The nurses find themselves facing a bizarre and formidable foe: a multibillion-dollar corporation running a hospital where business executives sit beside Catholic leaders on the board of directors and where, despite more than two decades of for-profit ownership, reproductive health care is restricted by Catholic doctrine. Such corporate religious hybrids are far from unusual, and the courts in recent years have granted them broader and broader leeway to use their religious ties to exploit workers. Nationwide, one in six hospital beds is subject to Catholic restrictions that have been invoked to deny birth control, tubal ligations, and gender-affirming surgeries, and to deny or delay care to patients who are bleeding and in pain from miscarriages if their fetuses still have a heartbeat. Many of these Catholic hospitals are owned by the country’s largest hospital systems. As a result, what many patients and communities have been left with is massive health care systems that can wield their religious affiliations to limit access to care and skirt laws intended to protect workers, while conveniently overlooking the more than century-long Catholic tradition of support for workers and unions.

Tenet, one of the nation’s largest health care systems, has expanded its reach in part by marketing its willingness to keep the Catholic rules in place. “Tenet was an early for-profit health care system that moved to acquire Catholic hospitals, and it basically established that it was willing to comply with Catholic doctrine following the purchase of these hospitals,” Elizabeth Sepper, professor at the University of Texas Austin School of Law, said. “It was a tool that Tenet used to break into markets and to acquire Catholic hospitals that were up for sale that otherwise probably would have gone to a Catholic health care system or another nonprofit.”

Sepper coined the term “zombie hospitals” to describe the creations resulting from these mergers. Such hospitals have little to no remaining connection to a church but are bound to follow religious restrictions on health care, sometimes through agreements attached to the land itself that purport to prohibit forever the use of the property for sterilization, abortion, or aid-in-dying. When the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced it would acquire the six-hospital Caritas Christi Health Care system in Boston in 2010, The Wall Street Journal quipped, “Catholic nuns, meet your new owners: A three-headed dog from hell.” The sale, Sepper notes, included a $25 million penalty if the archbishop determined that the for-profit owners were not upholding the Church’s principles.

Source: The New Republic

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