The Affordable Care Act and Community Benefit: A Mandate Catholic Health Care Can (Partly) Embrace (original) (raw)
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Catholic healthcare organizations and how they can contribute to solidarity
Abstract Solidarity belongs to the basic principles of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and is part of the ethical repertoire of European moral traditions and European healthcare systems. This paper discusses how leaders of Catholic healthcare organizations could understand their institutional moral responsibility with regard to the preservation of solidarity. In dealing with this question we make use of Taylor's philosophy of modern culture.
Building Community While Complying With the Affordable Care Act in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania
Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 2015
Among the many changes to health care and health delivery systems enacted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the ACA), is the requirement that, to maintain their 501(c)(3) status, all nonprofit hospital organizations must conduct a CHNA at least once every 3 years and adopt an implementation strategy to meet the needs identified therein (Section 9001a). The law further stipulates that the CHNA "takes into account input from persons who represent the broad interests of the community served by the hospital facil-abstract Problem: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct community health needs assessments (CHNA) every 3 years. Best practices for CHNAs are still emerging and, along with growing economic pressures, contribute to uncertainty about the short-and long-term costs hospitals will face as a result of the ACA. Purpose: This article describes a community-based partnership coordinated by a nonprofit hospital and a consortium of academic institutions as a model for conducting a CHNA. Key Points: Similar partnerships offer key advantages in complying with the ACA: local academic institutions are existing stakeholders in the community-they possess research expertise and have a vested interested in shaping implementation strategies to improve health; the process of collaborating itself helps to generate community resources, conceive of community health as a shared and iterative enterprise, and mobilize community partners in supporting long-term health priorities. Conclusions: No CHNA is ever perfect, but there are compelling reasons for nonprofit hospitals to seek community-based partnerships, not only because such partnerships comply with the law but, more importantly, because they hold great promise for linking the CHNA process and results to the health realities of local communities, ultimately bolstering community engagement while creating shared health priorities.
Managed Care, Catholic Vision, and the Claims of Justice
Christian Bioethics, 2000
There are numerous challenges posed to Roman Catholic health care institutions by recent developments in health care delivery. Some are practical, involving the acceptable limits of accommodation to and collaboration with secular networks of health care delivery. Others, quite often implicated in the first set, are explicitly theological. What does it mean to be a distinctively Roman Catholic health care institution? What are the nature and the scope of Roman Catholic institutional identity? More broadly, what is the moral relevance of themes in Roman Catholic social teaching to the provision of health care? This issue of Christian Bioethics addresses these questions with a spirited exchange among its authors. They offer noticeably different perspectives on the general cogency of Roman Catholic social teaching and different strategic recommendations for Roman Catholic institutions to maintain, or recover, their distinctive presence in health care delivery.
Health progress (Saint Louis, Mo.)
Establishing and maintaining institutional identity is a challenge for leaders in Catholic health care. A process known as "progressive articulation" can be used to help leaders assess how well their organizations reflect Catholic social tradition and help them apply this tradition toward specific organizational practices. The particular approach described here is called the "Identity Inquiry and Improvement Process" (31P), and it takes Catholic social principles and translates them into criteria and benchmarks for assessing an organization's interactions with internal and external stakeholders. In other words, 31P seeks to make mission measurable and concrete.
International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, 2019
Nonprofit hospitals have the potential to be strong partners in community-based projects. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, hospitals have new requirements to engage communities in identifying health needs and developing new community health programs. In this chapter, by Berkeley Franz, Daniel Skinner, and Danielle Dukes, a case study approach is used to explore how hospitals are developing new partnerships and the challenges they face in fostering relationships with the communities where they are located. Potential strategies will be suggested for improving communication between hospital employees and community members in the planning of community-based projects.
Linacre Quarterly, 2021
In the present time, what has been called the “medical–industrial insurance complex” in the United States needs reform. As health insurance in the United States remains inaccessible to millions of people, and as prices continue to rise, questions arise about the most moral ways to ensure delivery of health care especially to the most vulnerable populations. In this essay, I offer a virtue analysis of the moral implications of health insurance mandated by the US Government in contrast to an increasingly popular alternative to insurance, namely, healthcare sharing ministries. In part 1, I list some of the moral problems entangled with US Government-mandated health insurance, including injustice, disrespect for patient autonomy, limitations on patient freedom, exploitation of patients for profit, undermining of conscience rights, cooperation with evil, and scandal. In part 2, I discuss the issue of risk and then list some potential moral advantages to healthcare ministries, including respect for patient autonomy, conscience, and the religious freedom to witness to the Catholic faith in charity and solidarity.