DENVER—The pending sale of two nonsectarian Denver-area hospitals to the owners of a Roman Catholic hospital has opponents arguing that church guidelines banning abortions, emergency contraception and other services will harm health care offerings for the region’s residents.
State Attorney General John Suthers has approved the $311 million deal, finding there won’t be a “material change” in the hospitals’ provision of care.
But ethical and religious directives issued by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops prohibit doctors from providing sterilizations and many infertility treatments. They require people in vegetative states to be supplied with nutrition and hydration, a position reiterated by the Vatican this fall.
St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver, owned by the Catholic Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System, operates under the directives. The Catholic Sisters of Charity system plans to buy out Lutheran and Good Samaritan medical centers, which are nonsectarian.
The sale would change the policy on emergency contraception at Good Samaritan and Lutheran, where sexual assault victims can now get a prescription to prevent pregnancies. At St. Joseph’s, victims are told where they can get emergency contraception.
The Catholic Sisters of Charity formed Exempla Healthcare a decade ago with the Lutheran Medical Center Foundation, now the Community First Foundation, to operate St. Joseph’s Hospital and Lutheran Medical Center in suburban Jefferson County. The Sisters of Charity continued to own St. Joseph’s while Exempla took on ownership of Lutheran and opened Good Samaritan. Under the sale, the Sisters of Charity plans to buy out Community First’s share of Exempla.
Denver-based Compassion & Choices, a successor to the Hemlock Society, has joined with Ami Sadler, a Boulder resident treated at Good Samaritan, and Stephen Krebs, an internist at Lutheran, in a state lawsuit to block the deal. The Exempla board also opposes the sale unless patients can get services that will be banned, and on Tuesday it filed its own lawsuit.
“We think that as long as something is legal as a treatment option it should not be withheld,” said Roland Halpern, spokesman for Compassion & Choices.
Sale opponents are especially concerned about the effect on Lutheran, which is the only general hospital in suburban Jefferson County, Colorado’s second most populous with about 538,000 residents.
“It has potentially devastating consequences for people who aren’t aware of the directives,” said Ed Kahn, a lawyer with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, which helped opponents draft comments on the deal.
Christine Woolsey, a spokeswoman for the Sisters of Charity system, which owns nine hospitals in Colorado, California, Kansas and Montana, said the banned procedures account for just 1 percent of patient stays at the two hospitals.
“This transaction is going to strengthen local health care in Denver and provide a lot of other services,” she said.
The idea behind the sale is to fund improvements proposed by Exempla, Woolsey said. The Sisters of Charity plans to invest $300 million in the two hospitals.
Jeff Selberg, president of Exempla Healthcare, said talks between doctors and a Catholic ethicist on providing banned services broke down after nine months.
Financial pressures are behind an increasing number of mergers between religious hospitals and nonsectarian ones, said Lois Uttley, director of the Merger Watch Project, a New York-based group that fights religious-based restrictions on patient rights and health care.
Uttley said hospitals, many of them 50 years or older, need cash to expand or improve at the same time they’re being squeezed by discounts to managed care companies and state cuts in Medicaid payments.
Uttley’s group, which has offered guidance to opponents of the Colorado sale, has been involved with 50 mergers in 25 states since 1997, including the sale of Catholic hospitals to nonsectarian ones. In one case the new owners agreed to follow the Catholic guidelines as long as the hospitals continued to use the Catholic names; in another the guidelines were kept for three years and then phased out.
Uttley said some states, like New York, California and Maryland, allow consumer groups like hers to play a direct role in reaching agreements on patient services, but Colorado doesn’t have a such a process.
“These hospitals exist to serve the patients in the community. They are not just privately owned businesses that can do what they want,” Uttley said.
Community First has pledged $2.9 million a year to provide services banned by the directives, but hasn’t decided how to do it, spokesman Palmer Pekarek said.
Possibilities include a “hospital within a hospital,” carving out some services and operating them separately from the rest of the facility, or sending patients to other clinics, he said.
The deal is expected to close Jan. 31, but the lawsuits ask a district court judge to order that the two hospitals continue nonsectarian care or that money from the sale be used to provide nonsectarian medical services.
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