What I wish they would say about Health Care in America

Isn’t this a pro-life issue?

That seems to me a question that never gets asked in the health-care debate. The conversation seems to get bogged down talk of economics and insurance regulations and bureaucracies, but the powerful moral dimension gets little play. At least on my news. And I wonder why.

When it comes to abortion, the pro-life movement is impossible to ignore. Now, where tens of millions of Americans are going without needed medicine and medical treatment because they simply cannot afford it, where 14,000 men, women, and especially children lose their health coverage every day, where life and death questions are being decided by a profit and loss statement in some insurance company’s boardroom, where are the posters and bullhorns and the new conferences?

Thou shall not kill. It says it very clearly in my Bible. In more than one place. Every person who suffers and dies for lack of access to health care is blood-guilt on us all. Every sick child. Every missed surgery. Every pill not taken because it could not be purchased. It is not just statistics, not simply someone else's problem, it is a poor reflection on the world we have made and fight to maintain, it is our great and shared shame.

It is a great sin that our neighbors are doing without necessary medical care because someone else cannot profit from it.

I hear it said that it’s too expensive. We can’t afford it. It will overload our national debt for years and years to come. Is that what we truly want to say? That we are willing to sacrifice the health and life of our neighbors because we are unwilling to pay a few more dollars in taxes each year? How shall we explain that to St. Peter at the inevitable time?

I fear that too many of my pro-life brethren are silent now because, having sold their soul to the one particular political party, they are not capable of taking this stand against them. I’d like to be wrong about that, but probably am not.

There is a constant hue and cry over the lack of morality and decency in our politicians and our government in this country. Here is a first and easy step toward a more godly world. That we should stand up for the ideal that every person has the right to the medical treatment they needs is undoubtedly a very Christian notion. Let us honor our God by doing this necessary and right thing.