Moral Values that Can Change the World:
Reflections on Faith and the Common Good

Is There No Balm in Gilead?
Health Care for ALL God's Children

California is deliberating what health care plan serves the greatest good for state residents. Two legislative plans propose either to offer private insurance through all employers or to provide universal health insurance through the state as the sole payer. Other proposals, not yet legislative, are to mandate all people carry health insurance or to create health care 'savings accounts.' Each plan challenges us to define our values around key principles: Who is entitled to have access to full medical coverage? Is health care a commodity we should buy like any other? Who should pay for health coverage and how? What role does 'affordability' play in premium costs, deductibles, and co-pays in terms of access? Who decides which of us gets access, which of us gets care?

What is clear is that the current system does not work. California has 7 million residents who have insufficient or no health insurance. Nearly 80 percent of the uninsured are full-time working people. Over half of all personal bankruptcies are due to health care costs, even among those who believed they were insured. Uninsured adults and children tend to wait before seeking medical treatment thereby becoming more ill - and more expensive - when they do. Undocumented immigrants cannot obtain routine health care but are legally entitled to emergency care for life-threatening illness which is too often their fate. The uninsured are less healthy, less productive, and live less long than the rest of us. They also are not stereotypical; they are our neighbors, our divorced or widowed friends, those whose employers have stopped or cut coverage, the children in our schools. They are the young and the old, and the employed. It could be any one of us.

These issues are policy questions. For the faith community, however, they are fundamentally moral issues. At the heart of any policy we choose lies questions about the value of life, the balance between individual and societal responsibility, the issue of whether we rely on a market system and individual chance in that market. Do we look to government as an instrument of our society to help find the solution? We are all familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, the foundation of the Golden Rule, and the mandate that we are our brother's/sister's keeper. Can social policy rest on these fundamental principles? Can we shape a policy without them?