I have been thinking for some time of giving some of my views about the current debate on healthcare reform in spite of the fact that I usually try to steer away from political issues. Then yesterday when I was uploading Kathy Escobar’s post I visited her blog and was delighted to see that the spirited discussion that is already going on about healthcare. I realized too that Kathy expressed most of my sentiments and so I did not really need to add my own article.
i am strongly and adamantly in support of universal health care. i know some of you are cringing right now and that’s fine, we will agree to disagree. we live in one of the wealthiest, most-educated, most christianized, supposedly most sophisticated nations in the world and 46 million people in this country do not have health insurance and access to proper health care. i believe that is wrong. Read the entire article here.
Having trained as a medical doctor and worked in countries with both socialized and privatized healthcare I am very aware of the pros and cons on both sides. But I must confess that I have never worked in another country where people are afraid of going bankrupt because they get sick. Evidently in the US half of all bankruptcies are due to illness. Nor have I been in a country that thinks it has the best health care system in the world yet allows eighteen thousand people to die each year because they are uninsured. And the US has the highest infant mortality of any Western nation. These factors alone give me cause for concern so I am delighted to see that other far more able voices than mine are being raised about this issue.
Kathy’s article is part of a synchroblog that ran through August. Here are some of the other articles which as you can see don’t all express the same viewpoint.
- K.W. Leslie at The Evening of Kent: Christian’s Responsibility to Healthcare
- Ellen Haroutunain: Christian Perspectives on Health Care
- Steve Hayes at Khanya: Self-evident Truths and Moral Turpitude
- Kimber Caldwell at Convergence: Is Health Care a Right?
- Beth Patterson at Virtual Tea House: Baby Steps Toward More Humane Humanity
- Liz Dyer at Grace Rules: A Christian Perspective On Health Care Reform
- Phil Wyman at Square No More: Clowns to the Left? Jokers to the Right? Stuck in the Middle of the Health Care Debate
- Jeff Goins – A Christian’s Response to Healthcare in America
- Susan Barnes at A Book Look – Carrying Your Own Load
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This is very encouraging. I attended three health care forums in Rhode Island, and went face to face with people who told me in one breath that they were Christian, and in the next that people who made ‘bad choices’ would just have to suffer the consequences.
The ‘bad choice’ was being unable to afford, or to get, medical insurance.
I’m a nurse, and I only want to do my job. I resent all the time I waste filling out forms for insurance, making calls to see what’s covered. It’s much worse for doctors. The profit motive is a wrench in the system.
I hope that the President will get us a public option. It’s second best to single-payer, but without competition the insurance corporations will continue to skim off profits and interfere with health care.
Christine,
Tony Jones also wrote on the subject back in July and hit a couple of very interesting points about the potential for a public option in health care to free those with entrepreneurial instincts and other independent/self-employed types to do what they do best, which could result in economic benefit for the nation as a whole.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/tonyjones/2009/07/whats-a-christian-to-think-abo.html