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We have purchased land on Highways A & W and are planning to build soon! Drive by and take a look at our future home!
"America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system." Walter Cronkite
August 16th, 2009
If you’ve ever attended a town board meeting, you know watching paint dry is more exciting. The normal Congressional member’s townhall session is a yawner but the current national debate or, the national "shouting match," we are having over healthcare has more action than ringside at the WWF. So what’s the Christian perspective on all of this? Is this just political or are there Biblical worldview issues at stake in this national debate? Before I answer that, let me make some preliminary observations.
1. While Christians can be passionate about these issues, we are commanded to be respectful (Rom. 13:7). Though everyone around us may be losing their heads, we are not to lose ours.
2. Health care in this country is in a critical state. Rising health care costs and the growing numbers of uninsured Americans is a major issue. Many small companies can’t afford to offer their employees health care if they want to stay in business. A 2005 Harvard study found that about half of those who filed for bankruptcy said health care expenses, illness or related job-loss led them to do so. 27% cited uncovered medical bills specifically.
3. The Church’s first mission is not social. If the Church in America had been faithful in reaching the lost and making disciples during the past fifty years, we would not be facing this or many other issues today. Our first purpose is to glorify God. We’re to win the lost, not political debates. Our hope is not political. Please do not make an adversary out of a lost person over this or any other social issue. And there are committed Christians on both sides of the debate.
So what is a Biblical worldview on the healthcare debate? Underlying all of the rhetoric and finger pointing are much larger questions: Is human life something special? Is it to be valued more highly than, say, plants and pets? Are we now assigning worth to human life, or does it arrive with its own pre-determined value, irrespective of race, class, IQ, or disability? The bottom line then is not the bottom line, it’s something far more profound. Our decisions regarding who gets help and who doesn’t is about far more than bean-counting bureaucrats deciding if your drugs or operation will cost more than you’re contributing to the Treasury. What’s at stake are Ten Commandment issues, "You shall not murder" (Ex. 20:13). The secular worldview holds that we’re evolutionary accidents who crawled out of the slime and by natural selection, stand erect and over millions of years outsmart our ancestors, the apes. If that is one’s belief, then why spend lots of money to improve...or save the life of someone who evolved from slime and has no special significance other than the "accident" of becoming human? Policies flow from such a philosophy. Stark, or not, this is the inevitable progression of seeing humanity as maybe complex, but nothing special.
The Biblical worldview sees human beings as God’s special creation. Even Thomas Jefferson, identified by historians as a Deist who doubted the existence of a personal God, understood that if certain rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—do not come from a Source beyond the reach of the state, then the state could take those rights away. Those who believe that God made us and also makes the rules about our existence and our behavior, have a completely different understanding of life’s value and our approach to affirming it until natural death. And it’s between these two distinctly different worldviews that the battle is taking place.
There’s a cataclysmic difference between "letting go" of life and "snuffing it out." The unnatural progression for many secularists is to see such a person as a "burden." In an age when we think we should be free of burdens—a notion that contributes to our superficiality and makes us morally obtuse—getting rid of Granny might seem perfectly rational, even defensible. But by doing so, we assume an even greater burden: the role of God in deciding who gets to live and who must die. Anyone who has seen the film Bruce Almighty senses how difficult it is to play God.
Let me share just a few specific concerns that I have with the Bill. Page 390 of the bill uses the term "retarded." Such an insensitive term, particularly in this PC day seems indicative of a philosophical bent (much like we saw with President’s comment about bowling like someone from the Special Olympics). For the intellectual elite, the developmentally disabled are mistakes, needing to be aborted so they are not a burden for the rest of us.
The biggest shock is on page 425 where the bill makes it mandatory that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session which ultimately will tell them how to end their life sooner. Last year, in a little-noticed presidential debate between three progressives—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson—the candidates were asked if they regretted anything they’d done in their careers. "Yes," said Obama forthrightly. "I regret that I did not object when the Senate gave its unanimous consent for the Terri Schaivo case to go into federal court." What Obama was saying at that moment was that on reconsideration, his worldview should have been more liberal than 99 other U.S. Senators. Just last year, Barack Obama famously told Pastor Rick Warren that the question of when human life begins was "above his pay grade." But the question of when it ends—or should end—is clearly not above his pay grade.
While the Bill does not specifically mention abortion, it does not prohibit it. As with other government programs, there is little question that this bill will make abortion an essential medical procedure to be subsidized by tax dollars. Unless Congress specifically prohibits tax funding of abortion, it will ultimately be in the plan. When Barack Obama spoke to Planned Parenthood in July 2007, he said, "In my mind, reproductive care is essential care, basic care, so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose."
These are not political issues, they are worldview issues. Healthcare needs to be revamped but with the current plan being crammed down the American people’s throats, the cure is worse than the disease.
