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Thread: It's time for national healthcare - Page 120







Post#2976 at 01-19-2012 06:06 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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I started out as a chemist in a hospital lab in 1968 and retired from the profession in 2007. I lived through the following events, and participated actively in much of what I describe while working for two different community hospitals (one in Colorado, one in Pennsylvania) and a number of commercial for-profit labs. Perhaps some of you might be interested in this case study of what happens when healthcare is performed on a for-profit basis.

How Regulation Came to the Blood-Testing Industry of the U.S.

In 1988, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment was passed, which brought “onerous regulation” down on the shoulders of medical blood-testing laboratories in the U.S. Businessmen who decry federal regulations might heed the events leading up to this. But they seldom do.
During the period of the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, medical blood-testing went through a technological revolution, as Medicare came upon the scene. It became possible to run many tests, very easily and inexpensively, on very small quantities of blood. Suddenly, blood-testing laboratories went from being a drag on the typical hospital’s finances, to being one of its finest revenue-generating centers.

Almost immediately, outside-the-hospital for-profit commercial blood testing labs were formed by pathologists (specialist M.D.s who supervise labs inside hospitals) all over the country. The business model was to bring blood samples in from doctors’ offices all around town, do the testing and bill the doctors for the tests. The doctors in turn marked up the tests (usually several hundred percent) and sold them to the insurance companies, and of course, Medicare. Voila! Big bucks began to flow in and around blood testing for everyone.

As with any new idea, businesses flourished, and consolidation began to take place. Pathologists who had founded their little labs for a song, found that they could sell off their businesses for multi-million dollar acquisition prices to large national corporations, such as Upjohn, Smith Kline and MetPath. Many hundreds of community-hospital-based pathologists became millionaires overnight by selling their outside labs while maintaining lucrative practices within the hospitals. The national commercial blood-testing labs became bigger and bigger.

By the early 1980s, the folks at Medicare became aware of the conflict of interest and the immense amount of money being made by physicians, usually family practice, internal medicine and other large lab user specialties. In the summer of 1984 it became illegal for docs to buy lab tests wholesale and sell them to Medicare retail. This was a windfall for the commercial labs as they now could go directly to the government for as much as 30-40% of their revenue without having to subsidize their doctor customers.

These last years of the 1980s are not very complimentary of the blood-testing lab industry. Once a straight infusion of Medicare money was available, schemes to drive up the utilization of Medicare testing came about. For example, a 24-test chemistry profile existed that was called a “SMAC” in the industry. Medicare knew that the “SMAC” was all automated and cost the lab very little to run and reimbursed labs relatively little as compared to non-automated tests. National labs began to include other expensive, manual tests without the doctor having to ask. Thus, a “SMAC” suddenly included an HDL Cholesterol and some iron tests, all billed separately to Medicare. The doctor didn’t care, because he no longer profited from the Medicare testing; he was simply getting more tests than he actually ordered.

Notice how, from the very beginning of this huge industry, there was only a tenuous connection between the testing being done, and the actual needs of the patients!

These and other similar schemes led to billions of dollars in undeserved profits for these large national laboratories. When the hammer finally fell, a very few lab executives went to jail, but mostly some fines of the order of a few hundred million dollars were paid. Overall, it had been a very profitable run for the labs.

During this same period of time, a few unscrupulous folks ran what were called “pap-smear mills.” These operations took in pap smears, actually tested only a small percentage of them and reported the rest out “Normal.” Of course they billed for all of them. Many women found that they were, unfortunately, suffering from cervical cancer, undetected by cheating pap smear labs.

Hence, I ask, “Is the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment of 1988 an unfair burden on the businessmen who choose to run for-profit labs, testing blood samples?” I suppose so, at least for the honest businessmen in the industry. However, honesty only came to the industry through legislation and regulation, not from internal enforcement of any ethic.

It is easy to see, from this example, how structuring healthcare as a profit-making system drives unnecessary utilization, and why the U.S. has the highest per capita cost in the world. It is also not hard to see how too much “healthcare” activity is not designed to provide good patient care, but instead, only profits for someone.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2977 at 01-19-2012 06:54 PM by ziggyX65 [at Texas Hill Country joined Apr 2010 #posts 2,634]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
They buy into the assumption that "more expensive" equals "better," and proceed from there.
Our health care and education systems are proving that to be a fallacy.







Post#2978 at 01-19-2012 10:31 PM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
Quote Originally Posted by KaiserD2 View Post
But the real question is: what do you suppose the medicine actually costs to make?
Too many people don't think about that question.
They buy into the assumption that "more expensive" equals "better," and proceed from there.
I missed this,

I doubt the cost of producing the medicine is all that high. I'm sure the price was driven by the development cost, though I'm also cetain that it's highly profitable. It's also the first of a series of drugs that tend to follow one another as the efficacy of each declines. With any luck, the second or third will be off-patent when the time comes to switch.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#2979 at 02-07-2012 01:02 PM by KaiserD2 [at David Kaiser '47 joined Jul 2001 #posts 5,220]
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This is a very interesting story. A bill to establish a state single-payer system almost made it through one house of the California legislature. It could be the start of something big.







Post#2980 at 02-07-2012 11:00 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by Deb C View Post
The only thing you might want to consider is if you are ever hospitalized. Self pays (people without insurance) are charged the most for their care. Insurance companies are given the best rates. It's totally not fair but that's the crazy game that's being played in this country.
It is a crazy system. Just got insurance statement for lab tests that were billed for $540. The insurance company allowed $65 and my share was only $35. This is not a rational approach.







Post#2981 at 02-09-2012 06:47 AM by '58 Flat [at Hardhat From Central Jersey joined Jul 2001 #posts 3,300]
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Vermont's congressman scored a direct hit on the battleship so to speak when he said that if we had a single-payer system, the current manufactured controversy about whether Catholic institutions must pay for their employees' contraception would not exist.
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.

Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!







Post#2982 at 02-09-2012 02:21 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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The cost of healthcare in the U.S.

While it is very true that our healthcare financing system in this country is broken, so is the delivery system. And, while profit-making organizations contribute mightily to the dysfunction, we, as citizens and consumers of healthcare have plenty to answer to.
We say, “Our system costs too much.” Yes, it does. And with our data we know that an unconscionable amount of money gets spent on the last weeks of life of Medicare patients.

Let me describe two real examples at the ground level:

Medicare Patient #1
Last week we were called via 911 to an 81 y/o patient who was at least 350 lb, had congestive heart failure, diabetes, severe pitting edema in her legs and feet, and presented to us with “respiratory distress.” She is unable to ambulate, even to the bathroom. She lives in a mechanical lounge chair – the kind that can be elevated with a remote so that it brings the patient up into almost standing. Her family manages somehow to move her periodically from the chair to a portable potty chair when necessary, and then back to the lounge chair. When I asked her adult son if she had a DNR, he looked at me, shocked, and replied, “Oh, no.” And I’m thinking, omg.

Medicare Patient #2
A bit less than a year ago, my best friend died of a high acuity grade glioblastoma multiform, an invariably fatal tumor of the brain. In fact, it’s the most common kind of brain cancer in adults. NO ONE EVER LIVES THROUGH THESE! So, what did the medical system do for my friend? Well, they did brain surgery and removed most of the space-occupying lesion, which fixed, temporarily, his neuro symptoms, which were mostly caused by the pressure of the tumor on his brain. Then the oncologists convinced him to undergo traumatic radiation/chemo “treatment.” After five weeks of this, he developed a cyst/blister in the site where the tumor was excised and he died a week later of multi-system failure. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that had they simply left him alone after the surgery, he would have had a few months of fairly high-quality life instead of the brief period of “treatment” followed by an untimely demise. In any case, the best he had to hope for was 6-9 months before the cancer brought on fatal neurological symptoms.

What does this mean? Both of these cases cost Medicare a shitload of money. And for what? Why do we, as consumers of healthcare, permit it?

It seems to me that Americans have gone too far down the path of individualism. Somehow we get it in our heads that there should be some solution to our every medical problem, no matter what, no matter how old we are.

My examples are at the ends of the spectrum. In the first case, a patient who has largely brought her illnesses upon herself, with the enabling “help” of her family. In the second case, we have a man who has been convinced to have “hope” and to cling to “positive thinking” in the face of a hopeless malady that was no fault of his own.

But, but, but … we ask, what is the alternative? And there’s the rub. How DO we change the Medicare system so that as our Boomers age, they do not continue to do as we have done so far, that is continue to treat dead-end illness, providing only an illusion of hope, while soaking up much of the country’s wealth and causing serious dysfunction in our economic system?

I suspect that if the resources wasted on us old-timers in the last weeks of life were redirected to young people, there would be plenty of healthcare to go around. Yet, if we institute national “policy” around this issue, the “Death Panel” bullshit will erupt like Mount Vesuvius.

I’m not sure that we, as U.S. citizens, have it in us to be realistic about life and death, illness and health. We’ve gone too far down this pathway. Once you’ve made a pickle out of a cucumber, it’s hard to make it back into a cucumber. I frankly don’t see a way out of this conundrum. Tinkering around the margins may be the best we can hope for.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2983 at 02-10-2012 12:47 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
I I know someone who went through a similar ordeal, pushed by his doctors to have his terminal cancer treated, and it only ended up killing him faster. I'm sure it happens all the time .
Cancer treatment is one of the biggest money-makers in medicine apparently, if the presence and opulence of our local cancer treatment centers here in ABQ is any indication.

My wife is an artist and we attended a Sunday open-house and exhibit of art hanging on the walls of our local, privately run Cancer Treatment Center. The artists came and stood around their work and visited with the attendees - it was like a special show, only with lots of artists. I just stood there in amazement. How in god's name can such a misuse of healthcare resource be rationalized?
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2984 at 02-10-2012 11:58 PM by Exile 67' [at joined Jan 2011 #posts 722]
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Quote Originally Posted by KaiserD2 View Post
But the real question is: what do you suppose the medicine actually costs to make?
Another question is: how much did it cost to develope?







Post#2985 at 02-11-2012 12:04 AM by Exile 67' [at joined Jan 2011 #posts 722]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
Are you sure that healthcare dollars went towards that show? Maybe they were only loaning space to the artists, as a tax deduction or something?
Not that tons of money isn't wasted on cancer treatment. There are plenty of other examples, equally bad or worse.

In any case, the harsh reality is that a single-payer system would force someone, "death panel" or otherwise, to determine which treatments should be paid for with public funds, and which ones shouldn't. If we think that lobbyists in the United States are out of control now, we ain't seen nothing yet.
What's your opinion on socialized medicine?







Post#2986 at 02-11-2012 05:05 AM by '58 Flat [at Hardhat From Central Jersey joined Jul 2001 #posts 3,300]
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"Socialized medicine" is a loaded, demagogic term - just like "forced busing" was, for those old enough to remember that one.
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.

Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!







Post#2987 at 02-11-2012 04:45 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
Are you sure that healthcare dollars went towards that show? Maybe they were only loaning space to the artists, as a tax deduction or something?
I've been back there several times hauling patients to treatment. They own the art. There are no signs indicating that pieces are for sale or whatever.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2988 at 02-11-2012 05:17 PM by Exile 67' [at joined Jan 2011 #posts 722]
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Quote Originally Posted by '58 Flat View Post
"Socialized medicine" is a loaded, demagogic term - just like "forced busing" was, for those old enough to remember that one.
To me, socialized medicine represents a complete government run healthcare system.







Post#2989 at 02-11-2012 06:11 PM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by Exile 67' View Post
To me, socialized medicine represents a complete government run healthcare system.
So the Brits have Socialized medicine, but the Canadians and French don't. OK.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#2990 at 02-12-2012 05:31 AM by '58 Flat [at Hardhat From Central Jersey joined Jul 2001 #posts 3,300]
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But to some on the far right, what New Jersey and even Utah do on the state level amounts to "socialized medicine."
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.

Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!







Post#2991 at 02-21-2012 11:43 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by radind View Post
It is a crazy system. Just got insurance statement for lab tests that were billed for $540. The insurance company allowed $65 and my share was only $35. This is not a rational approach.
Just got another bill from Hospital for outpatient tests. Original bill was $6300 and the insurance allowed $725. I had to pay total of $380( mostly for annual deductible). Without good insurance this would have been a disaster.







Post#2992 at 02-22-2012 12:20 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by radind View Post
Just got another bill from Hospital for outpatient tests. Original bill was $6300 and the insurance allowed $725. I had to pay total of $380( mostly for annual deductible). Without good insurance this would have been a disaster.
As I've mentioned several times before, if you had NO insurance, they would expect you to pay every dime! They even have a name for this monstrosity - it's euphemistically called "Cost Shifting."

My national corporate for-profit commercial lab from which I retired in 2007, billed patients $160 for a 24-test automated chemistry panel that probably cost us four or five bucks to run. Medicare and the insurance companies reimbursed us usually less than $20 for it. But the poor bastard who had no insurance and had to pay his own bills got nailed and sent to collections.

Oh, by the way, physicians could buy the panel wholesale from us for $5-10 and re-sell it to some insurance companies to make a few extra bucks on the side. At least, Medicare made that scam illegal in 1984. But it doesn't stop them from doing it to some insurance companies and to their self-pay patients.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#2993 at 02-22-2012 12:44 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
As I've mentioned several times before, if you had NO insurance, they would expect you to pay every dime! They even have a name for this monstrosity - it's euphemistically called "Cost Shifting."

My national corporate for-profit commercial lab from which I retired in 2007, billed patients $160 for a 24-test automated chemistry panel that probably cost us four or five bucks to run. Medicare and the insurance companies reimbursed us usually less than $20 for it. But the poor bastard who had no insurance and had to pay his own bills got nailed and sent to collections.

Oh, by the way, physicians could buy the panel wholesale from us for $5-10 and re-sell it to some insurance companies to make a few extra bucks on the side. At least, Medicare made that scam illegal in 1984. But it doesn't stop them from doing it to some insurance companies and to their self-pay patients.
We always need a balance of power. The health care providers have too much power.







Post#2994 at 02-22-2012 02:02 PM by Deb C [at joined Aug 2004 #posts 6,099]
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Quote Originally Posted by radind View Post
We always need a balance of power. The health care providers have too much power.
There are so many variables with health care pricing. TNT is correct about cost shifting. However, if they do not (on paper) charge these outrageous prices, their reimbursements are much less from insurance corporations and Medicare. It's such a darn game that everyone is playing these days. Our broken health care system force prices upwards, even when the real cost is much less. We need a single payer system that would eliminate these games.
Last edited by Deb C; 02-22-2012 at 02:21 PM.
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a







Post#2995 at 02-22-2012 02:18 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
Did you feel that you were coerced into having unnecessary tests? That does sometimes happen.
I still don't quite understand the whole "power" thing. Patients always have the right to refuse treatment, or seek a second opinion.
If you need a test, the individual can refuse the test, which could be a medical risk, but has no way to negotiate price. And sometimes the price has no correlation with the cost of the test . When corporations abused their power, employees joined unions to provide a balance of power. A free market is not possible without a reasonable balance of power. I think that the large disparity between the 'list' price of a service and what Medicare or the large insurance companies will pay shows how out of balance the medical system is.







Post#2996 at 02-22-2012 02:22 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by Deb C View Post
There are so many variables with health care pricing. TNT is correct about cost shifting. However, if they do not (on paper) charge these outrageous prices, their reimbursements are much less from insurance corporations and Medicare. It's such a darn game that everyone is playing these days. Our broken health care system forces prices upwards, even when the real cost is much less. We need a single payer system that would eliminate these games.
Single payer is one solution. Managed competition is another. I favor managed competition, but it seems to me that we should work to find a solution with a strong national consensus. The one thing that is clear is that the current system needs to be fixed.







Post#2997 at 02-22-2012 06:23 PM by radind [at Alabama joined Sep 2009 #posts 1,595]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
As Deb noted, they charge so much because they know that the reimbursement percentages are low.
I think her description of it as a "game" is accurate. Even someone without insurance takes a gamble of sorts.
It apears to be a 'game' that is rigged. I don't know on any other business that plays such 'games'. I support free enterprise where it fits. It does not fit with health care and we should not force people to gamble with their health.







Post#2998 at 03-08-2012 05:53 PM by Deb C [at joined Aug 2004 #posts 6,099]
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"On this International Women’s Day 2012, I wish all my sisters a day of peace, reflection, and plans for action that will advance our common issues and help leave better conditions for our daughters and granddaughters – and top on my list is a healthcare system that heals first and does not brutalize them by putting profits before all else."

...................... Donna Smith
"The only Good America is a Just America." .... pbrower2a







Post#2999 at 03-09-2012 02:41 PM by JDG 66 [at joined Aug 2010 #posts 2,106]
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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50081

...In the course of a few minutes, Sebelius – who will become one of the most powerful officials on Earth, once ObamaCare is fully up and running - concedes that ObamaCare’s funding mechanisms are collapsing, its costs are ballooning out of control, and it has driven the cost of insurance for American families up instead of reducing them, and she has absolutely no idea what it’s going to do to the federal budget deficit...







Post#3000 at 03-09-2012 05:03 PM by The Wonkette [at Arlington, VA 1956 joined Jul 2002 #posts 9,209]
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There has been a lot of discussion about contraception, religion, and such in the Election 2012 thread. The New Republic had a long article about the clash between Catholic doctrine and health care, as it applies to the many Catholic hospitals. I'm posting this article in full, because you have to subscribe to the New Republic in order to access the full article. Disclaimer -- I am pro-choice, although I feel abortion should be restricted (not abolished, but restricted) in the 3rd trimester.

When the Obama administration decided that birth control coverage would be mandatory for all insurance policies, even those provided to employees by large religious institutions, the outcry from Catholic leaders and social conservatives surprised a lot of people. But conflicts between health care and religion, particularly Catholicism, are not news in many parts of the country. Just ask physicians in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Sierra Vista is a rural community about 80 miles southeast of Tucson and about 20 miles north of the Mexican border. It has one hospital: the Sierra Vista Regional Health Center. In 2010, administrators announced that their secular institution would be joining the Carondelet Health Network, a system of Catholic hospitals. The intention was to make the hospital more financially viable, the administrators explained, but it would also entail some changes: The obstetrics service would have to abide by care directives from the Catholic Church. Although the merger would not be official for another year, staff would begin observing Catholic medical guidelines right away.

The hospital did not perform elective abortions, which is typical for small conservative communities. But the obstetricians were accustomed to terminating pregnancies in the event of medical emergencies. And just such a case presented itself one November morning, when a woman, 15 weeks pregnant, arrived at the emergency room in the middle of a miscarriage. According to a deposition later obtained by The Washington Post, the woman had been carrying twins and passed the first fetus at home in the bathtub. When she arrived via ambulance, she was stable and not bleeding. But the umbilical cord from the first fetus was coming out of her vagina, while the second fetus was still in her uterus.

Robert Holder, the physician on duty who gave the deposition, said the odds of saving the second fetus were miniscule. Doctors would need to tie off the umbilical cord and put the woman at severe risk of infection. After discussing the options, the family, with some difficulty, opted for a medical termination. But, under the new rules, Holder had to get approval from a nurse manager and eventually a more senior administrator. When Holder briefed the administrator, she asked whether the fetus had a heartbeat. It did, he said. “She replied that I had to send the patient out for treatment,” Holder later recalled. He arranged for the woman to get the procedure at the nearest major medical institution—in Tucson. According to his account, the 90-minute trip put her at risk of hemorrhaging and infection, which did not happen, and “significant emotional distress,” which did.

Holder said that an official from Ascension Health, which oversees Carondelet, told him earlier that the rules permit terminating a pregnancy when a spontaneous abortion seems inevitable. (Officials from Ascension and Sierra Vista were not available for comment.) But Bruce Silva, another obstetrician on staff and an early skeptic of the merger, told me that confusion over the rules was common. “We couldn’t get a straight answer,” Silva says. “There was so much gray area. And sometimes you need to make these decisions quickly, for medical reasons.” Even when the new rules were clear, Silva adds, they sometimes prevented physicians from following their best clinical judgments, not to mention their patients’ wishes. A prohibition on tubal ligations, a surgical form of sterilization that severs or blocks the fallopian tubes, meant women had to go elsewhere for this procedure.

However, physicians routinely perform this operation as part of a cesarean section, either when patients have requested the procedure or when it’s medically recommended, in order to avoid a second invasive surgery and the attendant medical risks. “I had a patient who was blind. She and her husband were working but poor, and she was diabetic, too,” Silva told me. “She was having her second baby, and that’s all she wanted and she’s got these medical issues. She asked for a tubal ligation. And I can’t do it.”

CATHOLIC HOSPITALS have been a bulwark of U.S. health care since the early twentieth century, when orders of nuns from Europe came to tend to the immigrant communities powering the industrial revolution. Many of these hospitals provided care to people of all faiths. But their first order of business was to help fellow Catholics, particularly those of the same ethnicity, who required care—and, frequently, last rites—delivered in a language they understood. In this respect, the Catholic institutions were like religious hospitals from other faiths that provided services for their own followers, whether it was Lutheran hospitals that could communicate with patients in their native German or Jewish hospitals that provided only kosher food on the wards.

Today, Catholic hospitals supply 15 percent of the nation’s hospital beds, and Catholic hospital systems own 12 percent of the nation’s community hospitals, which means, according to one popularly cited estimate, that about one in six Americans get treatment at a Catholic hospital at some point each year. We now depend upon Catholic hospitals to provide vital services—not just direct care of patients, but also the training of new doctors and assistance to the needy. In exchange, these institutions receive considerable public funding. In addition to the tax breaks to which all nonprofit institutions are entitled, Catholic hospitals also receive taxpayer dollars via public insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, as well as myriad federal programs that provide extra subsidies for such things as indigent care and medical research. (Older institutions also benefited from the 1946 Hill-Burton Act, which financed hospital construction for several decades.)

But sometimes the dual mandates of these institutions—to heal the body and to nurture the spirit, to perform public functions but maintain private identities—are difficult to reconcile. That was the issue with the recent contraception controversy. The whole point of the new health care law is to make insurance a public good to which every citizen is entitled, regardless of where he or she works. And, because employers have traditionally been the source of insurance for most working Americans, the law effectively deputizes employers to provide this public good. In some cases, that means forcing religious institutions to pay for benefits—such as birth control—that violate the terms of their faith. Even Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association and a staunch supporter of health care reform, protested the contraception rule, arguing, “The explicit recognition of the right of Catholic organizations to perform their ministries in fidelity to their faith is almost as old as our nation itself.”

This tension has implications that go far beyond birth control. In 2004, during the Terri Schiavo controversy, Pope John Paul II decreed that Catholic health care providers had obligations to provide food and water intravenously—even to patients in vegetative states, as long as doing so would keep them alive indefinitely. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops interpreted that as a mandate to provide life-sustaining treatment except in cases where treatment would be “unduly burdensome to the patient”—prompting ethicists at different hospitals to debate when, and whether, that prohibited physicians from removing feeding tubes for patients with no hope of recovery. When President Obama early in his term announced a new policy for stem-cell research, leaders of Catholic hospitals hinted their institutions were not likely to allow such projects, clinical value notwithstanding.

Still, reproductive health is the area that has given rise to the most public controversies. In 2007, a physician wrote an essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association about a woman, also pregnant with twins, whose pregnancy was failing, threatening infection that could jeopardize her ability to have future children and perhaps her life. Distraught, she and her husband decided to terminate the pregnancy—only to learn the Catholic hospital would not perform the procedure. The physician, Ramesh Raghavan of St. Louis, knew about the case because he was the husband.

A few years later, according to an article in Ms. magazine, a New Hampshire waitress named Kathleen Prieskorn went to her doctor’s office after a miscarriage—her second—began while she was three months pregnant.
Physicians at the hospital, which had recently merged with a Catholic health care system, told her they could not end the miscarriage with a uterine evacuation—the standard procedure—because the fetus still had a heartbeat. She had no insurance and no way to get to another hospital, so a doctor gave her $400 and put her in a cab to the closest available hospital, about 80 miles away. “During that trip, which seemed endless, I was not only devastated but terrified,” Prieskorn told Ms. “I knew that, if there were complications, I could lose my uterus—and maybe even my life.”

Probably the most notorious incident occurred in 2009, when a 27-year-old woman with “right heart failure” came to the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, a Catholic hospital in Phoenix, while eleven weeks pregnant. Physicians concluded that, if she continued with the pregnancy, her chances of mortality were “close to 100 percent.” An administrator, Sister Margaret McBride, approved an abortion, citing a church directive allowing termination when the mother’s life is at risk. Afterward, however, the local bishop, Thomas Olmsted, said the abortion had not been absolutely necessary. He excommunicated the nun and severed ties with the hospital, although the nun subsequently won reinstatement when she agreed to confess her sin to a priest.

THERE'S REASON to think these kinds of conflicts are becoming more common. Like every other industry in health care, hospitals are consolidating to strengthen their financial positions or merely to survive. “There are a lot of rural places that now have only a Catholic hospital,” says Lois Uttley, director of MergerWatch, a research and advocacy group based in New York City. “We hear regularly from doctors there who are just distraught at not being able to provide the care they want.” Silva, from Sierra Vista, notes that such arrangements can be particularly tough on poor patients: “If you’re wealthy, you go up to Tucson and you get a hotel. But a lot of people can’t even pay for the gas to get up there.”

Catholic ownership of a hospital can mean different treatment for the patients—a recent study in the journal Women’s Health Issues found Catholic-run hospitals tended to offer different counseling and different medical remedies than secular institutions—but it can also mean different training for the doctors. Standards for training obstetricians and gynecologists include instruction on medical contraception and tubal ligations, as well as abortion techniques (although residents may opt out), but most Catholic teaching hospitals will not provide it. “Residents will have to take the time to do it as an elective, and sometimes they just end up taking one or two lectures a year on it, which really isn’t adequate,” says Debra Stulberg, a family physician and assistant professor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

Sometimes, the tensions are too great to resolve. The deal to bring Sierra Vista under Carondelet fell apart, following protests that Silva, working with MergerWatch and the National Women’s Law Center, helped lead. In December, the governor of Kentucky, acting on the recommendation of his attorney general and in response to community lobbying, rejected a proposed merger that would have put two major hospitals under the control of a Colorado-based Catholic hospital system. Not long after, Catholic Healthcare West, a network of 38 hospitals, voluntarily severed ties with the Church and renamed itself “Dignity Health.”

But sometimes institutions have been able to reconcile religion and medicine with creative solutions. When a secular hospital in Kingston, New York, merged with a Catholic institution, in effect reducing the community’s hospitals from three to two, administrators set up a separate maternity unit in the parking lot. It provides a full range of reproductive services, including abortion. In Troy, New York, leaders of a newly merged secular-Catholic hospital came up with a different solution: The maternity unit operates on the second floor, as a “hospital within the hospital”—complete with its own financial operations.

These distinctions may seem artificial or meaningless, which is precisely what some people have said about President Obama’s proposal for contraception coverage. Under that proposal, insurers are supposed to provide coverage of birth control directly to the employees of institutions who believe contraception is a sin. Although it satisfied some of the critics, like Sister Carol, it infuriated critics like columnist Charles Krauthammer, who called it “an accounting trick.” But what’s the alternative? For better or worse, the government depends on Catholic hospitals to provide vital services—and the hospitals depend on the government for money to provide them. Convoluted solutions may be the only way for this convoluted mix of public purpose and private institution to survive.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article appeared in the March 15, 2012 issue of the magazine.

I want people to know that peace is possible even in this stupid day and age. Prem Rawat, June 8, 2008
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