Finally, Hope for Health Care Reform

I don’t know what the final health care reform bill will look like but I am glad that it feels like we’re on the road to something being different, so that “the least of these” will have access to health care.
When President Obama began his drive to get a health care reform bill passed, I had no idea that health care reform had been an issue since the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I had no idea that President Richard Nixon had worked on the issue as well. I have learned so much.
When I have listened to Republican senators say that we need to slow down, to wait, I have been flabbergasted. Wait? How much longer ? Why? What about the people, the poor, the working poor, and others, who are suffering? Could they have been serious?
They were and they are …but there comes a time when there’s been enough waiting. Martin Luther King Jr. said as much in his book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” responding to Christian ministers said to him that he and African Americans must wait for justice and for civil rights. Huh? Are you kidding? It had been hundreds of years already when the Civil Rights movement got into its rhythm, pushing steadily toward its goal of justice. Wait??? Only those who have all they need can admonish others to wait. They have no vantage point, no place of personal knowledge, to fuel their arguments. It is easy to be an ideologue.
But people are suffering, and in this nation, when it comes to health care, that kind of suffering makes no sense. The government is not controlling people; big business is, in the form of insurance companies. Insurance companies do not care a hoot if patients live, die or suffer. Their concern is their bottom line: their profits. If people suffer, tough. So be it. That’s life. Or…at least that’s the way the capitalist mind thinks.
President Obama is to be commended for taking on health care reform and for sticking with it. It may cost him, politically. The bill that may pass the Senate (I am writing this four days before Christmas, when it is expected to pass) is not perfect. It does not contain the public option. It doesn’t extend Medicare benefits …there is a lot it doesn’t do, and Liberals are angry …
But Conservatives are angry, too, because some of the way improved health care will be financed is by increasing taxes on people who make more than $250,000 annually. Some things, like getting botox treatments, will be taxed … and there are other things that will be taxed that will make people angry …but at the end of the day, what is important to me is that more people who do not have health insurance will be able to get it. At the end of the day, the insurance companies will not be able to refuse coverage to people who have “pre-existing” conditions.
Thank God.
I think that having access to health care is a right, not a privilege, especially in this country. I am glad that the President, the House and the Senate have pushed this. It’s been mean and unkind, the war of words…but I am glad that the momentum was never stopped.
It’s a wonderful first step toward giving “liberty and justice to all.”
Have a good week as we end 2009 and enter 2010! See you at Watch Night Service!

Pastor Smith