Once more with feeling … follow the money
Exempla Lutheran in Wheat Ridge, Colo., and Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Centers in nearby Lafayette have been sponsored by the Community First Foundation, the former fundraising arm of Lutheran Medical Center, and the Kansas-based Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth in a complex joint partnership since 1997. The two organizations formed the non-sectarian Exempla Healthcare System to manage the hospital operations of the medical centers founded from the ashes of two former Lutheran facilities and St. Joseph Hospital, a 130-year-old institution in the city of Denver, which is wholly owned by the Sisters of Charity.
With the three Denver hospitals in need of major infrastructure investments to keep pace in a highly competitive health care market, the Sisters of Charity began flexing their muscle by demanding complete say in day-to-day operations. The Catholic health system complained to the Kansas Business Journal that without administrative control it could not borrow money needed for capital improvements.
Namely, that would mean the ouster of Exempla and its non-sectarian medical policies.
Not surprisingly, the ultimatum raised the hackles of community members, patients and health care professionals at the Exempla-run hospitals. The initial offer sought to buyout Community First’s co-membership in Exempla for $311 million with the Sisters of Charity committing an additional $300 million in capital improvements to the hospitals — a deal the charitable foundation readily agreed to as a way to plump up its sagging recession-battered assets and its growing distaste for the health care business.
The community and politicians fight to protect women’s health care
The Exempla board and a citizen group filed lawsuits in 2008 to block the sale citing, in part, concerns that non-sectarian medical policies would end under a Roman Catholic health care system. Community members formed Save Lutheran Medical Center and produced a petition signed by more than 9,000 local residents to reject the deal.
But it was all for naught.
Two years of lawsuits resulted in a June 5 binding arbitration agreement that nullified the cash payment to Community First as a violation of state law since the community, not the foundation, owns the assets of the tax-exempt, nonprofit hospitals.
But in a blow to reproductive health advocates, Arbitrator William Meyer determined that the takeover could still occur as long as nothing of value exchanged hands between the foundation and the Sisters of Charity. He also disregarded the religious medical directive argument claiming that the founding documents of the two Lutheran hospitals didn’t require them to remain secular.
While the cases played out in court and behind closed doors in the private arbitration hearing, Colorado state lawmakers worked to minimize the damage of losing hospital-based reproductive health care services.
Issues of religious doctrinal interference in physician-patient decision making came to a head in 2007 when Gov. Bill Ritter signed a law requiring hospitals and pharmacies to provide sexual assault victims information about emergency contraception. However, a conscience clause was added to the bill in order to get conservative Democrats on board after heavy lobbying by the Colorado Conference of Bishops.
Likewise, during the 2009 legislative session, the state passed a landmark Birth Control Protection Act to legally define contraceptive treatments, procedures and devices to stem future challenges to health insurance benefits or from “personhood” laws devised to give fertilized eggs civil right protections.
Though, again, the Catholic church forced a compromise to exclude mifespristone, or RU-486, and other federally approved pharmaceuticals that induce abortion.
