Health care reform is neighborly
Published: October 19, 2009
Good health is a basic necessity that ought to be sustained by enlightened public policy. Yet availability of adequate health care is badly in disarray in the United States, with millions of our citizens having only minimal access to needed medical treatment. Complex though the details of reform may be, it is essential that we consider it in the context of the foundational values of our society.
Just and equal access to health care is an essential human right. We have therefore a moral obligation to correct injustices in our current system. The core values of our society underwrite this obligation. Values inherent in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures stand at the headwaters of the American moral tradition. These ancient texts envision values rooted in a good order of creation and in the social bonding of an inclusive community, wherein love for neighbor is a corollary of love for God and wherein we are mutually obligated to extend human care to the dispossessed and marginalized neighbors among us. Such humane values are broadly shared among other spiritual and moral traditions as well.
Biblical faith is not merely individualistic and otherworldly, but has implications for social justice here and now as well. The Hebrew prophets cry out urgently and repeatedly for this. Likewise Jesus speaks often of God’s reigning compassion not just beyond us but already among us.
This basic moral mandate of love for neighbor must be made effective through practical structures of justice. Therefore members of Clergy and Laity United for Justice and Peace endorse the efforts of President Obama and the Congress to enact comprehensive health care reform legislation, including a viable public option.
Owen L. Norment is co-chair of Clergy and Laity United for Justice and Peace.
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Reader Reactions
Forcing your neighbor to support a plan that furthur complicates and burdens his life, along with a burden to be paid for by his children and grandchildren, is a funny way to show your love.
The CLUJP is advocating using the might of government to compel other people to give their money to support what the CLUJP considers to be social justice.
I am unable to lay my finger on that verse of the Hebrew prophets or that saying of Christ’s which says that it is charitable to take money by threat of force from one person in order to give it to another in accordance with the opinions and desires of yet another person.
The “basic moral mandate of love for neighbor” is, I think easily distinguishable from fear of the IRS or of the Federal government, and not too hard to tell apart from the pleasurable act of telling someone else what sacrifices he ought to make.
I do seem to remember a saying about binding burdens on the backs of others.
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