Category: Culture
Continuing to think about health care . . .
I like to read the opinion page of the New York Times, specifically the Op-Ed Columnist section. I found the article,
“How American Health Care Killed My Father”, referenced by David Brooks from his Sept. 3 column, “Let’s Get Fundamental”.
As Lisa and I navigate finding new doctors, pharmacy for medication, the new deductibles and paperwork governing our health insurance this article focused my attention on something I had not thought about: Does my doctor think of me or my insurance provider as the patient? In Lexington I believe the answer was yes and yes. My doctor in Lexington managed my care based on his assessment of my needs, my willingness to take meds, and my health insurance provider. Before his office began using electronic records he would ask me to remind him what insurance I had before making decisions about treatment. I never felt slighted, and given my own frustrations with the first insurance company I used I empathized with the headaches his office probably had with claim forms and letters.
This article by David Godhill, The Atlantic (September 2009), provided another way of thinking about health care. It is lengthy, but worth the time as you consider what changes need to be supported in health care reform, and how you may or may not lobby, encourage, or shame your Congressional representatives into making changes we can believe in, we can witness as substantive, we can experience as making the circle of live better for all the inhabitants of this nation.
How American Health Care Killed My Father – The Atlantic (September 2009)
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Can God Save Health Care?
Note from Michael D
My father is a Freemason. As a child I remember hearing him talk about a mason’s responsibility for helping the widow, the orphan, the less fortunate. Today, when I ask about or he sees some misrepresentation of Masons in the media, he talks of the mason’s life as finding ‘light’ and that one cannot do that by simply tending to themselves or their clan. Pop, if you see this post and my brief characterization of the mason’s journey is wrong, please respond and I will post. And though you never pressured me about joining the lodge, I’m sorry for not accepting your invitation all those years ago to follow the family legacy in the practice of mason principles. I don’t think guilt is helpful to living, but that decision is something I continue to regret.
When I read this article by James Carroll I remembered hearing Pop talk about why he was a mason and what the journey to finding more light in your life is all about. Mainline Christianity, in the name of unity, has been passive for 30 years as the rise of Christian fundamentalism has permeated our culture so much that the strategy enabled persons like Rep. Bachmann can get elected to service in our republic. The late Jerry Falwell, and the others like him wanting a theocratic nation equal to that of biblical Israel, must be smarter than I gave them credit. Maybe mainlines thought that an educated public would not be that naive. Christian fundamentalism has taken over corners of some states and the airwaves. I digress. Mr. Carroll’s article points to the need for ‘why’ and ‘how’ conversations based on the ethics of living faith which is the moral authority that mainline Christianity has all but lost in the public forum. President Obama and his handlers would be well advised to give his argument some thought and conversation in the coming week.
My thanks to Lisa, my companion, for asking some questions and her help with editing my note.
Can God Save Health Care?
by James Carroll, The Daily Beast
“President Obama got biblical the other day—or tried to, when he joined Moses at Mount Sinai to rebuke his opponents not merely for lying but for “bearing false witness.” In a telephone “call in” with leaders of liberal faith groups, Obama evoked the Ten Commandments to energize a left-wing version of the Religious Right, which has been wreaking such havoc in the health-care reform debate. If Obama wins, his holier-than-him opponents say, the government will fund abortions, Washington bureaucrats will run euthanasia agencies, and disabled people will be disappeared. Economic issues, which are complex, have taken second place to apocalyptic moralizing—the more simplistic the better.”
Click here to read the entire article.