There is no Catholic Hospital in the United States that is self funded. All operate with substantial public funding nearing 100%.
They donât.
Well, according to the article linked to by Faizal Ali, the number for the average hospital is 40-50%, but we neednât quibble, because even that is enough of a contribution to warrant calling the hospital part of the public health care system. But then, one has to wonder, what is the point of having Catholic hospitals? If the Catholic hospital is not to be allowed to conduct itself in accord with the principles of the Catholic religion, because it receives public funding, why not just secularize all the hospitals and be done with it?
The article linked to by Faizal Ali seems to be an intelligent and well-written one. I only looked at parts of it, but I find the authorâs conclusion intriguing, and wonder whether things will end up going in the direction of the final option he considers. It might be the only way of preserving a genuinely Catholic service, for Catholics to get out of âbig institutionalâ health care altogether, and find a niche where they perform more limited services but are freer to do that in a traditional Catholic way.
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Iâll stick with my near 100% government funding number especially for urban Catholic Hospitals. To answer your question âwhat is the point of having Catholic hospital?â I say that has long been pointless to ask or claim that these hospitals are operated in a traditional Catholic way. They operate independent of the Catholic dioceses that they are in. They have an independent Board of Directors separate from the Catholic Churches hierarchy. Todayâs reality of Catholic Hospitals is similar to Catholic Universities like Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Villanova. I claim that there is no difference in the way the Georgetown University Hospital operates compared to the way the secular UWSTL operates. Both Catholic Hospitals and Universities are, by and large, secular institutions and are fully entangled with Government in everything.
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I wonder the same thing.
And I would say what a repulsively callous comment.
We are not talking about mere conveniences, we are frequently talking about life or death situations.
If you were being taken in an ambulance at top speed, would you want to have to worry if the theology of the hospital that you are being taken to might conflict with your medical care? What if itâs the only hospital that you can get to before you die?
No @Mark10.45, they frequently do not âhave many options in lifeâ â it is their life itself that is on the line.
@swamidass â this is, incidentally, another point at which I âdonât like that realityâ. Being forced to let somebody elseâs religion dictate your medical care, and potentially life or death decisions, particularly when most of the funding is apparently coming from a government that is constitutionally required to be neutral on matters of religion, seems the very definition of âunlikableâ.
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Not âfrequentlyâ, but *extremely rarely" regarding the case we are talking about, i.e., where a woman will die unless she has an immediate abortion (as opposed to a scheduled operation on the following day). And as I already indicated in a linked article, there are some cases where medical care that would incidentally kill the fetus are allowable under Catholic teaching. And even if this were not such a case, there would almost certainly be plenty of time to move the woman to another hospital after diagnosis, by rapid conveyance, e.g., helicopter, or a fast-driving ambulance.
And in the scenario postulated, moving the woman would generally be advisable anyway. If a Catholic hospital had never before performed an abortion, it likely would not have any staff trained in the procedure, whereas another hospital would. If you were a young woman, informed at 3 in the morning that a green, just-out-of-med-school intern would be performing this rare operation, or that some older doctor, himself never having performed even a non-problem abortion let alone a dangerous operation such as the one contemplated, would be roused out of his sleep and might take an hour or more to get to the hospital anyway, would you want to have your operation there, performed by a groggy non-expert, or would you want to be moved to a hospital where the operation could be done by a physician who had previously performed many abortions of a complicated kind? The other hospital could be phoned ahead to make sure the doctor was standing by and ready for the incoming patient, so the wait might not be any longer.
There are probably ten good public hospitals within an hourâs drive of my home, but only one of them is equipped to do emergency heart surgery â or for that matter, even scheduled heart surgery. If someone showed up at 3 in the morning needing emergency heart surgery at my local hospital, the person would be whisked by helicopter or speeding ambulance to the heart surgery center an hourâs road drive away. Nobody would argue that it is the obligation of every single hospital to maintain the staff and equipment necessary to do heart surgery in case someone shows up with an extremely rare problem at 3 in the morning. Similarly, there are are only a few hospitals with the expertise needed for limb reattachment, and nobody would argue that every hospital in the country should maintain experts in limb reattachment, 24/7, in case some farmer who has had an accident arrives at the door with a severed limb asking for it to be reattached. Everybody agrees that the proper procedure, in such extremely rare cases where emergency surgery is required rather than a planned, scheduled operation, is to ship the patient to the hospital with the equipment and the doctors trained in the relevant surgery.
It seems to me that some people here are seizing upon an extremely rare possibility, and using it, basically, as an excuse to abolish the existence of genuinely Catholic hospitals, i.e., hospitals run by physicians and nurses committed to Catholic principles. The fact is that non-Catholics in the USA can easily obtain routine, scheduled abortions, and that even in the very rare emergency case contemplated, where not just an abortion but an immediate abortion is needed to save a life, most Americans will have a non-Catholic hospital nearby, and where they donât, it would make much more sense to spend taxpayer money on a no-charge, inter-hospital shuttle helicopter service for such cases, than to try to force all smaller regional hospitals to offer every conceivable late-night emergency operation.
I wasnât talking about that one case (and gave no indication that I was). I was talking about things like emergency care, intensive care, emergency surgery and so forth. Life or death situations that any given hospital would likely have a number of new cases on any given day.
Hosptial health care IS NOT like getting a drivers licence from the DMV as Mark suggested â when you need it, you often need it right now and your life may depend on it. That was my point.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Catholic hospitals are the equivalent of Catholic private schools: The latter function as an adjunct to a comprehensive public school system and are available for people who make the deliberate decision to have their children attend a private faith school. The public system does not take these institutions into account and is set up to function without them.
That is not the case for most Catholic hospitals, as the 538 article I linked above explained. Catholic hospitals function as part of what is supposed to be an integrated health system for the public as a whole and, in many communities, are the only hospital available within a reasonable distance.
If the only public school in a town was Catholic, it would not be acceptable to tell parents. âWell, there are plenty of non-Catholic schools in the next districts. I guess youâll just have to drive your kids there every morning if you donât want them to have a Catholic education.â At least, I donât think it would be.
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Either the Catholic hospitals are essentially public hospitals with some statues and images of the Virgin in the lobby and corridors, to give a superficial Catholic atmosphere, or they are genuinely Catholic institutions operating in accord with Catholic convictions.
If the former, then they have to provide services any public hospital does.
If the latter, then they should be exempt from having to provide abortions or any other treatment not in accord with Catholic faith â but should receive zero public funding.
I started out this discussion under the mistaken impression that Catholic hospitals were self-funding, or perhaps received a small amount of state funding but retained, by agreement with the state, complete autonomy on all policy matters. It appears that I was mistaken about the facts.
The way I see the matter now is that all general hospitals for general community care should be secularized entirely, removed from all religious control or even religious affiliation (out go the statues of the Virgin, unless Stars of David etc. are also allowed in the lobbies and corridors), and that the place for Church-controlled health-care institutions is covering special niches which the Church sees to be uncovered by the public arrangements. All Americans should have a core of basic rights to medical care, and that should be covered by the secular state, not by churches; but beyond that defined core of medical rights, churches and other religious institutions should be free to offer additional medical services, to which no one has a ârightâ but which would be greatly appreciated by some, out of charity, out of a desire to see no one fall between the cracks.
There is precedent for this in many areas. The state provides welfare in various forms for the poor, but in addition, many churches provide, e.g., âout in the coldâ programs for the homeless in the winter. Analogously, if state care leaves some people without some medical assistance that it would be good for them to have, medical assistance that could be given from church-run, relatively inexpensive small clinics (as opposed to massively expensive large hospitals) would serve a social good. Such auxiliary services would not be required to perform abortions or do anything else contrary to the Catholic faith. I think it would be better for both the Church and the state to adopt arrangements of this sort, than to continue with a system that relies on âambiguously publicâ and âambiguously Catholicâ institutions to deliver basic health care.
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I agree.
The folks in Hell must be lacing up their ice skates right about now.
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Do you think public roads make sense? Most countries seem to have some sort of system that maintains a network of roads paid out of taxation and available to all.
Many countries also have a public health system paid for by taxation, social charges or subscription and available to all.
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There is also the issue that a public-funded single-payer system (i) avoids much of the large bureaucracy that a health-insurance based system (making them generally more efficient) and (ii) that such a system avoids the perverse (profit-based) incentive to deny coverage for treatments whenever possible.
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Yes, late term, life of the mother is at stake abortions are rare (<1%) but really frightening from my own experience. Ideology shouldnât be part of the plan of care in emergency situations. Today, the vast number of abortions (93%) are done at home by taking a non-prescription drugs under the supervision of a doctor via Zoom. By focusing on the rare, medically complicated, emergency abortions we get out of the realm of womenâs healthcare policy into emergency room practices where ideology has no role to play.
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Do you think there are any religious components to the âDemocrats are evil socialistsâ crowd? All I am really looking for is some insights into what Republicans are thinking.
I was more interested in what they thought socialism is and why free-enterprise could not exist in a socialist system. For example, Sweden is a heavily socialist country yet they have a massive number of new business startups and high levels of entrepreneurship. Do Republicans really think socialism means the end of small businesses?
You will have to ask the particular Republicans making the particular claims about socialism. And remember that âsocialismâ is one of those slippery words (like âevangelicalâ or âfundamentalistâ) that means different things to different people. The best procedure is to get particular writers to nail down the definition they are using, so that a meaningful discussion can be held. I was merely reporting the sort of thing many Republicans say. Analysis and critique of their use of âsocialismâ takes us far beyond the subject âReligious Habits of U.S. Teens.â
What Iâm resisting is the overly simplified narrative Iâm finding on this site (which seems utterly dominated by people of the left), which runs something like this:
1-- Trump is the worst possible President, not only incompetent but actually morally evil;
2-- He was only elected because conservative evangelicals (or fundamentalists, or whatever sort of Protestant people here donât like) all voted for him;
3-- Therefore, conservative Protestants are to blame for all the evils Trump has brought about;
4-- Therefore, conservative Protestantism itself is evil, and its members âimmoralâ (direct quote from one person here, explicitly or tacitly approved by several others).
The narrative is flawed at many points. Even Point 1, while having some basis in truth, may be guilty of exaggeration, and the rest contains factually dubious claims or faulty logic. I was commenting to you mainly about Point 2, indicating that many people other than conservative Protestants voted for Trump, including business owners, large and small, union members, etc. But no one here is raging against all the non-fundamentalist small businessmen, laid-off unionized workers, etc. who voted for Trump. Only the conservative Christians are being targeted.
This of course in keeping with the typical agenda of many people posting here â the demonization of conservative Protestant Christians as the cause of almost every evil in modern America. But as social and political analysis of an election result, itâs embarrassingly crude. Not that one should expect a refined and sophisticated analysis of politics and religion from people whose academic training is in most cases 100% in the natural sciences, but one might expect at least a little intellectual modesty when biochemists, psychiatrists, etc. weigh in on complex questions of voter behavior and the sources of political attitudes.
I was just curious if you had any insights you would be willing to share.
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There are so many different types of Republican that I would not want to generalize. Iâve been told that a good number of Republicans donât like Trump and wish they had a different leader, but hold their nose and stick with him because the alternative is the Democrats. And of course many politically conservative Americans use the word âsocialismâ to mean the same or almost the same as âcommunism,â and by âcommunismâ they have in mind the governments of the former Soviet Union, of Maoist China, of several Asian regimes, etc. â places where the typical small farmer or businessman associated with the ideal of American liberties could not exist. And of course many of them see the Democratic Party as, though not literally communist in that sense, sympathetic with some of the motivations that led to communist takeover in those other countries, and inclined toward âstatismâ and elitism and against populism and grass-roots democracy. Whether any of these notions floating through the minds of Republicans (and other people on the political right) can stand up to analysis is another question, belonging to another discussion, not this one.
Yeah, Iâve noticed that. I wasnât sure how widespread it was. Perhaps it would be to the Democrats advantage to start educating the public on what socialism is.
We agree on this.
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