Health care causes poverty? That’s a new one I haven’t heard before.

Community and religious leaders, academic experts, and journalists. So, in other words, no one in touch with reality who can suggest practical solutions to the problems.

No thanks, if I want to hear rhetoric there are plenty of places to find it now that it is election season…

Yeah, health care causes poverty…if you need health care and you are not one of the elite who gets great healthcare through your job.

Yeah, if you are one of the many who were kicked out of their good jobs and had to take a part time job calculated to give you just too few hours to get you health care, and then you get sick and lose everything you have, like all too many people that the elite are just too good to even look down upon.

Lack of health care doesn’t cause poverty. I know plenty of people who don’t have health care through their employer and have a house, a car, cable TV…Your comment makes no sense.

Of course, you sound like one of the people who think healthcare is a right. It isn’t. Check the Constitution.

I don’t really want to get into an argument about the Constitution being a living document (or not). I do want to remember that this is a blog about religion, and that religious people should, in my opinion, be concerned about systemic injustice in our society.

To use the “health care causes poverty” example, obviously the idea is that lack of access to affordable health care causes poverty in some instances. Take someone whose life savings are wiped out by a combination of ill health (or injuries suffered through a car accident, or what have you) and inadequate insurance: as a Christian, I can’t just see him as somebody else’s problem. He is mine and yours and ours. I am my brother’s keeper, and just telling him that he doesn’t have a constitutional right to health care doesn’t seem to go very far in the direction of alleviating his suffering, nor does it help me to figure out how to prevent similar situations in the future.

I keep changing how to respond, but I will just go with this and hope it suffices.

It is unfortunately difficult to seperate our desire to help our fellow man from the realities of budget and law. On the one side is our duty as Christians to help, and we all do in different ways (donations, volunteering, etc). No one wants to see another suffer or lose all they have. On the other side is limited funds and a set of laws we have to work in. This is a very real and often overlooked divide by people when engaging in this discussion.

We could set up a national healthcare system some would say. Fine, only how is it going to be paid for? Medicare and Social Security are due to run out of money soon, and now people want another large government safety net implemented without a way to pay for it. A lot of Americans offer this as a solution, but it is not possible given the fiscal restraints of the current budgets.

You may not want to talk about the Constitution and rule of law, but by default they must enter the discussion once government involvement becomes a central theme of the possible solution. And the realities of law do not always jive with our beliefs and responsibilities as Christians, hence the divide. These are the facts of the real world verses our duty to help.

I wonder how many “we need to” and “we must find a way” type comments were made at the History Museum last night compared to the “here’s how to fix it” comments? Everyone already knows what the problems are, but no one has the answers to them. It’s not enough Pam that you want to fix them, you also need to figure out a way how. Saying we ought to help isn’t enough. Talking about the “elites” and blaming someone else like Numen did doesn’t cut it either.

Bringing up the Constitution and rule of law and budgetary constraints doesn’t help you figure out how to solve the problem or alleviate someone’s suffering, but it does let you know that using that argument won’t work so you don’t waste any more time on it.

That’s the reality of the situation. That is where the focus needs to go.

Tim, I appreciate your thoughtful response. I agree that we need to focus on real world solutions and that placing blame is just as unhelpful as doing a lot of wishful thinking or hand wringing. I still don’t agree with the comment in your original post that “community and religious leaders, academic experts, and journalists” are necessarily out of touch with reality or incapable of offering practical solutions.

I didn’t want to talk about the Constitution and the Rule of Law here because I think we probably have very different interpretations of those instruments of social change and this doesn’t feel like the place to hash out those differences. But I appreciate your insistence that we have to keep these discussions grounded. I will try to keep that in mind in future posts, as appropriate. Thanks again.

Thank you, Pam. My insistences and demeanor does not mean I don’t appreciate Civil Religion and your entries in it. Keep up the good work.