No Popery In Health Care!

I got emailed this post from Creative Minority Report and it's worth everyone's time to peruse.

The context of the post is the reality that current actions by state and federal government are reducing access to health care for the poor. Whatever you thought Obamacare (or your local StateCare managed Medicaid program) was going to do, this is the reality. Catholic providers are, by and large, the only entities stepping in to fill this gap because nobody wants to take care of a population that costs a lot of money (because they are usually very unhealthy) and doesn't pay very well. This influx of Catholic stuff into health care has a lot of folks disturbed because it would mean not being able to get all their abortion, contraception, and sterilization. What a tragedy!

Anyways, the CMR post links to a couple of articles. One is from Texas and describes the threats of an political group to file a lawsuit to unravel an agreement for a Catholic health system to manage a public hospital:

A national nonprofit that advocates for church-state separation is challenging an agreement involving the public Central Health hospital district, the University of Texas and the Catholic Church-affiliated Seton Healthcare Family.

Three lawyers with Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent a letter to Central Health board members and UT President Bill Powers saying that a Central Health-Seton master agreement is unconstitutional because of religious restrictions on some Seton hospital services, such as sterilizations. They asked that the agreement be reworked or scrapped.

The far better article is this one from the Seattle Times. Even better than that is this one, also from the Times, which clearly reflects the disturbed peace of secularists:

Why are the leaders in this state — the governor, the Legislature — generally letting religious folks call the shots with our health care?

I seriously doubt the publicly backed UW Medical Centers will start allowing religious rules to control medical treatment — this is still Seattle, after all. All hell would break loose.

But Catholic health services now run publicly backed hospitals and clinics from Vancouver to San Juan Island. So taxpayer money already is paying for bishop-guided medicine. All without a peep from the state about the rights of patients to get the legal care they need, not just whatever care the bishops consider moral.

“It’s insane that a state where conservative Catholics probably number around 5 percent, that we are allowing conservative Catholic principles to take over our health-care system,” says Monica Harrington, of Seattle, who runs a website called Catholic Watch devoted to this issue.

It ought to be the other way around. To get public funding, religious hospitals ought to be urged to abide by the public’s health-care principles as much as possible. Not us by theirs.

We’d never let the schools be ruled by a church, no matter how well-meaning. With our health care we’re halfway there.

Did you notice the next to last paragraph? To get public funding, which is code for Medicare and Medicaid, Catholic hospitals should surrender to the public's principles. Of course, this would mean sacrificing the Church's principles in return.

These aren't isolated sentiments. We're hearing it from legislators here in Louisiana. Make no mistake folks, you're going to hear this more and more as Catholic entities fill the access gap for the poor. We're going to be asked to turn our hospitals into Synagogues of Sanger to help the undesirables not breed so much. Not to mention that this access gap is a great excuse to move to single payer. The more Catholic hospitals keep the gap manageable, the more difficult it is to argue for a single payer, which is a political goal for many. Then you'll really see Catholic hospitals getting pinched under the rationale expressed above. No public money if you don't bow to Caesar's whims.

Don't think it can't happen here.