By KPR
Louisville, KY – Later this month, officials with University of Louisville Hospital, Jewish Hospital and Catholic Health Initiatives will address a General Assembly committee on the hospitals' pending merger. The principals were called before state lawmakers over concerns that reproductive and end-of-life services will be changed once the Catholic Health Initiatives owns a majority of the other facilities. How to provide vasectomies, abortions, contraception and other services has been a sticking point in many religious-secular mergers, but there have been solutions. In Kingston, New York, a third party was brought in to run a separate clinic outside of a secular hospital. Paul Kirby with the Daily Freeman newspaper wrote about the issue.
"It would come up, 'We gotta merge to save money, we gotta do it,' and then it would just disappear because the argument over abortion was never resolved. But when the state said, 'You gotta do it or one of these hospitals is going to close,' well, they made it happen."
In Austin, a floor of a public hospital was exempted from religious doctrine in a merger. That floor has become a women's hospital. Both solutions were costly and both required separate management structures. U of L officials say they will protect all currently-offered services, but haven't said how, though $15 million will be set aside to do so.