Public funding of religiously-sponsored hospitals that use doctrine to restrict reproductive health care and coverage

Religiously-sponsored hospitals are billing governments (local, state and federal) more than $168 billion a year, while many of these facilities are campaigning for expanded legal rights to refuse to provide reproductive health care to their patients or contraceptive coverage to their employees, if it conflicts with institutional religious doctrine. That is one of the preliminary findings from new research being carried out by the MergerWatch Project and the ACLU's Liberty Center. This study, to be released in 2013, will update the groundbreaking 2002 MergerWatch report, “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States,” which has been repeatedly cited in debates over proposed religious health provider “refusal rights.” Drawing upon institutional cost reports filed with the federal government and compiled in a comprehensive database of hospitals and health systems, this presentation will provide new details about the number, distribution and funding of religiously-sponsored hospitals in the U.S. It will describe the number of religiously-sponsored hospitals that are the sole community providers of health care for entire geographic regions, and receive additional public funding to provide this care. The presentations will also discuss the number and distribution of publicly-owned hospitals that are being managed by religious health systems and are using doctrine to restrict care. It will conclude by assessing the policy implications of these new data.