago before they made their Faustian bargain with the fundies who were essentially powerless 40 years ago. When I was a child growing up, Assemblies of God (we called them holy rollers)were point and laugh material. Now they are mainstream and very powerful in this part of the country.
Roger Moore
@slag:
Which makes perfect sense. The goal of our health care policy should be to make sure that everyone who needs health care can get it. Efficiency is desirable for that goal- it’s easier to provide for everyone if you’re not wasting time, effort, and money- but it’s dangerous to treat efficiency as the main or only goal. After all, closing down our health care system entirely would be very efficient. I can guarantee there would be no waste, fraud, or abuse, but there would also be no benefit.
TooManyJens
@Cassidy:
He actually was. He said a lot of racist and sexist shit. Sure, it was all trolling or whatever, but … he said a lot of racist and sexist shit. I’m glad he’s gone.
Matt
If the papists want a war, fucking Henry VIII the fucks. I wanna see cranky old dudes in dresses being dumped out on the street by federal marshals as every speck of land currently be held by the gang of pedophiles currently operating as “The Catholic Church” is seized.
J. Michael Neal
@Cassidy: And, boy, BOB could bring the wacky. Most trolls/spoofs end up just repeating the same thing over and over. You never knew what nugget of lunacy BOB would provide.
slag
@Roger Moore:
There’s that.
But, in the broader conversation, there should be room for focusing on efficiency. Doing so would make for a better system. Instead, though, we have competing conversations. Liberals want a public sector and conservatives don’t. There’s no room for substantive discourse or policy implementations focused on efficiency in that paradigm. We’re in a zero-sum spiral to nowhere.
moderateindy
Overlooked?…. Part of the story talks about Catholic hospitals merging with Secular hospitals and becoming for-profit entities, and how much tax money it will bring in. Conversely, when they take a for-profit system, and merge it into their not-for profit model, which I think happens all the time, doesn’t that mean that local governments lose all that tax revenue? Perhaps I am wrong, since I don’t know about the intricacies of such matters.
But if it is true people lose access to some health care services that they had, and get screwed by having less local tax revenue……..sounds like a Conservatives wet dream
kay
@NancyDarling:
It has gone really far. Reading about some of these mergers, women are really the very last item on the agenda. “Oh, we’ll have to accommodate them. How about…hospital withinn a hospital!”
It’s like we’re contageous or something. They have to cordon us off, in case our degeneracy spreads.
scav
@Gin & Tonic: Another Ruthenian!? although technically I’m only Ruthenian by Proxy (my personal heretics come from Bohemia, well, some did, I seem to be heir to a passel of non-conformists). I too have sat and stood intoning Ages upon Ages in company with one of the twice-excommunicated followers of the Russyn Church. All worth it for the Christmas eve dinner though.
Cassidy
@TooManyJens: Entirely possible. I don’t recall ever reading anything from him that was based out of pure meanness, so I don’t doubt I missed some things.
gocart mozart
Great post Kay about an issue that should be discussed more than it is. On a side note, it’s about the Hospital I was born in.
Irony Abounds
Catholics are, by and large, wonderful people, but the Catholic Church is rapidly becoming a despicable institution.
Roger Moore
@slag:
Except that a major point about public vs. private sector is based around efficiency. Liberals think a public sector system would be more efficient because it would remove the overhead of for profit insurance companies, let the government negotiate the cheapest rates for drugs, and in some models eliminate a lot of counterproductive profit seeking by medical providers. Conservatives like free market solutions because they think free market competition will inevitably lead to lower prices. If we’re having a problem in that area, it’s that Conservatives are allowed to base their claims on their theories rather than looking at how effective the free market has been in real life.
Roger Moore
@Irony Abounds:
They’re not “becoming” a despicable institution. They’ve been a despicable institution for centuries.
scav
@Roger Moore: Well, they were a mixed blessing before and they’re doubling down on being an unmixed unblessing, shall we say?
WereBear
They are all theory. It’s about their fantasies. They just decide what they want to think and then they think that makes it so.
They drive me almost insane.
Socraticsilence
@Only the Facts: Conservative 5? Huh, I don’t remember you guys thinking Kennedy was all that conservative when he decided Lawrence.
Socraticsilence
@Only the Facts: Yeah we’ll see what happens if thats the case, here I’ll give you a name to google just in case you forgot what happens when rich people treat americans like serfs- Emma Goldman.
Edward
The only differences between Islamic, ‘born-again” Protestant and Catholic Fundamentalists are superficial. While it won’t be pleasant, the U.S. can survive 4 more years of Obama (the country’s survived fools before); it can not however survive a Theocracy.