Here is a summary of what I heard from a commentator on NPR today about healthcare. We should not have universal coverage because if all people were forced to or were provided coverage, then some people would not be able to choose not to get health care. In essence, it would corrupt our pure freedom not to get healthcare if other people who cannot afford it were to get health care.
The argument for universal care was that when people are healthy, they can contribute to the economy more. If they are healthy, they will get more done. If they are healthy, they will be able to bolster and participate in what George Bush declared to be the primary patriotic activity…to go out and shop. Or, if the implication is not that people are reduced to their consumptive ability, then they are reduced to their productive capabilities. What a poor vision of humanity! While what I take most offense to is the explicit anthropology of a Liberal democracy…not the “worth of the individual” as most proponents claim to espouse, but rather the destruction of God’s image that is indelibly stamped upon us. A human being is not of any value because that human being is simply is or because that human is a creature made by a Creator and bearing that Creator’s image, but rather, we must produce our own worthy in order to have health and health care. This is why the assertion that “America is the last best hope for the world,” (put forth by Obama, McCain, and Clinton during the election cycle) is so misguided and nihilistic. America and Liberal democracies cannot offer a robust vision of human life flourishing, only a utilitarian market of commodities and commodified individuals. For this reason, we are not to put our hope in nations, governments, rulers, economies, and militaries. If we were to listen to who they say we are, there would be no intrinsic value in life itself.
Despite my great aversion to this view of humanity framed by the health care debate, the greatest irony is that it betrays Adam Smith’s vision of a free market. He saw the market as functional for humanity, not humanity as functional for and subservient to the economy. The capitalists need to find that not only are they forfeiting the beauty of human life, they are distorting their own roots. Though in the end, I suppose they have shown us the truth of market economies, that if we look to them for our worth and our identity, we will find that we have no roots. If we choose to stand alone, then it will be to our own detriment.
And finally my last claim is that we need the church in order to sustain human life, or at least the God that the church often fails to give witness to. Under the working anthropology of the free market and the commentators on healthcare today, we are no different from the Third Reich in regard to people with disabilities. They had a program to exterminate all people with disabilities because they were a perverted version of humanity, because they cannot provide and consume like we can, because they are a scar and an eyesore on humanity. The free market has no resources to offer a rebuttal. If the reason for giving people healthcare is because of the bottom line. If numbers tell more about our worth than our very existence, then we have no intellectual or moral resources to sustain care for those with disabilities. To be sure, this group of people often times cost us a lot of money, to be crude about it. I took Walton to a lot of doctor’s appointments while I was at L’Arche. He never produced enough artwork to pay for these bills. He was not “worth his care”.
The only hope for us is that the church tells us that Walton is not just important in and of himself, but he is important for our us and our salvation, that he is important to the exterior and interior life of God. This is not meant to be a perverted reduction of Walton for us to get our own ends. Instead, the God of Jesus Christ tells us that if we are to come near to God, we must come close to Walton. We can only be ourselves when we are part of a creation that is reconciled to each other. We cannot have life and God without making sure Walton has life. And we cannot have salvation unless Walton has life. Said another way, we are all in this together, the weak and the strong, the articulate and the mute, the entitled and the un-entitled, the abled and the disabled. I know this because I have been loved by Walton.
