According to AP reports, “Catholic nuns are urging Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s health care plan, in an unusual public break with bishops who say it would subsidize abortion.” Reportedly, 60 leaders of religious orders sent lawmakers a letter pleading with them to pass the Senate healthcare bill.
The AP clearly has not noticed the virtual ongoing war within the Catholic Church, especially with regards to government responsibility as opposed to private/church responsibility. In no sphere is this internal war more evident than when it comes to matters involving the Church’s Doctrine on Social Justice.
The Doctrines on Social Justice are, perhaps, the most misunderstood and lied-about facets of the Catholic faith. Just about everyone in public life, including even the majority of Catholics themselves, completely ignore the fundamentals of Social Justice teaching. They summarily conclude that Social Justice is a synonym for socialist redistributive policies, which seek to equalize material outcomes for all. I call this the Kumbayah Fallacy.
These nuns have fallen hook, line and sinker for the Kumbayah Fallacy. Right along with all the liberation theologians, who have shamefully wrapped Marxist doctrine around the cross of Christ for decades.
This mingling of socialism with Christianity makes a diabolical mockery of the Church’s genuine Social Doctrine, as delineated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In fact, the Catholic Church explicitly rebukes all forms of “communism” and “socialism” right there in plain sight in the Catechism. While the Church also condemns completely unfettered capitalism, with no regulations whatsoever, She saves most condemnation for the Marxist doctrines, which attempt to regulate the economy “solely by centralized planners,” as this “perverts the basis of social bonds” between human beings.
While President Obama has made wide use of his claim to fighting for Social Justice, especially with his zeal towards a government takeover of our healthcare system, he has utterly ignored the natural – fully predictable – unintended consequences of his attempt to reorder the best medical delivery system the world has ever created.
In fact, this reordering of the American medical delivery system to suit the whims of socialist reformers, President Obama is ensuring a genuine Social Justice nightmare for the whole world.
In which Country do the new drugs, medical innovations and most advanced surgical techniques originate? Exactly. In the United States of America.
But the United States is not a selfish Nation. And every one of these medical “miracles,” the products of free enterprise, under the supervision of government oversight, makes its way quite quickly to the rest of the world. Socialist countries, unable to produce the cures themselves because they have choked innovation with their own “centralized planner” philosophies, then buy the new American drugs at highly discounted prices for their own citizens. In effect, the American medical system quite heavily subsidizes all the other medical systems of the world with its own ingenuity and enterprise. Our doctors routinely travel around the globe, sharing and teaching their techniques to other doctors in other countries. Our charities routinely offer free medical aid around the globe.
Of course, once Obamacare makes all these “miracle” cures unprofitable, those new innovations will dry up here just as surely as they have in all the other socialized medical systems in the world.
That, in itself, creates a wholly unnecessary Social Justice nightmare for which not only America, but the entire world will pay a hefty price in untold suffering and death.
In addition to drying up incentives for medical innovations, which aid the entire human population, Obamacare will immediately cut the numbers of practicing doctors by up to 45%. This Investors Business Daily polling data, taken last summer, was widely criticized by liberal advocacy groups, but then was vindicated by a figure of 29.2% doctors quitting in an insert of the New England Journal of Medicine. The fact that a sizeable proportion of medical doctors would quit “if patient loads increase while pay decreases,” should not be at all surprising, since this is precisely what has happened in every other country with socialized medical models. Decreasing the supply of doctors will unarguably strike a blow at Social Justice, which simply cannot be overstated. One can throw all the taxpayer money he wishes at a disease, but that won’t cure what ails real patients. Keeping people unnecessarily sick because of a doctor shortage is unconscionable in the realm of Social Justice doctrine.
Another huge piece of the Social Justice puzzle, which is mightily threatened by Obamacare, is the charity sector of American medicine.
There is not a single medical delivery entity in America today, which does not have a social worker charged with helping people pay for their medical costs. In every hospital in these United States, patients are helped in myriad ways to either work out extended payment plans for services or receive already-available taxpayer assistance or charity dollars to meet their obligations. American doctors do much pro-bono work, just as lawyers do. But studies invariably show that once government takes over the obligations of individuals, charity dries up, causing the government burden to be much greater than it was believed it would be at the outset of new programs. Under Obamacare, not only will taxpayers assume the burdens of more and more entitlements, but will now also assume the burdens being alleviated through generous charity today.
Killing opportunities for charity may fit perfectly with the Marxist-oriented Kumbayah Fallacy, but it proves a diabolical mockery of the doctrines on genuine Social Justice.
Then, of course, there is the abortion component of Obamacare. As prohibitions against taxpayer funds being funneled to abortion coverage are not included in the Senate bill, every American taxpayer will now be conscripted into the Democrats’ genocidal denial of Social Justice to pre-born Americans – with no provision for conscientious objector status. This one thing – this fundamental, primordial facet of Social Justice – is more than enough reason to reject Obamacare on its whole. As the Pope and all others before him have repeatedly proclaimed, the right to life, once conceived, is the fundamental right upon which all others rest. No one – not even a president – can claim to be fighting for Social Justice without first protecting this unalienable right.
It is a sad commentary on our times, when even Catholics of high standing do not know enough about their own faith to stand up for it in the public square. Supporting Obamacare, and the piece-by-piece destruction of the finest medical system ever created, is an affront to the doctrine of Social Justice. It will prove a nightmare, not only for Americans, but for the whole world.