Outrage over the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House health reform bill ignores a bigger problem: it kills competitive advantage.
By inserting theological beliefs about reproductive health care into the private health insurance market, conservative House members have breached a no-mans land in the One Holy Apostolic Free Market they claim to worship.
With heavy lobbying by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Stupak-Pitts amendment creates a favorable competitive situation for the 624 Catholic hospitals across the nation — a lucrative business that spent $85 billion dollars in 2007 and encompasses 13 percent of the health care sector.
The Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives is now the largest of the church’s hospital systems in the country with 78 hospitals and 40 long-term care facilities in 20 states and operating revenues exceeding $9.6 billion ranking it sixth among all for-profit and charity health care networks.
It goes without saying that the church opposes abortion, contraception and sterilization on theological grounds which is they’re right as a private business.
But those medical directives also drive away patients that secular and other religiously-affiliated hospitals use to their advantage by emphasizing that they respect patient-physician decision-making on difficult medical decisions. Plus, from a cold, calculating green eyeshade perspective, sepsis from botched back alley abortions and multiple child births is a lot more expensive to cover than contraception.
With good odds that some sort of health care reform bill will pass Congress and be signed by the president, the potential for profit-making is unprecedented.
Congressional health insurance reforms promise the prospect of 36 million uninsured Americans — who are currently self-rationing care, paying on sliding fee scales, or not paying at all — flowing into hospitals, clinics and outpatient facilities via subsidized insurance, mandated policies and more affordable options in the proposed insurance exchange. Of the total uninsured, an estimated 15 million women of reproductive age could be eligible for coverage.
But this is where things get tricky.
One of the many factors patients use in choosing an insurance network physician is one with in-patient admitting privileges to a local hospital with the best reputation. And with these young, newly insured patients hospital loyalty could result in lots of billable revenue over their lifetimes.
Except the religious directives that restrict reproductive care creates a huge dilemma for Catholic hospitals trying to penetrate the billion dollar women’s market share in a brutally competitive health care sector. And that’s setting aside the fact that women make most medical decisions for their entire family. The power of their purse is great.
So the bishops used Stupak-Pitts to erase that competitive disadvantage. Make no mistake, health care — be it private, for-profit or public charity — is a business not for the faint of heart. And no less so for a Capitol Hill lobbyist with a clerical collar.
The $2.5 trillion health care industry now represents 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and is expected to double in less than 10 years. And those projections were made well before “health care reform” ever passed Barack Obama’s presidential campaign lips.
And now as the Senate enters the arena, we are faced with a critical question: Is the role of Congress to surreptitiously do the stealthy bidding of private business — even those who have the power of absolution, political or religious — against its secular industry rivals?
A version of this commentary appeared at RH Reality Check.
