Can the Catholic Church save US health care?

(RNS) — We all think of Catholic nuns as the force that created Catholic schools and made them what they are in the Catholic experience. But in the 19th century, orders of women religious also founded dozens of Catholic hospitals, as well as the nursing schools whose graduates would staff them. That leadership of the U.S. health care system has persisted to this day: 1 in 7 hospital beds in this country belongs to a Catholic institution. Catholic health care systems, in addition, now often take over hospitals and other clinics serving vulnerable populations where it is difficult for vulture capitalists to make money.

Indeed, the Catholic Church’s role in health care is so broad that those who insist on abortion and contraception are disturbed that they can go only so far without encountering the church’s bulwark against violence directed at children and the hormonal attack on women’s bodies.

Another way the Catholic Church may help save the American health care system is by resisting its capture by Big Pharma. Those who identify with the left have long complained about the major pharmaceutical companies’ price gouging, which has driven the cost of health care up so much in recent decades. Now, thanks in part to populists such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tucker Carlson, this has now become a bipartisan issue. 

The system was ready to be captured, in part, because Western medicine has become so hyperspecialized, dividing human beings into their component parts (heart, back, lungs, liver, brain, bowels and so on). We have lost the generalist’s approach to the fullness of the human person. We have only recently begun to recognize how stress, diet, drugs, activity and loneliness affect our health, and even now it’s rare for medical systems to offer genuine (to use a very Catholic phrase) care for the whole person. It is much more lucrative to divide the person into component parts and charge a lot more for specialized care. So that’s the way we do it. 

The Catholic Church, with its focus on the person as a whole, including the spiritual self, is perhaps uniquely positioned to push medicine back in this direction. Catholic nurses in particular can help effect this change, as I argued two years ago in my book “Bioethics for Nurses”; their vocation puts them at the care of the full person in ways that even primary care physicians are not. Already, we have come to see nursing as something other than subservient to doctoring, and closer to a primary way of doing health care in its own right. 

The Catholic Church may also save the health care system not only from Big Pharma or specialization, but from itself and the secular political ideologies that are pushing it to say obviously false and even ridiculous things: obviously false claims about children’s ability to consent to sex change surgeries; obviously false claims about the need for women to stay on hormonal contraception virtually all of their fertile lives; and obviously false claims when it comes to abortion, supercharged by the hyperpoliticized environment after Dobbs.

An article just published by the journal Radiology, for instance, offers a supposedly definitive lexicon for radiologists serving pregnant women, which says, “The terms ‘living’ and ‘viable’ should also be avoided in the first trimester,” when referring to a prenatal human being. 

Now, prenatal human beings are obviously “living,” not least because they can die. The reason for avoiding such language, the article’s authors tell us, is that “these terms may be appropriated by people outside of the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and proscriptive legislation.”

Points for being honest about their motivations, though they missed the fact that millions of pro-lifers work in health care and will certainly call them out for such nonsense. But let’s be clear: This was not some half-baked journal article that no one supports. It was explicitly endorsed by several professional organizations, including the American College of Radiology, the American College of OB-GYNs and the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine. 

The Catholic Church has its work cut out for itself if it wants to fight the forces that want the status quo. But if we can find the courage of our convictions and build institutions of resistance, Catholics are also wonderfully suited to be the agent of change.