In a Jan. 18 letters to members of the 112th Congress, the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops advised significant changes to the
health care overhaul passed by the previous session of Congress.
One day after the conference released the letter to the public, the
U.S. House of Representatives voted to repeal the law in question, the
2010 “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
Significantly, the USCCB has chosen neither to support, nor to
oppose, Republican-led efforts to repeal the law. Instead, the bishops
plan to “continue to devote our efforts to correcting serious moral
problems in the current law, so health-care reform can truly be
life-affirming for all.”
Although the overall repeal measure stands little chance of passing
in the Senate after its approval by the House, it is seen as the prelude
to a strategy that could result in changes to significant portions of
the overhaul.
These changes could incorporate some of the suggestions that the
bishops made in their recent letter that explained their critical but
nuanced position on health care reform.
The letter's signatories were Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of
Galveston-Houston, Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, and Archbishop
Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles – the chairmen of the committees on
Pro-life Activities, Domestic Justice and Human Development, and
Migration, respectively.
They reaffirmed the absolute importance of “basic health care for
all,” which Catholic social teaching affirms as a basic right rather
than an earned privilege. But they noted that “it has never been, and is
not now, for the bishops to decide the best means” –whether completely
public, private, or somewhere in between– “to realize this essential
goal.”
The bishops' conference had strongly criticized the health care
reform bill passed during the 2010 session of Congress for lacking
provisions that would ensure taxpayer money did not fund abortion.
Legal
experts at the bishops' conference said that President Obama's
executive order –purporting to block the act from funding abortion–
would not be effective across the board, but only in certain limited
cases.
The bishops have also consistently noted the law's failure to provide
access to reliable health care for illegal immigrants living in the
U.S., which they described as an injustice.
In the Jan. 18 letter, the bishops reiterated these objections,
without going so far as to say that last year's health care reform bill
should necessarily be repealed on this basis.
Instead, they urged passage of legislation along the lines of a bill
proposed –but never voted upon– during the last session, Rep. Joseph
Pitts and Dan Lipinski's H.R. 5111. That bill would have amended the
Affordable Care Act to prevent it explicitly from either providing
abortion directly, or funding health care plans and community health
centers that do so.
The bishops also praised the provisions of last year's proposed bill
H.R. 6570, which was intended to ensure that the health care bill did
not force individuals to provide or purchase coverage conflicting in any
manner with their religious beliefs, or other principles of conscience.
Like the Pitts-Lipinski proposal, this move to amend the Affordable
Care Act never went before Congress for a vote, meaning it would have to
be reintroduced in some manner during the 112th Congress.
The bishops
indicated they would “strongly support” any new proposals to prohibit
abortion funding and protect conscience rights under the health care
bill.
“We will advocate for addressing the current problems in the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act,” they resolved, “as well as others
that may become apparent in the course of its implementation.”
The Catholic Health Association, a private trade association of
hospitals which came out in favor of the Affordable Care Act over the
bishops' objections in 2010, issued a statement of its own on the same
day as the U.S. bishops.
That statement, which opposed any attempt to repeal the law, did not
address what the bishops called “serious moral problems” with its
proposals or omissions.
Instead, while acknowledging that “no one piece of legislation is
perfect,” Catholic Health Association President Sr. Carol Keehan stated
that “many of the (bill's) provisions … are essential and should remain
in law,” as a means to the Church's goal of expanding access to health
care.
Coming down on the other side of the repeal question, the National
Right to Life Committee also wrote to Congress, earlier in the month.
The committee favored an outright reversal of the health care
overhaul, rather than the specific changes that the U.S. bishops
recommended, as a means of preventing the government from funding
abortion within the category of health care.
In its analysis of the Affordable Care Act, the National Right to
Life Committee drew attention to the same avenues for abortion funding
that the bishops want to be closed off through subsequent legislation.
The committee also alleged that other parts of the act could result
in government rationing of critical care and lead to the promotion of
euthanasia. Consequently, the committee's directors held that “the law
is so riddled with provisions that violate right-to-life principles that
it cannot simply be patched” through the kind of surgical revisions
suggested by the bishops.
The U.S. bishops, for their part, have given no indication that they
see the promotion of euthanasia as a possible effect of the law.
Richard
Doerflinger, Associate Director for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S.
bishops' conference, told CNA/EWTN News on Jan. 5 that critics of health
care reform were unrealistically exaggerating the prospect of
government “death panels.”
SIC: CNA/USA