This Fateful Moment: Health Care

President Obama's visit and talk to Democratic Senators signalled the home stretch for the Senate health care bill, while negotiations apparently still continue within the Senate. According to TPM: President Obama evoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the creation of Social Security today in a rare weekend meeting with the Democratic caucus, in a bid to keep his party united behind a historic health care reform bill currently being debated on the Senate floor.... A number of senators suggested Obama's remarks provided the party and the legislation with much-needed momentum. "I think it helped, more than significantly," said Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT).

The slog through the posturing, lies, obstructionism and politicized idiocy is enough to make anyone sick beyond the help of any health care plan. If President Obama had to remind them of the whole point of this effort, that speaks volumes in itself. This is beyond politics. Catastrophic illness and accidents hit Republicans and Democrats, people of all genders, races, ethnicities and religions, in every region of the country. Except for the richest few, health care costs are increasingly a cause of fatal human tragedy.

I've been thinking about this column all week. It is only one story among too many that sickens the heart and mind, that this could happen in this wealthy nation. But this one, about a sawmill worker in Oregon not far from where I am, has features that surprised even me. This man has a condition that causes him daily pain, including pain so severe that he vomits, every day. His condition can be cured with surgery, but no surgeon will do the operation because he has no health insurance. Nicholas Kristof writes: "Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain. When he collapses or suffers particularly excruciating headaches, Esther rushes him to the emergency room of one hospital or another, but an E.R. can’t do much for him. One hospital has told them not to come back unless he gets insurance, they say."

This is human abuse. This is cruelty for profit. Forget for a moment that businesses large and small are going broke because of health care costs. Forget for a moment that U.S. business are less able to compete in the world because of health care costs, when other nations pay for them, contributing to America's slide into second class status. Forget for a moment that unless health care costs are reigned in, the federal government will face ever more massive deficits and the economy could collapse.

And maybe even forget for a moment about FDR and history. Think about the people who are suffering and dying needlessly. And about what that says about us as a people. As a Christian, if that's what you are. As an American. Think about what it says about you as a person.

It might be different if this were Somalia. This is America. Health should not be for sale. It still will be, apparently, but maybe it doesn't have to be at such a high human cost to all of us, body and soul.