As Peter Laarman noted here, and is making its way around the blogosphere, the Senate version of the health care reform bill would cover “spiritual care,” at the behest of Christian Scientists.
The amendment at issue, which has no counterpart in the House version of the bill, was sponsored by Republican Orrin Hatch, with the support of Democrats John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy. The Massachusetts connection (the Christian Scientists are headquartered in Massachusetts) goes back a way: Kennedy played a key role in getting similar coverage in Medicare in the 1990s.
That coverage was not without controversy. According to a 1999 article in the Washington Post, the church has used the Medicare provision providing reimbursements to Christian Science nursing home facilities in support of its claims of the legitimacy of spiritual healing. After the original Medicare law was overturned in a federal lawsuit brought by a former Christian Scientist, Rita Swan, and her organization, Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD), Hatch and Kennedy worked together to amend the law. According to the Post, “The new wording dropped any mention of the Christian Science church and instead created a new category of health care provider: the ‘religious nonmedical health care institution.'”
At the time, Kennedy said, “The Christian Science church was founded in Massachusetts over a century ago, and its members deserve the same basic fairness in federal aid that all other Americans receive. It would be fundamentally unfair for Medicare . . . to discriminate against Christian Scientists, and I welcomed the opportunity to work with Sen. Hatch to protect them.”
UPDATE: According to lobbying disclosure forms, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, paid the D.C. law and lobbying firm Mayer, Brown and Platt $110,000 this year to lobby Congress on health care reform and spiritual care.
