More bishops criticize government-run health care; ‘our federal bureaucracy is a vast wasteland’

September 07, 2009

Drawing upon Catholic teaching on subsidiarity, an increasing number of US bishops are criticizing the concept of government-run health care. Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo has criticized the view that “the national government is the sole instrument of the common good.” Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford adds:

As Catholic people, however, we are not allowed to wash our hands of it and to let things shake out as the federal government would have it. Our more than bicentennial experience with our federal government leads many to the conclusion that our government really does only one thing well: waging war. In every other area of life, when someone says, “I am from the government and I am here to help you,” our survival instinct tells us to run and hide. In the early ’90s when the health care scare was last put upon us, the opposition crowed: “If you like the postal service, you will love national health,” and that still seems to be the feeling of many …

The fourth principle is subsidiarity which commands us to seek the most effective approach to solving the problem. Our federal bureaucracy is a vast wasteland strewn with the carcasses of absurd federal programs which proved infinitely worse than the problems they were established to correct. It perhaps is too extreme to say that competent government is an oxymoron, but sometimes it seems that way. The moral principal of subsidiarity implies decreasing the role of government and employers in health care when lower order groups can better serve individuals and families. We need to think of health care as more of a market than a system …

It was observed by the ancients that usually the problem with totalitarian governments is not that they do not love their people; the problem seems to be that they love them too much — they just do not trust them. To establish control, these governments have always tried to control food. Remember why Jacob’s sons went down to Egypt in the Book of Exodus. But since homo sapiens is an omnivore, this proves increasingly difficult.

Modern socialist governments like to control not food but the means to protect and extend life. Some have called the current efforts of our federal government “senioricide” or “infanticide.” That perhaps is too severe, but we as Catholics should take care that health care does not morph into life control.

 

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Further information:

• Catholic bishops question details of health care overhaul (AP)
• Concerns to take to heart in health care and proposed reforms (Rockford Observer)
• Kansas City bishops question centralized health-care system (CWN, Sep 2)
• Iowa bishop warns against healthcare rationing, ‘federal monopolization’ (CWN, Aug 28)