Universal Health Care or Just for the Deserving?

About a week before the Health Care Bill passed I got a troubling glimpse of what that might mean.  I was with my husband in a doctor’s office when my husband posed this question to the nurse practitioner.  “What do you think of Obama’s health care plan?  Is it good or bad?”  The nurse, a young woman, was in favor of it. I’ve observed this before.  Younger nurses and doctors seemed more open to ObamaCare than older ones or ones who have been in practice for awhile, so I wasn’t surprised.  But what followed, was a stunner.

She told us that in order for it to work we would have to cut premature babies and the elderly loose, the two groups that soak up more of our health dollars than any others. She went on to say that premature babies cost an incredible amount of money, and that many continue to drain our health care dollars because they usually have more illnesses and disabilities than full term babies. Regarding the elderly, she said no more can a ninety year old man with a heart problem go in for heart surgery (as if he actually would).  Rather, he would be made comfortable with medication, then left for nature to take its course. Her words were not impassioned or full of sympathy, but were as cold as if she was reading off some graph. I found the whole thing frightening.  What happened to nurses and doctors caring about the sick, the weak? What happened to nurturing and protecting life? Or trying to save it?

It’s easy to take this further.  It wouldn’t even involve much of a leap. That ninety year old could easily become eighty or seventy or even sixty-five.  Why not?  Aren’t those sixty-five and older also a drain on our social security dollars?   On the other end, why stop at premature babies?  What about that one year old, or two year old who keeps coming back to the hospital for one treatment after another, one surgery after another to correct the uncorrectable?  Why not just cut them off, too, and just say that a child has to make it on its own until, what?  Four? Five? Sort of prove its worth.

Have we come so far as a society that we are actually talking like this?  Measuring out our healthcare dollars by how “deserving” a person might be.  If a baby has a good chance of contributing to our society then he can live.  Conversely, if a person becomes too old and is no longer a contributor but in actuality, a double drain, well, he becomes undeserving, too.

I’m so glad God doesn’t measure out His love or His blessings based on how deserving we are, how much we contribute to society.  The Bible says God is no respecter of persons.  To him, the weak, the incapacitated, those with impaired mental acumen, the feeble, the old are no less precious in His sight.  Why don’t we feel that way? When did we start measuring the worth of a life so callously?  I fear that those who laughed at Sarah Palin for her remarks about the “Death Panels” many someday owe her an apology.

Until next week,

Sylvia