Tag: health care reform

The Bishops, Proving Me Right

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I shouldn’t take any credit for predicting the actions of the most predictable institution on the globe, but I’ll take it anyway.  I made the case at The Nation last week that the USCCB’s recent statement on aid in dying would lead to broader crack-downs on end of life rights, privacy, and awareness.  I was right.  According to a new report at Crisis Magazine and a press release from the bishops today, they’ve targeted Catholic professors at four universities:  Georgetown, Marquette, Santa Clara and Boston College.  How did the bishops identify the academics they wanted to discredit?  Writes Patrick J. Reilly at Crisis:

The professors’ efforts came to light during a Cardinal Newman Society investigation in 2005, following news reports of a legal brief filed by 55 bioethicists in opposition to “Terri’s Law,” a Florida measure that empowered Gov. Jeb Bush to ensure that the comatose Terri Schiavo received water and nutrition. As reported in “Teaching Euthanasia,” an exclusive report in the June 2005 issue of Crisis, multiple professors at Catholic universities had taken positions on end-of-life issues that seemed to conflict with Vatican teaching.

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Antichoice at the End of Life

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by Ann Neumann

Reposted from The Nation.

Last week a regulation to provide Medicare coverage for advance care planning counseling—that is, offer reimbursement to doctors for time spent talking to patients about end-of-life care—was abandoned… for the second time.

Section 1233 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) died a first death in the summer of 2009 in the debate over healthcare reform, during which healthcare opponents characterized the provision as a call for government-run “death panels.” Former Lieutenant Governor of New York State Betsy McCaughey, who consulted with Philip Morris while working on the hit piece against the Clinton healthcare plan “No Exit,” coined the “death panel” moniker; Sarah Palin popularized it. Then John Boehner, at the time the House minority leader, claimed that the provision would lead the country down “a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.” Fox & Friends repeated the “death panel” meme dozens of times, and soon, the provision was stripped from the healthcare bill. But last November, the Obama administration quietly inserted it into Medicare’s annual regulations—after the customary public review period. The New York Times‘s Robert Pear broke the news on Christmas Day that end-of-life counseling was to be covered by Medicare.  Immediately, right-wing think tanks, some with legal cases against the healthcare bill, leveraged the “death panel” rhetoric to bolster their arguments. Continue Reading →

An Authentically Catholic Hospital

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In November of 2009 Sister Margaret McBride was fired and excommunicated by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted. As a member of the ethics board at St. Joseph’s hospital in Phoenix, McBride had authorized an abortion to save the life of a 27 year old mother of four.  The young mother survived.  In May of this year when the story was broken by The Arizona Republic, a local newspaper, Olmsted stated about his decision, “An unborn child is not a disease … the end does not justify the means.” Continue Reading →

Believing in Contraception

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An excerpt from today’s announcement by a coalition of pro-choice and anti-abortion faith leaders, urging the Institute of Medicine panel to include contraception as a preventative service in health care reform, without a co-pay requirement, from Faith in Public Life.

Data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that 99% of women aged 15-44 who are sexually active have used a form of contraception, and two recent polls found extremely high support for contraception among evangelical Protestants, who are overwhelmingly opposed to abortion. An April 2010 survey found nearly 90 percent of evangelicals leaders said they approved of artificial methods of contraception, and a 2009 poll conducted by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in partnership with Gallup showed that 90 percent of evangelicals find hormonal/barrier methods of contraception to be morally acceptable for adults.

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