Otero County has only one major hospital, so what happens when it merges with a Catholic care service that limits reproductive and other care?
That’s what Nina Martin wanted to find out. She’s a reporter and editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting and she went to Almagordo for the Reveal podcast. She spoke with KUNM about what she found about the merger between Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center and Christus Health.
NINA MARTIN: New Mexico did not have an automatic process for reviewing hospital mergers, or even having any notice at the state level that a merger was going to happen. And that seems highly problematic all by itself. But when you're talking about it, Catholic hospital coming in and basically taking over a hospital that serves a very large region, including the Mescalero Apache Reservation, the Holloman Air Force Base, a lot of people who are, you know, live in rural areas and don't have great access to health care as it is, suddenly, their hospital was going to be taken over, reproductive and other services were going to be limited, and the state couldn't do anything about it.
KUNM: New Mexico didn't have a mandatory review process for hospital mergers prior to a bill passed in February of this year. Many states don't have that review process. Can you speak about that?
MARTIN: This kind of review is really, really necessary. Because state governments are able to kind of take a look at really what the big picture is across the state. And if they know about mergers or deals happening, they can start to take action, they can start to ask questions, they can say, “No, you can't do this.” Or "you can only do this if you provide us with a plan for how you're going to provide services."
And the other thing I found is that the lack of any kind of oversight or regulation in a lot of states isn't just a problem when we're talking about Catholic health care and religion and health care. It's actually a really big problem if we're talking about the other major driver recently of health care deals, which is private equity. AndNew Mexico has a huge proportion of its hospitals owned by private equity. And those deals have been in a lot of places just really difficult to regulate to even know that they're happening. And they can have really huge impacts because private equity companies will buy up a hospital or they'll buy up a bunch of hospitals or buy up a bunch of clinics. And then they'll come in and do a lot of different things to kind of strip out money from the entities that they purchased, including closing them, without really thinking about how this is gonna affect the community? It's really more how is it going to affect our investors?
KUNM: Can you please explain the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic health care services (ERDs)?
MARTIN: It's a set of 77 directives that are written by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that basically are there to tell Catholic healthcare systems about the kinds of care that they can and can't provide? These directives touch on pretty much all of the hot button health care issues of our era. So reproductive care, abortion, emergency contraception, birth control pills, miscarriage, managements, gender affirming care, and also the right to die. So sort of death with dignity laws. And these are rules that are written by bishops who are mostly men and who are not doctors, and they apply to every Catholic health care setting in the country. So not just hospitals, clinics, doctors and nurses who work in those clinics and hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, insurance companies. So all of these rules, these directives or ERDs, apply to any Catholic health care entity in the US.
KUNM: Overall, why is the story important not just to New Mexico, but nationally?
MARTIN: The expansion of Catholic health care systems has been going on for a really long time. But in the post-Roe era, it's especially important in a blue state, that's really important. But think about the red states, there's a lot of red states that have high concentrations of Catholic health care as well. And in those places, you might think, well, abortion is already banned. So what does it matter if there's Catholic health care? Yes, there are abortion bans in those places. But birth control is still legal, and birth control is more important than ever. And so now if you have health care systems that are making it even harder to get reliable birth control, and then you add on top of that the fact that many of these mergers can happen without any government oversight without any community input. That's really dangerous.
