Jesus the political pundit

[Spengler]

Jesus the political pundit on the Spengler Blog


by David Layman

I was trying to locate some of the 0ld warnings about mixing religion and politics. So I searched for "God not Republican".  I was informed, however, that that "Campaign [is] Unavailable." The "alert has expired." Fuggedaboutit. Drop it. The crisis is inoperative.

[caption id="attachment_373" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The Alert has expired!"][/caption]

On further thought, I realized: boy, that's a relief. Another fearsome enemy of democracy and the American way has  been vanquished.  The dark clouds of the Bush theocracy that were about to terminally overshadow our freedoms forever have dissipated in the bright light of Obama's smile.

Alas, just when I thought as a believer that it was safe to let politics be politics and God be God, the claim that God does take political sides reasserts itself: Oliver Reed disingenously asks the question: "Would God back universal health care?" What? You expect Rev. Reed (also, according to the credits, trained as a lawyer) to answer "No"?

His ethical-theological method is brilliant. He observes that Maimonides "listed health care first on his list of services that a city should offer its residents." Well, our failure to follow that standard certainly accounts for the dozen large hospitals in a 30-mile radius, including a teaching hospital affliated with a state university, with multiple branches and a seemingly continuous building program. No doubt Maimonides also outlined the tax policy which would provide for all those buildings and the services within them.

He says "the Holy Quran contains multiple admonitions to attend to the needy," but doesn't quote any of them. (His only quotation is from one of Muhammad's "sayings," i.e., a Hadith.) So let me rectify his failure with a more-or-less random selection:

002.043 And be steadfast in prayer; practise regular charity; and bow down your heads with those who bow down (in worship).

002.177 It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces Towards east or West; but it is righteousness- to believe in Allah and the Last Day, and the Angels, and the Book, and the Messengers; to spend of your substance, out of love for Him, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in prayer, and practice regular charity; to fulfil the contracts which ye have made; and to be firm and patient, in pain (or suffering) and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of truth, the Allah-fearing.

057.007 Believe in Allah and His messenger, and spend (in charity) out of the (substance) whereof He has made you heirs. For, those of you who believe and spend (in charity),- for them is a great Reward.

107.001 - .007 Seest thou one who denies the Judgment (to come)? Then such is the (man) who repulses the orphan (with harshness), And encourages not the feeding of the indigent. So woe to the worshippers Who are neglectful of their prayers, Those who (want but) to be seen (of men), But refuse (to supply) (even) neighbourly needs.

How can one ignore the clear call for universal health care in those teachings?

But the exegetical tour de force is his commentary on the familiar parable of the "good Samaritan," who helps a wounded traveler lying by the road. Did you know Jesus is here providing deep, perspicuous guidance about "health care"? Silly me. After a whole  life-time of hearing sermons on that text, I had always thought that it was Jesus' midrash on the question of the second of the two arch-commands:  love your neighbor as yourself.

To be sure, on re-reading the text, maybe the preachers were wrong. The questioner, who is identified as "lawyer" (ESV) recognizes that to gain "eternal life," olam ha-ba, the age or world to come, he must follow the two great commandments. But he's a lawyer. The requirements must be precisely defined. "Who is my neighbor"? It is here that the preachers seem to lose track of Jesus' response. Jesus does not answer the lawyer's question. I love myself, yes indeed, the lawyer implicitly acknowledges; now explain who is the "one-I-must-love-as-myself"?

Jesus tells the familiar story of the traveler who is robbed by brigands and left for dead by the roadside.  First a priest passes by, and then a Levite. Both carefully avoid the victim (out-of-sight, out-of-mind). Then the "good Samaritan" comes. He observes, he stops, he gives aid, even to the point of purchasing the services of a local innkeeper to provide hospital care.

Last I read the text, it doesn't report that the innkeeper billed the Judahite Health Services Compensation Board, but no doubt some editor subtracted that detail, as detracting from the moral heroism of the Samaritan.

There is, however, another point to be observed. Jesus' account does not define (remember, this is a legal discussion) the neighbor as the one who was helped. The neighbor is the one who helps. This neatly inverts the discussion. It is no longer: how do I recognize the one-I-must-love-as-myself? This, of course, would be a standard application of the golden rule: if you were lying on the road beaten, you would want to be helped; so likewise help a person in similar circumstances.

Jesus' conclusion subverts this assumption: "Which ... proved to be a neighbor...?" He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” ... “You go, and do likewise.” One wonders if the lawyer walked away, pondering Jesus' halakhic jujitsu, trying to figure out how he could use the technique in his next debate. For the neighbor is not "the other," as we say in modern postmodern discourse. There is no "other." Jesus deconstructed the halakhic pursuit of the question, how do I define the one to whom I am obligated.

This then means that in Jesus' teachings at least, there is no halakhic definition of neighbor. I am the neighbor. There is no possible equation between the love I give myself, and the love I give my neighbor, whoever he may be. There is no equation, because there is only one term. There is the pure positive command: "I must love."

How does one command love? In the Christian mind-world of Paul, love needs no law, since love fulfills every command of the law. He also tells us that there is no law governing (kata ton toiouton ouk estin nomos) love and its spiritual complements, joy, peace, and so on.

I'm sure hidden somewhere in Paul's teachings on the "fruit of the Spirit," there lies the implication that we are obligated to pay for our neighbors' happiness pills.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Spengler,

Everyone, of course, is a critic, but I think you are missing your calling a bit. You composed a great essay on neighborly love, but sandwiched between two passages on the current health care debate. I know you are trying to put the issue of the day in the context of the truth of eternity, but I can't help feeling that it relativizes your point a bit. It's a minor criticism, because I really enjoyed the posting.

[David Layman]

Dear Juggernaut:

I, like my ironically described gospel writer, needed a better editor.



David

[Marcus]

My wife broke her hip a year ago last June ('08), and the resulting bill was something like $33,000—$25,000 for the hospital and another $8,000 for the surgeon. The hospital was charging for an ER visit, the OR, and two nights stay. The surgeon repaired the leg with three pins, which required a 3" incision. The surgeon charged for the operation, which took less than an hour, and two or three office visits, maybe three hours all together, operation and office visits combined.

We have insurance with a Christian outfit, a co-op of sorts. The surgeon has been paid by the insurance company, but the hospital is still waiting for their money because, evidently, the Christian co-op can pay only as funds come in.

So what kind of system are we looking at here? What kind of "system" can justify making a man's time worth $2,500/hour? Of course, we know that's to compensate the doc for his no-pays. What kind of "insurance" system makes the hospital wait more than a year for its money?

And what about Americans who can't afford health insurance? What percentage of bankruptcies are the result of medical bills? What about the folks with health insurance who can't even afford their deductibles? What kind of dishonest, convoluted, BS system are we party to?

It's claimed that the United States has the best health care in the world. Go to Google sometime and check life expectancy rates by nation. Do the same for neo-natal death rates. In both cases, the US is far, far down the list.

Watch the DVD, Michael Moore's SICKO. Moore has no easy, pat answers, and some of the film is plainly propagandistic, but Moore asks the right questions, which we must answer.

******************
Edit: Somewhat later . . .
Being up in years myself, I've lately received three or four emails from my fellow seniors, all up in arms about health care rationed by age. . . supposedly one can't get a heart transplant in England if one is older than 59. Now all these emails come from seniors with very good health insurance—federal and state to name a couple.

Quite plainly, no one—not England, not us—can afford to deliver all the health care we're capable of technologically. As it stands, here in the US at least, those who can pay get all they can afford . . rationing by money if you will. But what's wrong with rationing health care by age? How much of society's health care resources should be devoted to a 60-year old? A 70-year old? An 80-year old? We don't ask 60-year olds to assume the risks of military service and war.

[PatrickMurphy]

Marcus certainly has a sad story to tell. The naked City of Man has endless such sadnesses to relate. The question is: how do we deal with reality?

Dumbed-down moderns don't think, which is our worst feature, in my opinion, as moderns, taken as a whole. Perhaps the worst example is the knee-jerk acceptance of the idea that "health care is a right, not a privilege." Medical care is neither. Rights cost nothing, by definition. My right to live costs you nothing. My right to liberty costs no one a dime. But medical care requires human beings to expend their valuable time and consume scarce resources. No one is entitled to these things. We might come to need these ministries at some point in our lives, but we cannot legitimately force people to do them on our behalf.

Let us imagine a scenario. Say we have in our community a truly reviled man, who becomes sick. No doctor is willing to help him because every person in the community wants him to die. If medical care is a right, then one local doctor will have to be forced to help him. What if all refuse? Do the police jab a gun in each doctor's ribs? What if all of them still say no? Since it's a "right" they are trying to enforce, are they obliged to pull the trigger?

The point is, however imperfect the City of Man remains, the solution is not coercion. Before the federal government muscled into the realm, America produced charity hospitals at the county level, not to mention all the non-governmental examples, named "Presbyterian," "Methodist," "Saint Vincent," etc. Americans have ALWAYS sought to transform our country into the City of God, so far as that is possible. The poor, alas, we've always known, will always be with us. And the sick, too.

This is why medical care is not a privilege, either. God inspires His people to minister to the needs of the needy. Jesus' definition of "neighbors" multiply in the spiritual City of God. It's not a "privilege," because God's people LIKE to help the unfortunate.

But it is not kind, nor is it charitable, for me to hire politicians to forcibly extract money from stranger's pockets to use to hire doctors and buy scalpels and bandages to repair my damaged body. I do not have a right to do such a thing, no matter how badly my body aches.

Civil government is cruel, and spiritually blind. Lawyers have a saying: hard cases make bad law. Hard cases emotionally resonate. But they do not prove the case for communism. Freedom might be hard, but communism is far, far, harder to endure.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Republicans have screwed themselves on this debate by repeating the mantra that America's "free market" health care system is the best in the world and perfectly fine just the way it is. Anyone ought to be able to see that our system is not fine, and the percentage of GDP spent on health care is completely unacceptable. However, the Republicans, by defending the system as it is, have made this primarily into a debate of whether to either do nothing at all or else create a massive new federal health care system, have really ruined this discussion and if a bad system goes through, they will bear a large part of the responsibility for it.

Our health care system is so monstrously corrupt that most people feel that doing something is better than nothing, and if the something turns out badly, we can always tweak it later. For not only are you paying for the non-payers, you are also paying off a huge industry of lawyers who leach off the medical system, not to mention drug companies who essentially bribe doctors to prescribe their medication. There is no question, in my mind at least, that something needs to be done. We already have universal health care. If you show up to an emergency room with a broken arm, they have to treat you, regardless of your ability to pay. That is not going to change. So as long as that is the case, we ought to find a more efficient way of handling it. However, some ways are better than others.

In the ATimes forum, Alph mentioned that the basic problem with health care is the same as with every other good or service: scarcity. There are not enough doctors and facilities to give everyone every treatment and procedure they would like to have all the time. So the question becomes how do you ration the available resources? One answer is that you allow people themselves to prioritize their life in such a way that they make these decisions themselves. If it is very important to you that you be able to have the medical procedures you want, then you can ensure that you get an education, work hard, save your money, and do all the things necessary to make sure you can afford them. If that security is less important to you than, say, going on ski vacations and always picking up the tab at the club, then you may find that you cannot afford the procedure you want when you want it, but that is your choice and a result of the priorities you set in your life. The other extreme is that individuals have no say at all, and that a government agency or bureaucrat decides who ought to get what care and when. In one instance, you have to pay $30,000 for a hip surgery then wait a year while the insurance finds the money, but in the other instance you have to wait a year for the hip surgery to happen at all.

It is significant to note that successful universal health care systems always have an outlet valve. It happens frequently in Canada, for instance, that there are not enough resources to deal with situations, and patients are flown into the U.S. to receive the treatment they need. Canada is not Zimbabwe. Canada is as First World as it gets, and yet it is frequently required to fly its citizens into another country on an emergency basis for treatment. If everyone ends up on a nationalized system, we may end up with skies full of dying patients with nowhere to land.

The far, far extreme version of bureacratically rationed health care is that, if government resources become seriously squeezed, decisions may eventually have to be made as to who should receive care and why. Should an expensive procedure really be wasted on a 70-year-old man when our department has a budget to meet? Should the liver transplant go to the college kid with the 180 IQ or the 40 year old father of four who works in a factory? These are obviously dystopian visions of what such a system could become, but I would bet that more people than you might think would be open to such ideas as long as they were dressed up properly.

[Marcus]

Patrick,

That dog won't hunt. Nationalized health care does not equate to communism any more than does a nationalized army, postal service, fire protection and so on. It's simply a question of what do we want to do for each other as a society, how do we pay for it, and who gets how much.

Watch Moore's SICKO for starters . .

[ellens]

Michael Moore is a slob but his movie Sicko was absolutely on target. The Republicans are simply digging their own graves on yet another issue by opposing health care reform of any type, having branded socialist, now for decades, the idea of a national health care system. Every advanced country in the world has national health care supported by the government, except the US. Doesn't that tell you something? In addition to national health care, there can be private options as well, for people willing to pay. Fine, but there still needs to be a public option, because the private sector health care that we have now leaves a lot of people uninusured or underinsured.

The problem with America's health care system, and what makes it so much worse than other developed countries, is not the rationing issue. Every system, private and public, has rationing. They just dress it up differently. What is wrong with the American system is tying something necessary for all human beings, for their entire life span, to the transient and fickle job market. How ludicrous can you get?

In the 1950's when employer-based health care became institutionalized, American workers typically stayed in one job for a long time, often a life-time. Life spans were shorter and the incidence of chronic, slowly debilitating diseases was much less. Look at the cancer rate of the 1950's and the predicted life expectancy of someone with metastatic cancer, compared to today. People did not survive that long with chronic diseases. Today, survival with chronic diseases is what being over the age of 50 is all about. We all have our chronic diseases. The current private system excludes people from starting a new insurance policy, in many cases, if they have prior conditions. Almost all human beings past the age of 50 have prior conditions, known or not. This is simply a way to kill people off more quickly, by depriving them of bridge care, between jobs, or forcing them to stay in jobs that make them miserable to stay on an employer-based health care policy.

Of course the health care system has to be reformed, and the Democrats will be the ones to do it, making the Republicans look even more like the party of the rich and out of touch.

[Marcus]

Michael Moore is a slob but his movie Sicko was absolutely on target. . .

Good shot, ellens. Not in the bulls-eye but maybe on the paper. I never watched a Michael Moore film before SICKO and can't recall what prompted me to finally give in. Based on my reaction to SICKO, I'm tempted to try more of Moore . .

I've recommended SICKO to many of my friends and acquaintances and am absolutely stunned by how many of them refuse to even consider viewing the film based on their preconceived notions of Moore himself. Talk about knee-jerk reaction . .

For what it's worth, my wife is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner here in Alaska. Believe me, you don't know the half of it.

[Pastaneta]

Patrick,

That dog won't hunt. Nationalized health care does not equate to communism any more than does a nationalized army, postal service, fire protection and so on. It's simply a question of what do we want to do for each other as a society, how do we pay for it, and who gets how much.

Watch Moore's SICKO for starters . .

Did you ever talk to a Canadian about their wonderful health care? It is communism!

[Marcus]

Did you ever talk to a Canadian about their wonderful health care? It is communism!

Watch SICKO, pasta, and you'll see a girl from Detroit, Michigan going across the river to Canada for health care she can't get in the US. You'll also see older Canadians scared to come to the US without some sort of insurance policy due to fear of the American health care system.

Don't know the answers, but not sure we yet know the questions . . .

Oh, and while I haven't talked to any Canadians lately, last year, while camping, I did talk to some fellow campers, a Swiss anesthesiologist and his French girlfriend, a nurse-anesthetist. I asked them what they thought of American health care. The guy replied, "It's inhumane."

[Pastaneta]

Speak to real Canadians and you'll find wait of months to begin cancer treatment... 30% of the population without a family doctor. Worse survival rates in about all cancers than the US...

Try http://www.fraserinstitute.org/commerce ... rn2008.pdf

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release ... 07284.html

The median wait time for Canadians seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment dropped to 17.3 weeks in 2008 from 18.3 weeks in 2007, according to new research published today by independent research organization The Fraser Institute.

"Despite the small improvement, many Canadians are still waiting 121 days or more for necessary medical treatment. Is this something we should be proud of? Absolutely not. A seven day reduction in total waiting times is far removed from the goal of providing timely access to health care," said Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute Director of Health System Performance Studies and co-author of the 18th annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada....

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.c ... rates.html

[Marcus]

And yet life expectancy in Canada is 81.23 years compared to 78.11 years in the US.

Go figure . . .

[Pastaneta]

Not very difficult to figure out. There are pockets of poverty in the US that skew the results.

[ellens]

All of America's gross health statistics are skewed by the black and Hispanic underclass which have very bad statistics. The very high five-year survival rate for cancer surprises me, though, Pastaneta. I would want to look at the source for that data.

However, it might be true because the most advanced cancer treatments are developed in the US and so people who have insurance that will pay for it do get better care. For the top 20% of the population of any country, the US healthcare system is probably the best in the world. The problem is, what if you're not in the top 20%? The quality of my healthcare depends on where I work. My previous company was small and the premiums were so high that I would have had to go uninsured if my husband were not insured by an employer with a very active union. This is the real problem in the US, as I mentioned before - insurance connected to employment.