An increasing number of clinics and hospitals in the United States are run by religious sects, predominately the Catholic Church.

These publicly-funded institutions conspire to obstruct proven legitimate fields of healthcare that defy their church's ideology, typically:

• Life-saving hysterectomies, based on a personal belief that a person's fertility is more sacred than their own life;
• Hormone therapy for transgender patients, even those who have been treated for years and become necessary for their physical health;
• Abortions, even for pregnancies endangering a mother's life and wellbeing;

and likely many more grievances yet to be reported.

By their refusal to treat on the grounds of personal beliefs, these hospitals have broken the Hippocratic Oath all physicians make to be licensed.

As these religious hospitals continue drawing from public health funds, they and the government agencies involved have committed one of the greatest violations of the First Amendment in U.S. history: that the state shall not work to establish a church.

As many as one in seven hospital beds may belong to a religious hospital that may enforce their personal beliefs on patients at the cost of their lives. Even today many communities' only nearby healthcare option is a religious hospital.

This continues as long as establishments like the Catholic Church stand. It will invest further in its clinics, that go on to merge with secular clinics and overwrite their policies, as the Church's money and influence more than likely takes precedence over a local organization's.

Seeing as the United States was founded on a principle of separation of church and state, it should be recognized that separation of church and medicine is an equally important principle.

Our government must strip religious hospitals of taxpayer funding, sanction their expansion over secular clinics, and invest in establishing public secular alternatives in all metro communities monopolized by religious healthcare.