Politics and religion and health care

The political and moral ramifications of providing health care for the people have become inseparable.

NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez sees the entanglement as a confrontation between President Obama and the Catholic Church.

“You’ve heard this is all going to mean government funding of abortion,” the president said. “Not true.”

He added that the “fabrications” were “put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation.”

And with that, the president inadvertently began to pull away the vestments from the eyes of Catholics who had thought he was a perfectly acceptable representative of their views.

The Catholic bishops have been persistently warning that the bills as proposed have unacceptable language that threatens human life. Denver’s Charles Chaput has been one of the most prominently engaged in the public debate.

Last week a British Catholic journal, in an editorial titled “U.S. bishops must back Obama,” claimed that America’s bishops “have so far concentrated on a specifically Catholic issue—making sure state-funded health care does not include abortion—rather than the more general principle of the common good.”

It went on to say that if U.S. Catholic leaders would get over their parochial preoccupations, “they could play a central role in salvaging Mr. Obama’s health-care programme.”

The editorial has value for several reasons. First, it proves once again that people don’t need to actually live in the United States to have unhelpful and badly informed opinions about our domestic issues. Second, some of the same pious voices that once criticized U.S. Catholics for supporting a previous president now sound very much like acolytes of a new president. Third, abortion is not, and has never been, a “specifically Catholic issue,” and the editors know it. And fourth, the growing misuse of Catholic “common ground” and “common good” language in the current health-care debate can only stem from one of two sources: ignorance or cynicism.

That’s clarity. The terms ‘common ground’ and ‘the common good’ have been reconstructed deftly for political purposes. But Catholic teaching on subsidiarity and true social justice is not relative to political winds.

Health-care reform is vital. That’s why America’s bishops have supported it so vigorously for decades. They still do. But fast-tracking a flawed, complex effort this fall, in the face of so many growing and serious concerns, is bad policy. It’s not only imprudent; it’s also dangerous. As Sioux City’s Bishop R. Walker Nickless wrote last week, “no health-care reform is better than the wrong sort of health-care reform.”

If Congress and the White House want to genuinely serve the health-care needs of the American public, they need to slow down, listen to people’s concerns more honestly—and learn what the “common good” really means.