Catholic Health Insurance Ethics Reviews (CHIER)

What Do Your Health Insurance or Pharmacy Benefits Plans Pay for?

Bishops and administrators of Catholic health plans are sometimes surprised to learn that their self-funded diocesan health plan covers certain procedures that violate Catholic moral teaching, even when they have established basic exclusions. On the other hand, they may not realize how many medically and morally sound interventions they are denying to employees through overly broad exclusions.

Effectively excluding practices such as abortion, contraception, gender transitioning, reproductive technologies, and sterilization, while still providing appropriate access to sound interventions for infertility, miscarriage, women’s health issues, and gender dysphoria, can be complicated. It requires familiarity with health benefit plan language, medical procedures and coding, claims administration, and pharmaceutical products. Above all, it requires in-depth understanding of Catholic moral teachings and their application to contemporary health care.

Moral Clarity, Ethical Integrity, Financial Stewardship

The NCBC brings its unique ethics expertise and experience to bear in the Catholic Health Insurance Ethics Review (CHIER) Program through a two-tiered process:

Tier 1: Benefit Plan Guidance

• Review of existing plan design

• Identification of interventions for ethics-based exclusion

• Coverage suggestions for morally sound options typically omitted

• Language recommendations for plan documents

• Implementation process guidance for new or updated benefit plans 

Tier 2: Claims Review

• Claims processing guidance for plan administrators using ICD-10, CPT, and HCPCS II codes;

• Regular periodic analysis of claims to ensure ethics compliance

• Claims appeal guidance with real-time answers to ethics questions from insurance carriers, third-party administrators, brokers, or others

• Periodic reports with review data

• Periodic updates to claims and benefit plan guidance