Martin Laverty is looking after our young, old, maternal and infirm — the Roman Catholic way. Laverty runs Catholic Health Australia, the largest provider of health and aged care outside government.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or communion wafer). For those in favour of a more secular system, the price of publicly funded Catholic heath — which includes the refusal to offer services such as abortion, euthanasia and birth control — is too high.
Catholic Health Australia operates 10% of our hospital beds and 15% of aged care beds. Without them our health system would be in big trouble, particularly in regional areas where Catholic facilities are sometimes the only game in town. They run 21 publicly funded hospitals, such as St Vincent’s in Sydney.
“We’ve been at this for a very long time, the first Catholic hospital in Australia is now 187 years old,” Laverty tells The Power Index.
He says Catholic Health Australia is very up front about what procedures you can get in a Catholic hospital: “We provide excellent care, we are involved in medical research, and it’s tested by external agencies, but within that there is certainly some services and research areas that we don’t involve ourselves with.”
What Catholic doctors can and can’t do is all set out in a Vatican-approved code of ethics, the regulations by which Catholic hospitals are obliged to operate. Among other things, the code says: “Catholic facilities should not provide, or refer for, abortions.”
That particular clause came under fire in 2008, when the Victorian state government legislated that doctors must refer for abortions if they could not perform them. Catholic hospitals account for around a third of all Victorian births.
At the time, Melbourne archbishop Denis Hart said that conscientious objectors would be forced to break the law and that it could prompt the Catholic Church to “get out of hospitals all together”.
Laverty, a keen opponent of the bill, says Catholic hospitals have complied and “would always seek to comply with the law”. He argues that in a “plural health system” there should be more flexibility in the law to accommodate the Catholic ethos.
But pro-choice campaigners such as Leslie Cannold say Catholic hospitals shouldn’t be receiving taxpayer dollars if they refuse to offer a full suite of services. She argues they are not sufficiently informing women about what s-xual and reproductive health services they don’t provide
“Our political leaders should not be handing over public monies to run so-called public hospitals that are empowered to unilaterally decide that they won’t provide a range of services because of their religious beliefs to public — and nearly always female — patients,” Cannold tells The Power Index.
Cannold says that often women may not know (or have a choice, in the case of acute care) what they are agreeing to when they go to a Catholic hospital. She believes it puts lives at risk.
“Women pay their taxes like all other citizens and should be able to expect the standard of care at all healthcare institutions that are accepting public monies and calling themselves public hospitals,” she says.
But while it may look like Catholic hospitals are bringing more religion into our lives by stealth, Laverty says he is not trying to attract converts. A key part of the Catholic mission, he says, is that the Church covers the areas of the system that may not be provided by government and the for-profit sector, such as care for the socially disadvantaged.
On multiple occasions during a phone interview with The Power Index, Laverty lauds the power of “turning up”. A Catholic “by birth and choice”, Laverty admits to struggles with his faith, particularly over how the Church sometimes conducts itself.
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