Universal Health Care, Two Catholic Perspectives

As the health care debate reaches its crescendo, here are two Catholic perspectives for your consideration, the first is the column by Bishop Doran of Rockford and the second is the 2004 statement from the Catholic Medical Association Health Care Task Force, Health Care in America: A Catholic Proposal for Renewal, which provides history and policies foundational for understanding the Catholic position.

An excerpt from Bishop Doran’s column.

“The overwhelming preoccupation of our national political government and consequently of the captive media is the vexed and vexing question of health care reform. It is almost impossible to get reliable consistent figures as to the number of people who lack health care coverage in the United States. Each advocacy group inflates or minimizes the numbers to suit each group’s respective fantasies. If, for instance, the number of people who actually, at this moment, lack health care is estimated from a low of 18 million to a high of around 50 million, the difference is considerable (from about 6 percent of the population up to around 16 percent — a vast range).

“One analyst breaks down the 50 million figure into about three equal groups:

“1. Those who do not want any health care but would rather have whatever the employer spends on health care given to them in wages;

“2. Those who because of changes of employment or medical condition are disqualified from the coverage they formerly had; and

“3. Those who have no hope of getting adequate health care (children whose parents do not or cannot provide it for them).

“Certainly only the hardhearted would say that children who through no fault of their own lack coverage, should not be provided it by the state. Further, the state should do something to insure that people who have been provided with health care by employers should not be deprived of it simply because they change jobs or are victims of “reductions in force.” Those who refuse health care are somewhat more problematic for me….

“As Catholic people, however, we are not allowed to wash our hands of it and to let things shake out as the federal government would have it. Our more than bicentennial experience with our federal government leads many to the conclusion that our government really does only one thing well: waging war. In every other area of life, when someone says, “I am from the government and I am here to help you,” our survival instinct tells us to run and hide. In the early ’90s when the health care scare was last put upon us, the opposition crowed: “If you like the postal service, you will love national health,” and that still seems to be the feeling of many.”

An excerpt from the Catholic Medical Association Statement.

“A crisis exists in American health care. This crisis transcends, indeed it explains, the crisis of coverage. In the United States in 2002, an estimated 43.6 million people lacked health insurance coverage during some part of the year, 60 percent of them for the entire year. However, the number of Americans who are mis-insured -- who work but cannot obtain coverage, who cannot obtain coverage that matches the varying needs of the life cycle, or, most important, who cannot obtain coverage that accords with their fundamental moral beliefs -- is far larger. Indeed, it can be said that the mis-insurance of America, defined as the systematic, inequitable and unjust allocation of public and private resources for health purposes, is a near-universal phenomenon.

“Just as cogently, the crisis in American health care is more than the crisis of the insured and uninsured. It is a crisis afflicting the patient-physician relationship, which has been eroded by factors that include the financing of health care, but that are more properly understood as having their root in the loss of a common understanding, within and without the medical profession, of the sanctity and inviolability of each human life.

"In the United States, this erosion is now decades-advanced, and in key respects it is deepening. For millennia, the guiding ethic of the physician was captured in the Hippocratic Oath, a statement of both positive obligation and moral proscription, epitomized by its strict injunctions against acts of abortion and euthanasia. More than this, the Oath carried with it notions of both justice and charity in the care of the sick. Secular in its underpinnings, it nonetheless reflected in thought and form a sense of medicine, much as the Charter for Health Care Workers expresses it, as “a meeting between trust and conscience.”

“Since 1964 the clarity of the classical Oath has been gradually displaced, in many U.S. medical schools, by the subjective terms of a modern restatement. Omitting all reference to the moral proscriptions, the restatement, for example, acknowledges the physician’s “power to take a life” but describes it only as an “awesome responsibility [that] must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of [the physician’s] frailty.”

“By 1993 displacement of the classical Oath and the unbroken tradition it represented was nearly complete. In that year only 8 percent of new physicians swore not to commit abortions, and only 14 percent forswore the practice of euthanasia. There is little reason to believe that the numbers have changed markedly since, though it should be acknowledged that many physicians who did not take the Oath do observe its precepts.”