Catholic hospitals and universities may be forced to close in two years because of President Obama’s 
controversial health mandate, a leading US Cardinal has warned.
The mandate in question will force religious institutions to put their employees in insurance schemes that cover abortion-causing drugs, contraception and sterilisation.
Writing in his diocesan newsletter, Cardinal Francis George (pictured), Archbishop of Chicago said “the Catholic Church in the United States is being told she must “give up” her health care institutions, her universities and many of her social service organisations”.
Unless the mandate is change, Cardinal George said, institutions may be forced to choose between dropping their religious identity or abandoning their work.
If Catholic hospitals were to close, it could add major costs to the US taxpayer. According to the Catholic Health Association of the US, the Church operates 12.6 percent of hospitals in the US accounting for 15.6 percent of all admissions and 14.5 percent of all hospital expenses, a total for Catholic hospitals in 2010 of $98.6 billion.
More than one in six people over 65 and disabled patients get attention from Catholic hospitals, and more than one in every eight low-income patients as well. Almost a third (32 percent) of these hospitals are located in rural areas, where patients usually have few other options for care.
Catholic hospitals also tend to cover more of the costs where patients have difficulty paying. For instance, Catholic Health Services in Florida provides free care to families below 200 percent of US Government’s poverty line, and caps costs at 20 percent of household income for families that fall between 200 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line.
Cardinal George offered a striking picture of “what will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded.”
“A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices,” he explained.
The first would be to “secularise itself, breaking its connection to the Church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop.”
The second choice would involve paying “exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilisation. This is not economically sustainable.”
A Catholic institution’s only other choices would involve transferring ownership to a non-Catholic group or the government – or shutting down altogether.
Meanwhile, an amendment in the US Senate designed to expand the religious freedom exemptions to the Obama mandate was defeated yesterday.
The Senate voted 51-48 to reject the amendment, introduced by Republican Senator Roy Blunt.
The amendment would have allowed employers and health insurers to ignore portions of the federal health reform law they found morally objectionable.
It said an entity could refuse to provide types of health coverage on moral or religious grounds.
The vote was largely along party lines, with only one Republican, retiring Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, opposing the amendment and only three Democrats, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, supporting it.