Health Care Providers

The American health care system relies on a mixture of public and privately-owned hospitals, nursing homes and outpatient clinics, as well as on thousands of privately-owned pharmacies and physicians’ practices. As a result, patients often must seek care in a private marketplace that values profits and/or seeks to further certain non-profit charitable missions, such as the fulfillment of religious teachings.

For example, only about 25 percent of community-based hospitals in the United States are operated by local or state governments, and they contain only 16 percent of the nation’s hospital beds. The rest are operated by for-profit corporations or non-profit charitable organizations, including religious groups, which own 13 percent of America’s hospitals, with 18 percent of all hospital beds.

When a religious organization operates a hospital, nursing home or outpatient clinic, it may choose to use religious doctrine in determining which health care services it will offer. The nation’s more than 500 Roman Catholic-affiliated hospitals, for example, operate under guidelines issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. These hospitals do not offer birth control, sterilizations, abortions, infertility services, comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention information (such as “safer sex” counseling about use of condoms) and may limit patients’ end-of-life choices.

Individual health providers, such as physicians, nurses and pharmacists, sometimes use their personal religious or moral beliefs to decide which health care services they will provide to patients. For example, a group of pharmacists calling themselves Pharmacists for Life, are refusing to fill women’s prescriptions for contraceptives, based on the pharmacists’ religious beliefs about birth control.

Patients also can encounter religiously-based restrictions in their health insurance coverage. Some health insurance plans, such as New York’s Fidelis Care, will not pay for contraception, sterilization or abortion services. In addition some religiously-affiliated employers – such as hospitals, social services agencies and colleges – exclude certain reproductive services from the health insurance coverage they provide to their employees.

The MergerWatch Project monitors the activities of religiously-sponsored health care providers and works to protect patients’ access to medical information and care. If you have a problem with obtaining medical information or services because of the religious policies of your health provider or insurer, contact us at info@mergerwatch.org.