As most likely all of you know, there was a very significant healthcare bill passed yesterday. A friend of mine went so far as to say (via facebook),
Hurray, the United States government just declared the Church is officially off the hook in regards to the care of the sick and infirm. Now all we need is some social action to clear out that pesky widows and orphans problem and we can get back to the real job of speculative theology and anathamatizing each other.
Of course, he was speaking in jest but I will say this plainly–regardless of what effect the bill has on medical bills, the Church worldwide needs to know that we are most definitely not off the hook on the matter of helping the poor. It is and always has been a mission of the church and the growth of the welfare state gives us no excuse to turn away from those in need.
Many extreme things are being said on both sides of the aisle, so I thought I would try to, if not persuade any of you, at least give you a glimpse of what’s happening in the minds of folks like myself regarding this bill. Many on the right have hurled about accusations of fascism, Nazism, and communism against the supporters of this bill. Naturally, those supporters who support the bill out of a love for the poor and hurting see such accusations as ridiculous. On the other hand, there are those on the left who are shocked that the Republicans and libertarians of this country are almost unanimously against this bill. Do they hate the poor? Do they deliberately wish to prolong suffering?
And so, as someone against this bill, I will explain what I think. The goal is not so much to persuade any of you but to show that opposition to this bill is not simply grounded in hatred for the poor and opposition to the principles of Christianity. Because there are a number of points I want to bring up, I’ll only address each one briefly. If you want more information on any of them, feel free to ask. So here are some of my objections to the bill:
1) Abortion. As someone who believes that human life exists in the womb, I am against abortion. Let’s leave aside for a moment the difficult problem of pregnancies which threaten to an unusual extent the life of the mother, which I won’t argue one way or the other at present. As opposed as I am to even the toleration of elective abortion, it is even worse in my mind if the federal government were to pass a health bill granting my forcibly taken tax dollars to pay for elective abortions. There has been debate over whether this bill includes such funding, but what is most telling for me is that the bill was forced through without Stupak’s amendment to forbid abortion coverage. Instead, the bill was sent through with the promise of an “executive order” by President Obama to stop money from being used on abortions. However, the President does not have the power to use an executive order to stop funding, so the order is not worth the paper it’s printed on. See here and here.
2) Personal choice. There are, in my mind, two general tendencies any government can follow. It can provide a minimum framework of law and order, and then allow individials to make choices about their own personal lives. Or it can set about with the goal of planning out people’s lives for them, with the government given the power to make people make choices that the government thinks is right. This bill, which severely limits the choice of the individual as to whether to get insurance and what kind to get, is a clearly coercive action by a government which thinks it can decide what is best for people–an action which is contrary to the principle of liberty which is the foundation for all prosperous societies.
3) Socialism. This bill is socialist in that it gives the central government the power to the healthcare industry–to regulate prices, what sort of health products are sold, who gets healthcare, how much healthcare they get, what treatments they get, etc. It forces doctors and insurance companies to form policies not by competing to provide the best value to paying customers, but instead to try to keep up with a myriad of regulations imposed by the existing overgrown bureaucracy and 159 new agencies created by this bill. To my mind it is about as sensible to say that this will result in better healthcare as it would be to say that North Korea’s Kim Jung Il has hatched a communist utopia in his nation.
4) Spending. The United States government spending is currently equal to just under 50% of the nation’s total domestic product. Amazingly, this massive spending by government, including incredible amounts of wealth redistribution, has not removed poverty from the U.S. And yet rather than say that government spending is creating problems, our nation repeatedly resorts to simply spending and borrowing more each year to try even larger projects. This new healthcare bill already requires a tax hike of 400 billion over the next decade to help pay for it, and that’s just the beginning, even according to our federal government’s ridiculously optimistic estimates.
5) The national debt. This point is of course closely related to the previous one. We have a national debt greater than $12,600,000,000,000.00, (12.6 trillion dollars), we are borrowing about $1.5 trillion ($1,500,000,000,000.00) annually at our present rate of spending, and we spend 18.2% of our national income just keeping up with our interest payments. Our interest payments will grab more and more of our federal revenues as we continue to increase our debt and as interest rates on our debt go up as the world begins to distrust our ability to pay back money. If you doubt that the world would mistrust our ability to pay the debt, know that it is no coincidence that on the same day our already-broke government passed this massive socialist bill, it was announced that the market now finds more security in loaning to an individual (Warren Buffet) than to the U.S. Federal Government, and that we are in the process of losing our stellar national credit score.
So there it is, my friends. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I’ve made clear that the reason me and others like me oppose the stimilus bill is because of our concern for our nation’s stability and well-being, and not because we want the poor to suffer.
One Trackback
[...] it’s eroding even now. As I reported to you before, the confidence of the market has eroded to the point that Warren Buffet is considered a safer bet, [...]