541 Clothman On Health Care
Holy Co-Pay, there are more statistics on health care than cold remedies at Walgreens. With such a mountain of numbers, pundits from all sides fortify their agendas till they sound like their right and everyone else is wrong. That leaves average Joe Citizens like Clothman at the mercy of the media. As with other issues, whichever outlet we avail ourselves to, tends to create the bias of our opinion.
Therefore, I decided to take a non-statistical approach to health care to try to clear some of the fog from my right/left, Democrat/Republican, FOX/CNN windshield of life. I ended up with three moral/ethical principles that I can then use to guide me through the practical/statistical discussion.
I’ll be straight with you; I have a Christian bias in my approach. However, the principles I’m going to discuss are not exclusive to Christianity. These are universal principles found in most religious and non-religious traditions.
1) Health is a basic human right.
As much as I wish it didn’t have to be, health care seems to be basic human rights. Indeed, death and taxes aren’t the only certainties in life, so are illness and injury. Sickness seems to be designed into the very core of the human condition. Thus, health care is a basic human right.
All traditions, including Christianity, strongly endorse healthy living. The Bible goes so far as to say that the body God’s temple and that we are to care for it as such. Furthermore, caring for and praying for the sick are non-negotiable as far as God is concerned.
2) Loving your neighbor is a basic human ethic. Though known best as coming from Jesus, The Golden Rule is the basic principle of all ethics. Over and over, Jesus expressed that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. His point being that living without loving your neighbor, is not really living, it is selfish existence. Humanity must rise above an animalistic, survival of the fittest mindset.
A health care system must mimic this priority. Our current system which leaves 10’s of millions without health care coverage is clearly failing this principle. The Golden Rule proclaims that those with health care should find it unacceptable that others are without it.
3) Community is a basic human need.
The following described the lifestyle of the earliest Christians. “They didn’t even claim ownership of their own possessions. No one said, ‘That’s mine, you can’t have it.’ They shared everything.” They had community – common unity. Humans aren’t born superior or inferior to one another, society and its systems wrongly assigns them to such stations in life. In truth, humans are created equal and a health care system should reflect this reality; for when one human suffers, all humans suffer.
Capitalism, for all its good, has an Achilles’ Heal; greed. Greed has eroded our community regarding health care. Nevertheless, the Haves should help the Have Not’s when it comes to health care.
I find these principles very helpful as I try to figure out what in the heck we need to do to fix health care in America. But honestly; our system seems so sick, and those leading the “reform” so biased, that I have to force myself to believe it can be healed. Sickness seems to be as much a part of the political condition as it is the human condition. I wonder if there is a remedy for that on the shelves at Walgreens.
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