Faith and Health Care Reform    

     Circleville Herald - June 9, 2009 

     by Brad Cotton

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. Samaria did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they.  Ezekiel 16:49-51

Our understanding of faith impacts our political life. What would our health care system look like if we believed Ezekiel, that God was more concerned about justice than about homosexuality?  Would we have almost 50 million Americans thrown overboard to drown with no health insurance at all, another 50 million with slickly marketed underinsurance that guarantees only bankruptcy if you or anyone in your family ever is sick or injured?

Many, many Christian and Jewish scholars interpret Sodom’s sin from Genesis 18 ,19 to be not homosexuality, but rather violation of the code of hospitality to strangers, as well as unconcern for the less fortunate among them. Ezekiel, along with Amos, Micah and a large portion of the Prophetic literature decry Israel’s economic and political injustice, identifying this arrogant unconcern for the dispossessed as the cause for God’s judgment and subsequent destruction by the Babylonians. I recently reviewed The Poverty and Justice Bible, available from Sojourners. The editors highlighted every Old and New Testament verse that speaks directly to God’s overwhelming passion for justice. Cut out those passages and there is not enough left of the text to hold it together.

For the past several decades, the Religious Right has claimed to be the voice of Jesus in our national political discourse. An observer of the 2004 elections would have thought that placing discriminatory laws against homosexuals on the ballot in a dozen or so states, thus guaranteeing a high turn-out of evangelicals for George Bush and Republican free-market candidates, was the primary mission of the Church.  Jesus never condemned homosexuals, neither did Ezekiel as quoted above, both rather condemned idolatrous love of money and markets, arrogance and unconcern.

Our health care “system” is a product of an idolatrous worship of money and markets. The power of profit and market has had decades of opportunities for proving it is up to the task of providing healthcare. It hasn’t done so. Leading figures in Congress are taking huge amounts of cash donations from health insurance companies / pharmaceutical companies this very day to see to it that your health is just another market-traded source of profit/loss. The insurance/BigPharma complex has spent over $120 million lobbying the first quarter of 2009 alone. That is $120 million of the premiums you paid them to insure your health, not lobby against it. Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee is leading the charge to keep cost-effective and compassionate single payer healthcare off the table. In the last two years alone Sen. Baucus received almost $400,000 from the insurance/BigPharma complex.

Matthew 25:40 admonishes us that as we do for the least of us, we have done to God himself. I treated Kevin in my emergency department recently. Laid off from his job, with loss of health insurance for himself, his wife and three children, he ignored the chest pains he was having for the past several days. Kevin told me he did not want to take food out of his children’s mouths by spending money on seeking care for himself. His heart attack damage was now completed, the pumping ability of his heart permanently diminished, he may never again be healthy. Had Kevin been able to get care when his symptoms began, we may have been able to prevent or interrupt his heart attack. Our idolatrous worship of money and markets damaged Kevin and his family. He will likely eventually be one of the 22,000 deaths in the U. S. directly attributable to lack of health insurance. What would Ezekiel, Jesus and the Prophets say about our nation that allows thousands and thousands of unspeakable tragedies like Kevin’s to occur every day? 

Call your Congressman, Senators, President Obama today. Tell them that you we must have the only proven cost-effective and compassionate system of health care delivery proposed, single-payer, embodied in H.R. 676 and S.B. 703. What would Jesus of Matthew 25:40 do?

- - - Brad Cotton, MD

Dr. Cotton is a full-time emergency physician. He is available to speak to church, business, civic groups on single payer healthcare. E-mail  at roundtownquaker@hotmail.com