I agree with your comment on insurance. And there are alternatives, such as several Christian organizations that link people to help pay each other’s medical bills. It seems to me that is the way it should be among God’s people. Just Google “Christian health insurance”.

I have no fundamental objection to health care as a social service, so long as private options can coexist. This is fundamentally how libraries, police and fire work and work well. (Yes, even fire has private components; the govt does not distribute extinguishers, alarms and sprinkler systems.) My concern is that such health care/insurance should not be set up at the federal (or even state) level. I don’t care if the feds and states partially or fully fund them, so long as they don’t run it. It’s not their job constitutionally, and such massive bureaucracies are equally massive magnets for inefficiency and corruption. Keeping decisions very decentralized will allow the people on the ground to have proper influence and maintain a degree of market forces to keep the large providers (Big Pharma, etc) in some measure of check.

And let’s not disregard the great work the church *is* doing in healthcare. Most hospitals in my town are church charity in origin and do provide a great many services for free or reduced cost to those who need them. My own family had a significant amount of debt forgiven by Legacy Emmanuel, who also even offered spiritual/emotional support in the wake of my son’s death. More could be done, yes, always, but please do not let the whole system become “managed”. Room must be fiercely maintained for local people and local organizations to make loving decisions, or else the fight for justice becomes a mere fight for bureaucratic “fairness”. In an “industry” as deeply personal as healthcare, the question of scale is more essential than ever, and i would argue that small, local management is much more important than the questions of funding or of socialized vs free market.

Dan & Nathan – I agree the film is simplistic (and even fallacious at some points), and I’ve criticized it elsewhere, however the problem of profit-making in a critical-care industry can’t be so easily dismissed. This is an issue that touches on the moral hierarchy of need. We generally accept that Government steps in when people’s lives are critically endangered, and it can be argued that health care is about being in critical need. My grandfather died sooner than necessary because an insurance company stalled approval of his treatment. It was a profit-based decision and he died to protect someone’s profit margin, plain and simple.

Housing, food, and clothing are industries that are normally within the realm of abundance in American. Hence, they normally function well within the profit-making marketplace. However, that marketplace does, by necessity, create inequalities that threaten people’s lives in a critical way, and whenever these necessities are lacking to the point of creating critical need, Government does step in amid these industries too – here in America and abroad.

Of course, there are already such programs for healthcare too, and in my mind a major issue here is whether or not we should create a single-payer system with the government providing sole coverage, or whether we should simply be expanding the existing scope of government subsidized health care and offering people that extra choice. Either way, it’s not a simple issue.

What I’m really interested in is whether the church has an obligation to support universalized healthcare as the people of God who are called to embody a foretaste of God’s perfect eschatological future – a future, that promises people will live to a ripe old age and not die prematurely (Isaiah 65:17-20).

last, why single out health-care as an industry in which it is morally questionable to have profit motives? no one singles out housing, exercise, clothing or food like that, and those are equally (or more) essential than health care. why is the government suddenly so focused on getting health insurance for everyone when it doesn’t even guarantee housing, clothing and food? i don’t get it.

@Dan: You have a lot to say on this issue! I do agree that the “tone” of the movie is a bit snide, but I think one important point is that there do seem to be moral ramifications to the profit motive when it comes to health care, because of how crucial it is for the normal functioning of human life. Because of this, it’s an issue worth thinking through. There are precedents to governments stepping in to disrupt markets on moral grounds (slavery, for example). I’m not saying health care is like slavery, just that there are moral ramifications to the question that aren’t there in other kinds of industries. Thanks for your thoughts.

Hey, a book you might really enjoy is Nation of Rebels, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.