"Health care legislation, with all its political, technical and economic aspects, is about human beings and hence has serious moral dimensions. Our focus is the concrete realities of families with children and their access to doctors, the poor and the elderly, those with limited means and those with few or even no means, such as the mother carrying a child in her womb. Our Catholic commitment to health care picks up the pieces of our failing system in our emergency rooms, clinics, parishes and communities. This is why we believe our nation's health care system needs reform which protects human life and dignity and serves the poor and vulnerable as a moral imperative and an urgent national priority.
-- Cardinal Francis George, president of the USCCB, in a statement on health care reform.
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There is so much good the Church can do by taking the lead, not on health care legislation, but in legitimate health care reform.
If the Church takes the lead and takes the ball out of the hands of politicians who will cater to special interests and who will not serve the needs of the poor, we will be better off.
In a follow-up to a health care discussion run by the Franciscan Action Network, a representative told me they were supporting coercive government programs because it would make neighbors live more according to the Gospels. I was forced to point out the only religious group in the Gospels that turned to coercive government to aid their agenda was the Pharisees.
There is so much we can do, and should do, but not through the vehicle of big, coercive government for only too soon that government turns on its people, its religious people, and takes away their freedoms.
The Catholic in me is all in for health care reform; the economist in me is all against THIS health care plan. In the end, what matters is that people are able to get affordable, timely, and quality care not whose district and whose campaign donors get the gravy.
In response to Greg's post above, the Franciscan Action Network does not support "coercive government programs because it would make neighbors live more according to the Gospels." Such a characterization is a distortion that serves to misrepresent not only Franciscan Action Network but the positions of the Catholic Health Association and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. On the FAN website, we read:
"We advocate for health care reform policies that promote human dignity so that everyone has access to a basic standard of health care. And we urge our legislators to properly allocate funding to make that happen. We invite them to shape policies that emphasize quality, cost efficiency, and patient-centered care for everyone.
Such an effort will be both a living testimony to Francis of Assisi, who respected the creature in love of the Creator and cared for the outcast, and the honoring of a treasured memory of Clare of Assisi, who healed so graciously."
Such is not the statement of an organization that uses coercion in any fashion. Greg should reflect a bit more before he willfully distorts a legitimate Catholic perspective in the health care debate.
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