Master Plans, Medical Centers, and Medicare: The Struggle to Restructure Catholic Health Care in the Diocese of Brooklyn in the 1960s

Abstract: This article examines the effort to restructure Catholic health care in the Diocese of Brooklyn during the 1960s. It looks specifically at the formation of the Catholic Medical Center of Brooklyn and Queens (CMC), an ambitious plan to unite diocesan-owned hospitals and forge the nation's first multi-institutional Catholic hospital system. Formally announced just two days before the federal government's new Medicare program launched, the plan reflected the optimism of the moment and reveals the enormous faith that Catholic health care providers placed in the promise of federal funding. But within a few short years, the system stood on the brink of collapse as administrative and financial challenges mounted. The CMC's complicated history reveals not only the internal struggle that the diocese faced in restructuring its hospitals, modernizing facilities, and creating a unified health care system but also the tensions inherent in 1960s health care reform and the limits of the public-private partnership it envisioned between the government and the voluntary health care sector.