Published today on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute:
Some numbers are highly significant in the Bible. The Israelites, for example, wandered in the desert for 40 years. Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai when he received the Law. Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days and nights. These are periods often associated with probation, trial, or even chastisement before the Lord.
Now we have “40 Days for Health Reform,” a massive effort by the Religious Left to muster support during the congressional summer recess for the Obama administration’s nationalization of America’s healthcare system. Liberal Christians and Jews even recruited the president on August 19 for a nationwide call-in, which was said to draw 140,000 listeners. If the ministers, rabbis, and lay “community organizers” in the churches and synagogues succeed, we’ll all be wandering in the parched wilderness of socialized medicine—and for a lot longer than 40 days.
What’s remarkable about this effort is that, as Americans have started to see the details of ObamaCare, they have revolted against the plan in ever-growing numbers. They’ve shown up at town halls and given their nonplussed members of Congress a healthy dressing down. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that most voters (54 percent) now say they would prefer that Congress simply not pass a healthcare reform package.
Yet the tone-deaf Religious Left has mobilized for the rescue of socialized medicine, one of its most dearly sought objectives. In doing so, its leaders have labeled the honest dissent of ordinary Americans as the fruit of “mob rule,” the result of manipulation by “right wing” talk radio hosts, and evidence of outright misinformation and falsehoods. Not a very Christian thing to do, if you ask me.
Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who worked so feverishly for Obama’s election, has been leading the charge. He recently wrote that the “storm troopers of political demagoguery, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, have mobilized their followers to disrupt town meetings and defeat comprehensive reform by yelling louder than anybody else.” Like others, Wallis has cast the healthcare debate as a Manichaean battle between the forces of Light and Darkness, prooftexting the president’s and the Democratic congressional reform plan with handy bits of Holy Writ.
In the Washington Post, he cited Leviticus to show that the Bible lays out a “detailed public health policy in regards to contagious rashes and leprosy.” This, Wallis claimed, proves that “the laws governing the Hebrews ensured that participation in their healthcare system was not based upon economic status in the community.” I must have missed that lesson in seminary.
Amazingly, Wallis told Congressional Quarterly that opponents of socialized medicine “really want to shut down democracy and we can’t let that happen. The faith community is literally going to stand in the way of those who want to stop a conversation.” CQ also quoted John Hay Jr., an evangelical leader from Indianapolis, Indiana, who said that “40 Days for Health Reform” is “really an effort to refocus where the central moral issue is—it seems to have been derailed or taken off track by a lot of voices over the past couple of weeks.”
Along with Sojourners, some of the key collaborators on the Religious Left’s rally to the White House and congressional plan include PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has argued that healthcare is a human right that should be available to all. “The Bishops’ Conference believes healthcare reform should be truly universal and it should be genuinely affordable,” wrote Bishop William F. Murphy, the chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, in a July 17 letter to Congress. Now, Catholics can agree or disagree with the bishops’ advocacy for universal healthcare—that’s a question of prudence not dogma. Tellingly, Bishop Murphy’s letter did not cite Scripture, the catechism, or any papal encyclical. It was argued from a basis in policy and motivated by the bishop’s honest desire for improvement in a system where one in six patients in the United States is cared for in Catholic hospitals.
But note also what the Catholic bishops did. They issued a clear and forceful call for a reformed health policy that “protects and respects the life and dignity of all people from conception until natural death.” That non-negotiable insistence on the respect for life is, by and large, missing from the Religious Left’s campaign. What we get instead are bland assurances, parroted from White House and congressional talking point memos, that “life and dignity” would be forever safe under ObamaCare. I am not persuaded.
What else is missing from the Religious Left’s campaign? Plenty.
There is no acknowledgement that expanding federal spending by $1 trillion or more to reengineer the American healthcare system, and further burdening future generations with groaning debt loads, might be a bad thing. Or would the Religious Left simply have the government declare a Jubilee and disavow these debts when they become totally unmanageable? Is this too somewhere in Leviticus or perhaps Deuteronomy?
There is little or no recognition that other key institutions—the family, the Church, local civic associations—might also have a role to play in shaping reform. Certainly, no recognition for those civic and social groups that have a healthy distrust of an invasive state. Instead, we get the constant demand from the Religious Left that Washington must act. It is a sort of idolatry—the worship of Big Government as the solution to all of our problems.
There is a near total blindness to the fact that nationalized health systems in other countries are deeply troubled, even deadly. Horror stories about these systems are plentiful in the mainstream media. What about the common good? A 2002 report by the Adam Smith Institute noted the following about Britain’s state-run healthcare monopoly:
The NHS has a severe shortage of capacity, directly costing the lives of tens of thousands of patients a year. We have fewer doctors per head of population than any European country apart from Albania. We import nurses and doctors from the world’s poorest countries, and export sick people to some of the richest. More than one million people—one in sixty of the population—are waiting for treatment.
Faith communities should recognize the Religious Left’s “40 Days” campaign for what it is: a politically driven “community organizing” effort that aims to expand a bloated state and make Americans evermore dependent on politicians and bureaucrats, not doctors, for healthcare. As people of faith, we need to speak up against this dishonest affair. After all, it’s our “prophetic” duty.
