And There Was No Sick Among Them

“And remember in all things the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted, for he that doeth not these things, the same is not my disciple.”  D&C 52:40

I remember the day – 10 years ago this month –  I first realized that government-sponsored healthcare might not be inherently evil.

A British friend and I were engaged in an impromptu debate on social policy.  I started lecturing him on the defects of British healthcare compared to true red-state and Mormon principles of self-reliance.  Any form of welfare, especially government-sponsored healthcare, perpetuated a cycle of dependence.  If an individual legitimately needed help, family, friends, and nonprofits should step in.  Government involvement was wasteful, anti-capitalistic, and coercive –  it could never heal society.

He offered a pithy response: “I can think of nothing more barbaric about America than that you let people die because they can’t afford healthcare.”

“Barbaric” hit me with a jolt. What an absurd word!  And yet, one with truth.

Do I want sick people to die? Of course not. 

 Do I want sick people to be forced into bankruptcy just so they can live? Don’t be ridiculous. 

 Do I want to make sick people forego basic checkups and medicines, which might prevent worse outcomes, because they can’t afford them?  That’s just cruel.

My red-state, free-market, “Christian,” upbringing had taught me to ask the wrong question.  The question wasn’t: “how can I make sick, sinful, slackers take responsibility for their lives?” Rather, I should be asking: “how can I build a society that helps the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable?  How can I better support life?”

The sick aren’t sinners who deserve illness and death; they’re Children of God who deserve healing and life.

In my scripture study I confronted that message everywhere.  God called Christians to heal, not just by giving Priesthood blessings, but by building compassionate communities.  Christ constantly reminds us that no wealth, no social status, no righteousness makes us better than our neighbors.  All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; all are less than the dust of the earth.  Prophets call to repentance not only prideful individuals but also prideful societies.

“Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?  Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.  The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick.”  Ezekiel 34:2-4

I was beginning to understand the “Christian left.”

But I refused to become a bleeding-heart liberal.  So I searched for ways to make the conservative, economic case for expansive healthcare.  Healthcare is like infrastructure, or education, I reasoned.  It’s a common good; an investment in the future.  I ate up stories about various experiments with free children’s coverage, free vaccines, and free birth control.  In the long run, these upfront investments were often resulting in better health and cheaper costs.  Simply put, government could provide healthcare more expansively, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively than patchworks of private industry and charity.

Sure, government is cold, dispassionate and bureaucratic, I acknowledged, but it’s a reasonable choice for voters to choose to outsource healthcare to the government, in order to achieve more comprehensive results.

That position became my stock response in Sunday School whenever political condemnation of Obamacare infiltrated class discussions.  “Let’s step back and acknowledge the good intentions here,” I regularly countered.  “Those who support government healthcare do so because they genuinely want to care for the poor and needy. They want fewer of their neighbors to be sick.  I can think of nothing more Christ-like.”

A few weeks ago I was chatting politics with a New York-liberal friend when I fell back, once again, on my “the government is dispassionate but efficient” argument.  He looked bemused (it’s a long-running trend that every argument I make circles back to “efficiency”).  Then he offered a response that once again, changed my entire paradigm.

Dispassion is a virtue, not a flaw.

As he explained it, the problem with patchworks of private charity is that they invariably end up benefiting the cute, the familiar, and the sympathetic.  Those who can pull at media and social media heartstrings benefit in a private charitable system; everyone else falls through the cracks. Those without family as backstops; those without friends who can afford to contribute to GoFundMe accounts; those without the marketing prowess to appear faultless except for their sickness; those who suffer the effects of unconscious bias; those who are unemployed or homeless or disabled or mentally ill; they are left out of a system structured around private generosity.

We may wish for a world where every one of us has the Christ-like compassion to succor every person who asks, regardless of our emotional judgment of whether that person “deserves” or has “earned” our help.  But that is not the world we live in.  And even if we always did chip in, that alone would not be enough to cover everyone in need.  Too many of us with wealth are too far removed from the social circles of those needing help to even hear their pleas.

That’s why the social safety net is so valuable.  Bureaucracy does not depend on heartstrings.  It is built upon trained professionals, asking objective questions, filling out dispassionate forms.  What’s your income level?  How many children do you have?  What healthcare do you need?  In many “universal healthcare” countries, even those questions are irrelevant, at least for basic services.  They simply ask Are you sick? Here is treatment.

Any human system will always be imperfect, but let us always strive to make it better, not worse.

As Christians, we should have one goal in sight:   “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.”  Moses 7:18.  Neither should there be any among Zion who are sick.