It has been many years (nearly 40) since I wrote anything for the Bagpipe, but Dr. Foreman’s comment on a piece by Jonathan Cate prompts a response. In making a case for the morality of the Senate health care bill, Dr. Foreman properly challenges all of us who claim the name of Christ to regard others more highly than we regard ourselves, to be willing to give up some of our “personal peace and affluence” (Francis Schaeffer’s phrase, not Foreman’s) for the sake of the uninsured poor. He says that opposition to this legislation is motivated by the “realization that extending health care to the poor will actually cost something.” On those grounds, opposition is likely immoral.

Dr. Foreman has occupied the moral high ground here, or so it seems, so any argument with him on this point will have the appearance of moral debasement, but I’ll try anyway. I’ll make no attempt to refute his fairly sweeping condemnation of business generally and the prosperity which a “free market ideology” has foisted upon most of us reading his words. Such a counter-argument, while not having to embrace a totally free market, is certainly possible, but this is not my focus. My concern here is first of all with a one-sided argument that a certain callousness attends opposition to massive health care legislation and the implication that “the working poor and the unemployed” are currently without any protection. This is simply not the case. Medicaid, although it threatens to bankrupt many states (Georgia and Tennessee notable in this number), provides medical services to millions of low-income folks. It does so at rates which are unacceptable to many health care providers, and so these uncovered costs are routinely passed along in higher prices to those “fortunate enough to have health insurance,” people like Dr. Foreman and me. As Georgia residents, he and I contribute to Medicaid through our federal taxes, our state taxes, and indirectly through our insurance premiums. We contribute as well, and so do many of the Bagpipe’s student readers, to Medicare, which covers the poor while covering everyone else over 65. In like manner, we all contribute to Social Security, which provides a different sort of assistance to the same population.

My final concern has to do with Dr. Foreman’s implicit challenge that as followers of Christ, we should be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the poor. No argument here, especially if this challenge is directed at how he and I give away our own “prosperity.” But your young readers should know that the aforementioned entitlements (Medicare and Social Security), plus the new health care entitlement (much of which will be administered through Medicaid), has them on the hook for literally tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, even before the costs for Obamacare kick in. This will come to hundreds of thousands of dollars for each household in America–obviously unsustainable. Having been saddled with these costs by the decisions of their elders, I see nothing “irrational” or “selfish” in the current generation of college students rejecting such mandated largesse.

Dear Editor:

Jonathan Cate, in his recent article, sees the failure of the health care bill as democracy at its best. But Democratic attempts to pass healthcare reform have been stymied by people’s realization that extending healthcare to the poor will actually cost something. Christians, who claim to be pro-life, have resisted attempts to guarantee healthcare for the poor, citing hyped-up fears of government control, “death panels,” or increased abortions (while, ironically, pro-choice groups are also condemning the lack of abortion funding in both the Senate and House bills). Christians somehow think it is more likely that a health care industry run for profit will reflect principles of justice and fairness than that the government will. We are convinced that the government of a democracy is fallen and that business somehow isn’t. Or perhaps, we, who are fortunate enough to have health insurance, simply don’t want to pay to guarantee health care for the working poor and the unemployed.

Cate seems to believe that the American people have some common grace understanding of what the government should and should not be doing. But it seems to me that Americans have come to expect increasing prosperity at no cost. We have eagerly accepted decades of double-speak, in which we have been promised that we can lower taxes, increase services, waste money on ill-advised wars, sell our economy to China, and somehow prosper as a society. Republican administrations have criticized government and lowered taxes while increasing the size of government and government debt at the same time. How can we deny that the American people themselves are to blame for believing this nonsense? People voted for the Democrats because of the abuses, corruption, and economic chaos fostered by a decade of pro-business cronyism and governmental failure to regulate financial markets. Christians, who should know better, often supported this ideology of unregulated human goodness. Though Christian support was often based on a free market ideology that was supposedly biblical, that ideology too often reflected our own greed as well. We Christians are, sadly, part of the economic problem and will most likely oppose any solution—if one is even possible.

Cate is right that President Obama faces increasing opposition, though Cate perhaps shouldn’t be so gleeful about it. Now that the Democrats have been in power for a year, people are impatient. Why haven’t the Democrats given us vibrant prosperity (which we see as our God-given right), full employment, universal health care, lower health insurance premiums, and a balanced budget? Voters may turn back to the Republicans, but they will soon lose patience with them as well. Neither of the parties can clean up the mess we have made and govern this country properly as long as people continue to believe that the purpose of government is to guarantee their prosperity and solve their problems at no cost.

People are hungry for leadership, but the only leadership they will support is leadership that lies to them or flatters their patriotic vanity. I would think that a Calvinist, particularly after the vivid demonstrations of fallenness we have seen in our recent political and economic crises, would be a bit more sympathetic to the idea that Americans, at all levels of society, may be behaving irrationally and selfishly.

- Dr. Cliff Foreman