A Catholic voice on the issue of Health Care:
Archbishop Donald Wuerl, quoted in "PoliticsDaily"
As part of living out the Gospel challenge to heal, the Catholic community knows firsthand the impact of the current crisis. The Catholic Health Association alone represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals and health care systems across the United States. In fact, the nation's 600 Catholic hospitals care for one-sixth of all hospital patients in the United States. Add onto that the more than 1,000 nursing homes, neighborhood clinics and other health ministries, such as the Spanish Catholic Center's medical clinic right here in the nation's capital, as well as the outreach by thousands of parishes nationwide to those in need.
We offer a safety net for many who fall through the huge cracks of a failing health care system. The uninsured find their way to our emergency rooms, shelters and clinics where they know they will not be turned away.
We teach that health care is a basic human right, an essential safeguard of human life and dignity. Here in the Archdiocese of Washington, the Catholic community serves nearly 600,000 people in our hospitals and other health care facilities and over 120,000 persons through Catholic Charities, including its Family Centers, and even more through parishes. It is this direct, frontline experience that has guided the Church's efforts for decades to expand and improve health care coverage in our nation and our work for genuine health care reform today.
So, what are some of the basics of health care reform?
Health care reform especially needs to protect those at the beginning of life and at its end -- the most vulnerable and the voiceless. It is essential that reform include long-standing and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates and uphold existing conscience protections for health care providers. Abandoning current federal policies on abortion funding and conscience protection, thereby forcing people to pay for or participate in abortion would be morally reprehensible and a repudiation of the understanding of individual freedom and the rights of conscience that goes back to the American Revolution.