Jennifer Foster: The moral imperative in health care debate

Let’s talk about health care as a moral imperative. I’ve watched the back-and-forth over the last few months between a local pastor who writes a regular column for the Religion page and various folks who have responded to what he’s said about the issue.

As I’ve listened to these arguments, I’ve tried to extract the authors’ valid points from the hyperbole that so often obscures them.

For me, it comes down to this: Whether we realize it or not, our beliefs about health care reform are almost certainly couched more in what we believe the proper role of government to be than in our beliefs about whether health care is a moral imperative.

Most folks I’ve encountered agree that health care in America needs to be more affordable and more accessible. That group includes a bunch of Republicans. And they even believe there is a moral component involved.

But they don’t see a nexus between the need and the government as the sole fulfiller of that need.

A friend of mine said on Twitter this week that one could view Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 as “Biblical redistribution of wealth.” After all, the five loaves and two fish used to provide meals for the thousands who otherwise would have gone hungry came from one person in attendance.

I found myself pointing out that although Jesus was the authority figure in that story, He wasn’t acting as an agent of the government when He provided for those people.

As that relates to health care reform, there is a role for charity. But that role for charity may best be reserved for private citizens – especially Christians, if we are using the feeding of the 5,000 as a guide. It falls to government, then, to concentrate its efforts on creating policies – offering tax incentives, fostering robust competition among insurers, ending insurers’ ability to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, etc. – that empower and encourage individuals to get the coverage they need at a price they can afford.

The question of the public option is vulnerable on many fronts, not the least of which is the straightforward objection constitutionalists lodge against it: Of all the defenses of the public option we’ve heard throughout the year, we’re still waiting for first mention of a constitutional citation that enables the government to set up, fund and administer a health insurance company.

(Of course, the federal government – especially over the last 13 months – has done a whole bunch of things for which there is no constitutional basis. So perhaps Americans have tacitly determined that constitutionality isn’t such a big deal. And if that’s the case, we have an entirely new set of problems.)

But even beyond the philosophical objections to a public option, there are concerns that a public option might eventually end up scuttling the private system altogether. Those anxieties are only magnified when plans to fund a public option depend heavily on taxes on so-called “Cadillac” private plans, as has been discussed this summer.

Pragmatists in this debate are trying to improve access and increase affordability without tying themselves to any specific potential component of reform. They know that politicians and activists who treat any single piece of reform as the whole of reform imperil the entire effort.

So the moral imperative surrounding the public option, then, may not be that its supporters insist on its inclusion in reform. It may actually be that they become willing to let it go.

Jennifer Foster is a political enthusiast who lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News. She can be reached at