Musings

There has been much debate on health care for many years now. The debate has become especially heated this past summer after the House wrote a 1000+ page bill that was published online and people actually read what was contained in the bill. What many people read there caused them concern, worry, and anger. So they started contacting their elected officials in Washington, from both houses of Congress, and they went to the townhall meetings that were held in August.

The results of ordinary everyday people attending townhalls and also attending protests since February has been that they have been labeled as Nazis, ignorant, paid agitators, and have been insulted in myraid ways by those who are their employees but who act as if they are the employers with whose words one must always agree. Yet there are still those who support the elected officials in their inappropriate, rude, contemptable behavior.

One of the other things that has come out of the debate is a use of the Christian religion to try to convince people that having the government take over health care lock, stock, and barrell is the right thing to do. As a Christian, as a Christian pastor, I find this to be an arguable point. Yes, Jesus did say that we, as Christians, are to be looking out for each other, providing for those among us who are experiencing poverty and all that encompasses. Jesus did not say that we are to look to government, ever, to provide for the least of these among us. Jesus did not say that we are ever to look to government for anything at all. His only mention of government was to say that we are to pay Caeser what belonged to him. Recently I heard someone using the Golden Rule to say that he did not want to have government run health care, so why would he want it to be imposed on his neighbor. I really like that comment. I don't want government run health care because from where I sit the government cannot run anything without screwing it up. I defy anyone, anywhere to name me just ONE government run program that actually, honestly, really runs efficiently and in an economically sound way.

My biggest objection to government getting into the health care business is that government should not be in ANY business at all. It is not Constitutional for government to have its fingers in any business in any way. Period. There are those who will argue that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gives the Federal Government the right to do so according to the way that the Supreme Courts of various eras have interpreted it. I say that the courts got it wrong. That is not what the writers of the Constitution intended.

There is a word that theologians use: isogesis. When one engages in isogesis, one is looking at a biblical passage and then interpreting it so that it says what the person wants it to say. While there are those who accuse conservatives of cherry picking which passages they will obey, isogesis is also a way of cherry picking. It is cherry picking how one wants to interpret what the Bible has to say. In much the same way, previous Supreme Courts are guilty, in my opinion, of isogetically interpreting what the Constitution has to say in the Commerce Clause. In other words, they decided that it gives the government rights to do things that our founding fathers never intended for the federal government to have.

I will post more on this later.