Coming And Going

by digby

Far be it for me to question the motives of a religious leaders, but this does seem like something that should at least be part of the argument:

The justifiable anger at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for lobbying on the Stupak-Pitts amendment overshadows what is possibly the bigger motive for the Vatican: the billions of dollars at stake for the church’s hospitals.

The scale of the church’s involvement in the rapidly growing $2.5 trillion dollar American health care industry is staggering.

What the Stupak-Pitts amendment does for the Catholic health care system is omit a competitive advantage secular and other religiously-affiliated hospitals without doctrinal restrictions can use to simultaneously market their services to both the expected influx of newly insured patients and the outpatient medical professionals who will treat them.

By restricting insurance coverage of women’s reproductive health care, the competitive barriers faced by Catholic institutions will be eliminated — provided the amendment is not stripped out of the final bill that emerges from House-Senate health care reform conference committee. Which is why pro-choice advocates should expect nothing short of a full-frontal attack by the Vatican on conservative Senators.

And in the case of an industry that accounts for 18 percent of the gross domestic product and is expected to double in less than 10 years, it’s absolutely critical to follow the money.

And once again, we see the problems with government funding of “faith based” programs in general. Money tends to muddy up the whole argument, doesn’t it?

I doubt seriously that anyone will have the guts to even bring this up. Religious correctness is far, far more prevalent than anything the PC police could ever gin up. But it does bring up the wider issue of fungibility. We are told that insurance companies cannot keep these funds separate because money is fungible. When do you suppose they figured that out? Faith based programs are all premised on the idea that religious organizations would keep government funds separate from those which are used to proselytize. In fact, there are dozens of examples of private contractors keeping federal money separate from their own private funds and 17 states do it even in the case of medicaid for abortions.

If the churches want to use this fungibility argument, bring it on. It’s hard to see how even the Roberts Court could uphold this double standard. And I can’t see how the churches benefit if they don’t.

I personally think the whole thing is absurd. Money is fungible and all the protestations of the churches over the years that they weren’t using my tax dollars to spread their word never made any sense to me. And it’s not my “moral objections” that rule in this case (although I do have them) it’s the US Constitution which clearly intends that the government not be involved in the religious sphere. Churches aren’t taxed for just that reason — separate spheres, no taxes, no interference. The churches and their adherents, however, not only want to be tax exempt, which most people agree with, they want taxpayers to actually fund them. And now they also want to determine how tax dollars are spent, including those spent on constitutionally guaranteed rights.

At some point some legal decisions are going to have to be made one way or the other. Either federal money is fungible or it isn’t — and either the constitution allows government money to be spent on abortion or it doesn’t. You can’t have it both ways on those issues. This silly pretense that just because some people really, really don’t like abortion means they get an exception to every rule that guides federal and state or private partnerships in other circumstances is ridiculous.And why government money can’t be spent for a constitutionally sanctioned medical procedure just because some people feel strongly about it makes no sense. Churches have many privileges in society and there are very few people who would argue that they shouldn’t have them. But they have limits as well.

And the fact that they also have huge financial stakes in the outcomes of these moral decisions should not be ignored. Money is power and power is money and there’s no doubt that a rather large incentive exists to tilt the playing field to those who can control the political system. Anyone who thinks that the Christian tradition isn’t riddled with political ambition and financial corruption hasn’t been paying attention.

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