Why are Catholic organizations supporting Obamacare? Follow the money.

[update 3 - in fairness, please also scroll to the bottom and see the links supplied.]

Last week I was scratching my head trying to figure out the reasons why Catholic organizations (such as Catholic Charities USA, The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and the Catholic Health Association) are "rushing anti-life health care reform".

One of the reasons I'd like to be able to rule out very quickly is that they are doing so out of self-interest, because they have significant financial stakes in this debate.

It becomes hard to rule this possibility out when I find out that Catholic Charities just received $100,000,000 in government money on July 20th - it's first federal contract ever:

Catholic Charities USA has received a five-year, 100 million dollar federal contract to aid in disaster relief throughout the United States. The contract is the charity’s first ever federal contract.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Administration for Children and Families (ACF) section awarded the contract to Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA), a 100-year-old service organization.

The contract allows HHS to issue task orders to the agency for aid in connection with a specific disaster. The agreement became effective on July 20, a Monday CCUSA press release says. (CNA)

It becomes still more difficult to rule out this troubling possibility when I discover - through Jack Smith's original and incisive reporting - what sort of organization, and compensation, obtains over at the Catholic Health Association:

CHA does not represent patients or the poor. Their board is composed of, and Sister Carol represents, the very highly compensated chief executives of large health care conglomerates throughout the country. Lay-led corporations such as San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West and St. Louis-based Ascension Health run dozens of hospitals across numerous states which at one time were directly operated by religious orders.

The executives at these companies are compensated as you'd expect the heads of large corporations to be compensated. In the last year figures are available, the head of Ascension Health made $1,756,790 plus $599,744 in deferred compensation and benefits. Catholic Health East's top exec made $1,185,000 plus $693,000 in deferred compensation and benefits. Both execs are on the board of CHA, where they are joined by numerous execs from similar health systems.

But the biggest fish is Lloyd Dean, former Chair and current Speaker of Membership Assembly on the Board of Trustees at CHA. Dean is head of Catholic Healthcare West with 41 hospitals and clinics in California, Nevada and Arizona.

In 2006, the last year figures are available, Dean made $4,001,892 and the Chronicle of Philanthropy named him the second highest paid non-profit executive in the United States. Dean's compensation, according the the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is based in part on "improvements in the organization's finances". As well it should be. Dean also has made gobs in his position on other boards, including Wells Fargo & Co. Dean is non-Catholic and a donor to both the DNC and the Obama campaign.

This is not to begrudge these executives their salaries. It is only to point out that it is their interest that Sister Carol serves. And she serves them very much as a peer.

Democrats have been claiming that the resistance to their proposed health care reform plan is being organized by well-funded insurance organizations. Well, here are some well-funded trade associations who seem very interested in seeing the democrat proposal come to fruition.

So why is no one talking about that?

In a related vein, I was pleased to see that the Knights of Columbus are taking the right sort of action:

Delegates to the 127th annual convention of the Knights of Columbus Aug.6 adopted a resolution declaring opposition to “any health care reform legislation that does not explicitly exclude abortion coverage for any health insurance plan, public or private.”

On Tuesday in his annual report to the convention, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson had sounded a similar note, saying, “Health care reform must be abortion free.”

The resolution on Defending the Right to Life also called on “legislators everywhere to adopt legislation protecting the religious conscience rights of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, guaranteeing their right to refuse to participate in abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide or any other practice that is destructive of innocent human life or that conflicts with their sincerely-held religious beliefs.”

The resolution reaffirmed the commitment of the 1.78 million member Knights of Columbus “to unconditional support for the right to life and full protection in law for every human being from conception to natural death.”

That sounds much closer to an authentically Catholic starting point for health care reform.

update 2: I am being made aware of statements by these organizations which commit themselves to supporting only pro-life legislation. That's excellent, but what we have in our hands right now is anti-life legislation, and I believe many Catholics believe that, in supporting Obamacare, they are following the advice of these Catholic organizations.

So clearly we have some communication issues to straighten out over the next month.

I will be posting more on this topic soon.

update 3: here are statements from Catholic Charities and St. Vincent De Paul (PDF). 

The latest letter (July 30th PDF) from the Catholic Health Association's Advocacy wing is woefully-inadequate. We should focus our demands on CHA for them to clarify their position immediately.