Religion & Law

Health Care Goals

By Susan Stabile

One Mirror of Justice reader has this resonse to my post about access to health care:

"From my perspective as a Catholic physician, every person should have access to essential health care.  The tricky part is defining "essential health care."  It is easy to agree that childhool immunizations are essential.  What about acne treatment?  What about Viagra?  If a less convenient therapy is as effective as the more expensive therapy, should everyone be entitled to the more convenient therapy?  I have no doubt that if we move to a single payer system we will move to mediocrity for all and excellence for none.  our current system is characterized by "Have's" and "Have-not's."  I think an improvement would be to move to "Have's" and "Have-more's".  Everyone shoudl have the bare bones essential coverage. (Defining what is bare bones essential will be a political nightmare!)  Those who want to spend their discretionary income on bells and whistles for their health care should be free to do so."

I agree that reaching agreement on what constitutes essential health care will not be easy.  However, we dont' even get to that question until we have universal agreement on the proposition that everyone should have affordable access to essential health care and that the government has some role in helping to achieve that.  (I emphasize some role; as I've suggested in the past, there is plenty of room for debate about the precise nature of that role.) The thrust of my original post was that I don't see that commitment coming from the republicans.   

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).