Health Care Train May Be On Wrong Track
I think that we, in this country, can take for granted the founding documents that give us our freedoms and rights. Gone are the days of sitting around the table listening to one of our elders tell stories of occupation or oppression in this country. Though this is a blessing, it can also be a curse. It was George Santayana (Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, 1863-1952) who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It behooves us as Christians to look through our common history to remind ourselves that the safety and security of those who follow Jesus Christ continue to be precarious at best in many parts of the world today. Even in this country, founded on Christian principles, we see the interjections of the few who wish to tear God from this country, having a tremendous impact on the silent majority.
We cannot forget that the 20th century produced more martyrs for the faith than did previous centuries. Why? Because there remains in this world (and in our very own culture) those who wish to work against the will of God, resorting to violence and persecution if necessary… and do not think that our free shores are inoculated against such disease. It can happen here quicker than we think.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) offered this advice: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We must not be those who stood by as our freedoms hard fought were chipped away.
As Christians, we are a people of hope. It was the hope of our Christian ancestors that we would live in peace, where the right to worship God freely would not be infringed upon. We have been afforded that place in which to live and yet it seems to be slipping, ever so slightly, away from us.
We seem to accept the societal interdictions that God should not be spoken of in our public schools. We have traded Christmas events for winter events or holiday events. We are outraged when Russia bans Americans from adopting their children (and rightly so); but we live in a country that aborts our children instead of placing them in loving homes with parents who wish to adopt! What madness is this?
Even now, our religious freedoms are being pressured as Christian businesses may be forced to provide birth-control measures in their insurance plans. Over-the-counter birth control is now available to our youth.
I attended a recent ethics seminar that focused on health care reform. To open the seminar, the facilitator posed an ethical situation: There is an out-of-control train (health care) running down the track and we have the choice to allow it to run down Track A, which will result in the death of one person (who is working on the track) or we can pull the lever at the juncture, thus diverting our out of control train down a different track, where we will kill five persons.
So it seems that the baseline attempting to be created here is that we will have to start making choices in the future health care of this country regarding whom to treat. Do we save the life of one person or the lives of five?
It was also stated that places like Cuba have better health care outcomes than we do in this country. It is not surprising if they choose to treat the five people as opposed to the one. Of course, not much is said about the one person sacrificed for the five.
Maybe we should step back to see if there are other trains that can get us to our destination. Maybe we should not accept the premise that we must sacrifice the weak among us in an effort to decrease costs. Can we not have this discussion? Can the nation that created the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, modern aviation, modern vehicles, fast food and Wal-Mart NOT find a way to make the healthcare of our citizens affordable without having to sacrifice some for the sake of the many? It is an ethical dilemma, indeed, and one we should take very seriously if we truly belive in the dignity of every human life, from conception to natural death.
