If I wanted to foster a crisis in help for people in need in general, and in the health care system in particular, the first thing I would do would be to try to get rid of tax deductions for charitable giving and make it impossible for religious hospitals to stay open. Obama has proposed doing the first -- or, at least, to cut it in half -- which has managed to find opposition from a few Democrats, causing him to (temporarily) back down from it. Abortion legislation just passed, making it illegal to refuse to perform an abortion no matter what your beliefs (which I'm pretty certain violates the 1st Amendment), will cause Catholic hospitals across this country to shut down.
Don't think that any of this is an accident.
The attempt to reduce the tax deduction for charitable giving is intended to cause a reduction in charitable giving -- during a time when charitable donations are down anyway, due to the economy. Such a move would be the final death blow to perhaps most charities. The result will be less private sector aid for people, meaning the government will have to step in to fill the gap -- with the added benefit of being able to claim that the private sector has failed in the realm of charity.
The abortion law is also intended to have a similar effect. Regardless of your position on abortion, I would hope that you could agree that nobody should be forced to perform abortions if they don't want to do so. This legislation is designed to run off doctors and to cause religious hospitals to shut down. You cannot tell me that the people who passed this legislation didn't know that the Catholic church couldn't run a hospital that performed abortions. Why would they want to pass legislation that would shut down hospitals? Well, religious hospitals are often charity hospitals, meaning they provide inexpensive or even free health care to poor people and those without health care. If these hospitals shut down, it will actually create a health care crisis in this country. This will make it even easier for the government to nationalize the health care system. And, again, they will be able to point to the "failure" of the private sector to provide health care to the poor and uninsured.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with nationalized health care, you have to agree that such tactics are highly unethical. If bad action is doing something bad in ignorance of the good, and evil is doing something bad knowing what the good is, and choosing do to the bad anyway . . . Well, I'll let you decide the moral state of this administration.
4 comments:
Chris,
Did you notice that only guys were making fun of Pelosi's family planning money. Women think it's the basic level of individual responsibility we teach our daughters. You don't have a kid you can't support. Mainstreem US Blue thinks you shouldn't have kids unless you can support them and of course Orange women are into work-life planning.
Abortion debates usually miss the prevention issue. If Catholic doctors and counselors weren't denying women access to birth control, we wouldn't have the moral horror of abortion as a method of birth control.
In a managed care system, a woman may not be able to choose a doctor who does abortions if she is a victum of rape by a family member or if she is carrying a non-viable fetus. My cousin gave birth to an ancephalic baby that lived for days because a Green hospital force them to keep a soleless husk on life support. The horror of that experience destroyed her marriage and after 20 years I still see evidence of the trauma.
It's a very toxic blue that takes upon itself the right to decide for a couple if such a damaged creature should be kept alive in constant pain or allowed to rejoin god.
And to move us into Orange, I don't see the Catholic church agreeing to foot every penny of the expense for damaged or unwanted children. The Catholic women who march around abortion clinics aren't foster parents caring for the kids they're attempting to force on others. They expect the tax payers who believe in responsible family planning to foot the bill for those who don't.
Just some thinking points.
[By the way, I do agree it's a moral outrage to force a Dr. to do an abortion AND therefore, managed care systems MUST provide women an alternative provider that will.]
If we reframe the debate in that way, perhaps we could come up with a reasonable compromise.
Regards,
Barbara B
The point is that there should be many different alternatives out there. The law in question is designed to shut down a major alternative. If you don't like the Catholic approach, provide your own -- but we, and they, should not force or threaten to use the force of government to get what we or they want. And the government certainly shouldn't be using such tactics as this to try to shut down charity hospitals. There should be moral outrage at this. But the forces at work are Green, and they don't see any value to anything anybody else is doing. Thus, the attempt to shutter all competition and get medicine completely under the control of government. We need a variety of hospitals representing a wide range of levels, as they will provide the kinds of care needed by different kinds of people. Of course, 2nd Tier health care should be able to put them all out of business. Whatever that may look like. That's the debate we really should be having, I think.
I am surprised that this is being proposed in the United States. The U.S. is about the last place in the world that I would expect this to be happening. Things really have changed in the last few months.
By the way, I agree that this is bad policy!
There were people who warned us that this would happen if we elected Obama, but everybody thought the same thing, that there was no way anyone would actually try to do these things. Not in the U.S.
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