CMA engages Obama health officials on conscience rights

Excerpted from "The Global Health Initiative: Maximizing Impact on Global Health," December 2011, by Lois Quam, executive director of the Global Health Initiative.

The Global Health Initiative (GHI), the Obama administration’s strategy to maximize the impact of U.S. investments in global health, aims to protect Americans, save millions of lives around the world and create strong nations. Our health agenda is taking on the hardest and most intractable challenges, including maternal and child mortality, HIV/AIDS and malaria.

This unified effort is driven by the combined leadership of key U.S. agencies and builds on current programs, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), to deliver a focused, cost-effective and results-oriented program for enhancing global health. To achieve its goals, GHI also reaches beyond the health sector to areas that intersect with health, such as safe water, sanitation, health financing and education for girls.

GHI is rooted in seven core principles:

1. Focusing on woman, girls and gender equality.
2. Encouraging country ownership and investing in country-led plans.
3. Building sustainability through health systems strengthening.
4. Strengthening key multilateral organizations, global health partnerships and private-sector engagement, and leveraging resources of key stakeholders.
5. Increasing impact through strategic coordination and integration.
6. Improving metrics, monitoring and evaluation.
7. Promoting research and innovation.

Through GHI, the United States also seeks to achieve major improvements in health outcomes by reforming the way it supports countries in delivering health services. Strategies include working to increase the number and types of local partners, such as nonprofit organizations, private businesses, civil society, faith-based organizations and partner governments, and strengthening the capacity of partner countries to lead, manage and oversee health programs.

CMA VP for Govt. Relations Jonathan Imbody: "I recently sought to persuade the author of this article, GHI Executive Director Lois Quam, and other high-ranking Obama administration officials to respect conscience rights in order to gain the crucial partnership of faith-based health organizations overseas and in the U.S.

"In a meeting this month at the U.S. Department of State with Ms. Quam and officials from the CDC, USAID, HHS and the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, I urged administration officials not to discriminate against faith-based organizations on the basis of their conscientiously held moral convictions, especially considering that such organizations often can best accomplish the vast majority of the health care goals aimed at by domestic and international grant programs.

"A World Health Organization report reveals that between 30 percent and 70 percent of the health infrastructure in Africa is currently owned by faith-based organizations.^[1] The Gallup World Poll asked sub-Saharan Africans in 19 countries about their confidence in eight social and political institutions. Overall across the continent, they were most likely to say they were confident in the religious organizations (76 percent) in their countries.^[2]

"I explained to the U.S. officials at our State Department meeting that the same faith that compels faith-based individuals and organizations to care for the poor also compels them to minister according to faith-based moral and ethical standards. For the government to ignore those convictions or worse, to purposely exclude faith-based groups on the basis of those convictions, is to throw away the critical assistance of a huge sector of the health care community, especially in poor and medically underserved countries and regions. Why reject the partnership of a faith-based group, I asked, simply on the basis of one area of disagreement when that group is willing and ideally equipped and positioned in a community to achieve 90 percent of the health goals of a federal program?
"I cited the recent discrimination by HHS against a Catholic group by taking away a federal grant to provide care for victims of human trafficking, after the group declined to participate in abortions as stipulated by revised grant requirements. I urged federal officials at our State Department meeting to put systems in place to review grant requirements to insure that they do not unnecessarily or illegally discriminate against faith-based organizations."

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