Experts are warning that if the contentious HHS mandate is permitted to stand, it will force the closure of 13 percent of U.S. hospitals and reduce the number of available beds by 120,000.
LifeSiteNews.com is reporting the sobering statistics that are lurking behind the public furor over whether the imposition of the HHS mandate, which would force religious employers to offer insurance coverage for services that violate their religious beliefs, is about religious freedom or access to birth control.
“The Catholic Church…operates 12.6 percent of hospitals in the U.S., according to the Catholic Health Association of the U.S., accounting for 15.6 percent of all admissions and 14.5 percent of all hospital expenses, a total for Catholic hospitals in 2010 of $98.6 billion,” wrote Ed Morrissey of the Hot Air blog.. “Almost a third (32 percent) of these hospitals are located in rural areas, where patients usually have few other options for care.” All in all, “more than one in six seniors and disabled patients get attention from these hospitals.”
As a result, more than 100,000 beds would disappear from the health care system.
Richard Ralston, the executive director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, told LifeSite that it’s unlikely that all Catholic hospitals will close, but “if they’re put in an intolerable moral position, they would have the right to do that.”
The loss of so many beds in religious institutions is only one element among many that would lead to a gradual decline in the number of physicians and medical institutions that would occur as ObamaCare is implemented, with the reduced supply coming just as tens of millions of newly insurance Americans and millions of aging baby boomers will swell the ranks.
Ralston told LifeSiteNews, “The only way they say we’re going to reduce spending is we’re going to cut [government] reimbursement to providers and force more providers to provide services at below their cost. You don’t need to have a Nobel Prize in economics to know the long-term impact of that is to drive providers out of medicine.”
“Why go through 10 years of medical training to have Kathleen Sebelius tell you what you can collect from your medical patients?” he asked.
The mandate will force the closure of more than just hospitals, however. Schools, philanthropies, and orphanages affiliated with religious denominations would also be forced to shutter.
For the good of people, the Church has no choice but to fight back, which Ralston predicts will only lead to more “vicious attacks on the religious for political reasons.”
“Freedom of religion (or freedom of anything) enrages the collectivist, intellectual, political, and journalist elites if it stands in the way of their control over every detail of our daily lives,” he wrote in a new column to be published shortly by the Orange County Register. “That makes religion itself the target of this rage.”
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