I was having a conversation over the holidays with one of my very best friends, and the subject of Facebook came up. He said, “You like to be provocative with your status, don’t you?” I had to agree. After all, I am a curmudgeon.
But that did get me to thinking about how difficult it is to be provocative without offending. Perhaps that isn’t possible. But I never set out to offend.
I think what I find difficult is not the beliefs of different political groups, but the methods and means they use to achieve their different goals. Back in the day, I was a Reagan Republican. I helped start the College Republicans and the Young Republicans (two different groups) in the county where I went to college. I worked (as in paying gig) for a Republican candidate for the State Legislature.
Professionally, I worked in for-profit healthcare and pursued a career in maximizing the return to our investors.
Then a major life event, common to most in the early 1990s, happened: my for-profit hospital, my identity as a person, was sold. I was without a job, with a family to support, some 1,150 miles away from any support structure. For the first time in my life, I (and my family) had no insurance. I struggled daily with the lack of insurance.
I strained my back, for which my physician indicated I’d need surgery that cost (in 1994) $35,000. I knew the actual cost – at least at one of the hospitals I’d run – and the margin was astronomical. At that point in my life I lived with my in-laws, worked some short-term consulting jobs, and had never owned a house, or a new car. I drew unemployment while looking for work, and my wife worked a retail job with no benefits. $35,000 was out of the question.
Within the healthcare industry, there was a consensus that the major issues of the day could be solved by universal coverage. Figure out a way that everyone can be covered, and the idea of cost-shifting will go away, and the people with insurance will no longer have to pay for the people without insurance.
But then the idea of universal coverage morphed into governmental coverage. Suddenly, healthcare was no longer a right, but rather for those that could afford it. And at that point, my personal views began to morph as well. The Orthodox Church holds a tradition of “Unmercenary Physicians” who treated everyone for zero payment.
Some said, “The Emergency Room will not deny care.” That is true, to a point. The Emergency Department is required by law to treat anyone in a life-threatening condition. That does not, however, mean healing or solving the underlying cause. It means move that patient from critical to stable. The particular law is called EMTALA, Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Allegations of EMTALA violations strike fear in the hearts of healthcare administrators everywhere. The defense against these allegations is simple – the patient was stable when discharged. The fact that they died on the bus on the way home is not the hospital’s or emergency department’s fault.
I began to see, because of my own dependence on the social safety net and my increasing certainty that healthcare should not be the territory of the privileged few, that the Republican Party was telling us “I got mine, so you get yours.” I slowly became politically agnostic, then increasingly Democratic.
Part of the problem I faced was that I couldn’t find a consistent ethic I could support. I am pro-life, but I am also for the separation of Church and State. The Republican Party adopted the pro-life stance, except for the death penalty. My Baptist heritage of old told me “The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends.” (from the Baptist Faith and Message, Section 17).
The emphasis on governmental activism seems antithetical to the Christian ethic, at least as expressed by the Baptist Faith and Message. When I began participating in the Orthodox Church, I saw the same thing – the Church is not about law, but about personal transformation.
My accounting background put me squarely in a supply or demand dilemma. Some, particularly the GOP of Reagan, believed that if the supply was managed, the demand would change. If you made abortion illegal, the demand for abortion would decrease. The same can be said of economics. If the suppliers can increase supply, the prices will drop and demand will increase.
Unfortunately, the empirical evidence doesn’t bear this out. Supply and demand are mechanisms that determine pricing, not supply and demand. Scarcity does not lower demand. Rather, demand creates scarcity. Think “Tickle-me Elmo” of a while back …
For the past few years, since the beginning of the second Iraq and Afghanistan war, I have leaned very heavily toward the leftist, progressive political agenda. What I found is that only one really “leftist” position, that of abortion, was inconsistent with my religious faith and personal beliefs. Even then, I could rationalize that because ultimately, I didn’t believe the government should play a significant role in controlling the supply of abortion.
My friends on the GOP side have made an excellent point in that the Gospel of Christ does not contemplate a government redistribution of wealth. So I find myself once again swinging back toward political agnosticism.
Today, I find myself still holding somewhat progressive ideals. I cannot agree with the methods advocated by the GOP, particularly the Tea Party, to move away from Government dependence. However I do agree with their ultimate goals – that charity and social justice should be supplied and administered by the people, not the Government, and that individual liberty should trump governmental programs.
So, at the end of the day, where do I stand?
To be honest, I’m in no-man’s land.
First and foremost, the Gospel of Christ contemplates nothing less than personal transformation by God. The Orthodox Church would say we are always in that process of being transformed, and rarely understand we reach the completion of that transformation.
Politically, we have created an environment where people are dependent on the Government for basic needs – food, clothing, shelter, and yes, I will continue to throw in healthcare, particularly since over 55% of the spending on healthcare in the United States is governmental – Medicare, Medicaid, Tri-Care and the Veterans Administration.
While I strongly believe the social safety net should be better provided as a voluntary offering, until that exists, it is essential to maintain the governmental safety net. The GOP seems to believe that the best way to move toward anything is to simply force the issue – starve the beast, so to speak. I don’t believe we can nor should do that until the demand for the services is decreased.
I do think there is an appropriate role for government to play. There is danger in private policing and militia. There is danger in private education. There is danger in privately held infrastructure. Everyone, including the 1% most of all, benefits from strong public schools and colleges, strong public infrastructure like roads and bridges and parks, and strong public safety professionals like fire, police, ambulance, and military. I also happen to see healthcare as a public safety issue, but again, until the private sector can come up with charitable hospitals that can survive, the government is likely the only way to provide entree into that system.
The most important aspect of societal life in the US to me is that we avoid the political and economic apartheid that dominated the rest of the world. Democracy as a great experiment holds fundamental that each person, each individual, within society has the same influence in governmental affairs as any other individual or person. In this respect I think the Occupy movement has the right idea. Apartheid is antithetical to democracy. I’d hate to see our democratic experiment end and prove unworkable. We have to re-establish the public good. Ultimately, we need to ensure that government and regulation serve the greater societal good, and that we are not slaves to the faceless “government.” The government is us – ourselves, our friends, our neighbors.
There is an appropriate role for regulation – primarily to prevent the powerful from abusing their position. Ideally (in my view) the powerful would hold a strong obligation toward the other, and would never think to abuse anyone. The Orthodox Christian faith promulgates the belief that our obligation is to the other person, and not ourselves. We have to recognize that some (most?) will not hold this position, particularly the foundationally amoral “corporation.” Thus, those with moral beliefs should advocate regulation to protect us from those without moral beliefs.
Most importantly, though, each one of us needs to envision the world we want. We also need to establish mechanisms within the community where the visions can be expressed, safely and respectfully, and community consensus can emerge. Once everyone is “on the same page” the community can begin to be the change they want to create. The “town meeting” format in the New England heritage is particularly appealing. Perhaps larger urban areas can be broken down into smaller, town meeting amenable units.
As for me, and for my house, we choose to follow Christ. I want a land where that is possible, and where everyone in society has food, clothing, shelter – and health. It is idealistic, and likely will never come into actual existence, but isn’t it a loverly goal?