The state bumps aside private insurers to become the #1 insurer, and then you figure that makes it alright for the state to dictate to a religious organization, because the religious organization “operates with huge amounts federal funding”?
That’s a crock.
If the hospital were to take ear-marked grants, that’d be one thing, but just because the state provides the insurance for many of the hospital’s customers hardly makes the hospital a creature of the state, and therefore at the state’s mercy for making policy.
If McDonald’s sold hamburgers to state workers, would that make McDonald’s “a recipient of government funds”?
Of course not, but I am sure that this hospital had to sign provider contracts with the state and the Medicare intermediary in order to recieve Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. Not quite the same thing as the McDonalds example.
It would be wonderful if this Catholic hospital would drop out of the government system and treat the truly poor on a charity basis. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
Then you certainly won’t mind if university and independent research facilities that rely heavily on government funds do embryonic stem cell research. As it stands now, these facilities have to spend a lot of extra money and go through all sorts of inefficient contortions to keep an absolute wall between their main operations that receive government funding and the small parts which involve embryonic stem cell research and don’t get any federal funding. The researchers aren’t allowed to share any lab equipment, and in some cases aren’t even allowed to share information between each other. This is all due to Catholic and other religion-based forces organizing to get a law passed prohibiting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Once they got the law passed, they demanded it be enforced to the letter, notwithstanding the beliefs of the researchers in all the facilities. But now they don’t want the taxpayer-funding connection to force THEM to comply with the law. They think regulations tied to government funding should apply to other people, but not to them. Won’t fly.