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I wonder how many countries’ healthcare the Vatican hoard could fund in perpetuity. The number is greater than one.
I was actually surprised to find out LDS (mormons) are several times wealthier than the Catholic Church on paper.
Their total revenue is around $30 billion a year. They could, in theory, pay for an entire states medical costs like Utah that spends about $18 billion a year.
Spefically pointed to your comment though, the Catholic Church is already the biggest private healthcare provider in the world. It operates roughly twenty percent of healthcare facilities in the world.
Those are great points. What payment model do the Catholic hospitals usually use? Free to everyone? Or are they operating the hospitals but only under whatever insurance or government coverage exists? I’m sure it varies around the world but I’m curious about the US especially. I think I was born in a Catholic founded hospital. But it seems like they are just the care provider and not so much the funding provider. The world “healthcare” has two meanings in this way.
Yes, they do not pay all the costs. Often times they will write off debts or provide care for free. This is not always the case though. Typically they are funded like a for profit hospital with the major difference being there are no shareholders to take the profit.
I have heard estimates that they subsidize $60 billion a year in healthcare costs across the US.
I was trying to get a clearer picture of how many countries the Catholic Church could fund annually but estimating their money is very complicated. They are not centralized like the Mormon church and all their churches operate independently.
With estimates as high as $2 trillion of total revenue, in theory, they could pay for several European countries. But not something like the whole US that spends $5.3 trillion on healthcare.
I think this also touches on just general criticism of the Catholic church. Are they really good stewards of their money, is corruption a problem, etc. I have read a lot of conflicting information on these topics.
Catholic hospitals are private in the US, unless specifically otherwise designated. You can pull up the public finance records to see how revenue is spent, to the best of my knowledge.