Health-care reform needs to be practical, comprehensive, ethically sound and solvent. These issues are vital. They can't be avoided or tabled for later discussion. For that reason, the U.S. bishops' conference has worked tirelessly for the past three months with members of Congress and White House staff to craft good compromise legislation.
As of Nov. 5, all those efforts had failed. This weekend, in churches across northern Colorado, Catholics will receive the unhappy news that the health-care legislation pending in Congress is fatally flawed; that it undermines human dignity in the name of serving it; and that unless it is quickly amended, it should be vigorously opposed and defeated. For Catholics, the lesson is that while Congress and the White House talk about seeking "common ground" on disputed public issues, the reality turns out to be something very different.
In addition to the issue of coverage for immigrants, the pending health-care legislation in Congress fails in two critical ways:
• Real health-care reform must respect the dignity of every human person, from conception to natural death. At the very minimum, this means it must treat the elderly with special care and sensitivity. It must also exclude abortion and public funding for abortion, no matter how well disguised that funding might be. Whatever one thinks of abortion, it has little to do with improving human "health," and there are far more sensitive ways of supporting women with unplanned pregnancies than underwriting a procedure that a significant number of citizens see as destructive both to women and their unborn children.
• Real reform must respect the conscience rights of medical professionals and institutions so that they cannot be coerced into actions that violate their moral convictions.
These seem to be reasonable principles. They do not attack the constitutional status of abortion. They take nothing away from persons who regard themselves as pro-choice. They do, however, protect the rights of the many people and institutions that see abortion as gravely wrong and refuse to be implicated in advancing it. Yet despite claims to the contrary, pending legislation in Congress does not adequately reflect these principles. It is therefore profoundly dangerous.
So far, with a few worthy exceptions, the White House and Congress have ignored these concerns, rebuffed every attempt at compromise and rammed ahead with huge, complex and now genuinely bad legislation. Most Catholics, from bishops to people in the pews, sincerely want some kind of good, comprehensive health-care reform, and they're eager to help — but not at any cost, and especially not at the cost of an ethically poisoned system.
The director of our state Catholic conference, which speaks for the statewide Catholic community in political affairs, spent most of a recent meeting on health-care reform with the chief legislative aide of one of our Democratic members of Congress fighting for his attention while he fidgeted with his BlackBerry and told her to "talk fast" because he had another meeting.
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