At Salon:

Let’s get on with it, Mr. President. We’re up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This healthcare thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution — the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as Gen. Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory “Made in the USA.” We could have said to the world, “Look what we did!” And we could have turned to each other and said, “Thank you.”

As it is, we’re about to get healthcare reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean, this is topsy-turvy — we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity.

As we speak, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, has been fined a record $2.3 billion as a civil and criminal — yes, that’s criminal, as in fraud — penalty for promoting prescription drugs with the subtlety of the Russian mafia. It’s the fourth time in a decade Pfizer’s been called on the carpet. And these are the people into whose tender mercies Congress and the White House would deliver us?

Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government-run insurance plan alongside private insurance — mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company’s share price and profits.

And, about that unprecedented fine for Pfizer, it seems Wall Street couldn’t care less. Wonder why.

Obama at the AFL-CIO picnic. Let’s hope Harry Reid, Max Baucus, and the Blue Dogs hear this, and get off their duffs.

Update: Apropos of the Public Option discussion, here is Paul Krugman: “Why the Public Option Matters”

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/why-the-public-option-matters/

The White House has posted the prepared remarks President Obama is to give in his school speech. It’s what any rational person would have expected from Obama – a return to his basic theme of personal responsibility. Here is a typical passage:

I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn.

I imagine that critics of the president are at this moment searching between the lines for a conspiracy to radicalize the nation’s youth and seeing something like this:

I’m calling on each of you to ignore what your parents, clergy and teachers say and set your own goals, no matter how low. It’s up to you to decide something as simple as if you’ll do your homework, pay attention in class,  read the Bible or refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe you’ll decide to volunteer for ACORN and register voters. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being discriminated against by serving as the plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against your school district, because you believe, like I do, that kids need to throw off their chains and act in solidarity.

Those who didn’t make it all the way through Nelson D. Schwartz’s 2,700 word article on Lego in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Business section may have missed this gem of a factoid: Among the thousands of blogs and websites that cater to the toy brand’s grown-up fans is GodBricks, a blog about Lego creations that depict religious imagery. (“Blogging at the intersection of Lego and religion” is the blog’s tagline.)

I couldn’t resist: I Googled GodBricks, which currently features a model of Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral and a diorama of the murder of Thomas Becket, among other truly remarkable feats of Lego art.

The always informative and challenging Austen Ivereigh has an interesting post on the America blog, concerning Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s assessment of his fellow monk, Thomas Merton. Here is how he sums up Weakland’s view:

In sum, Weakland is saying that Merton was arrogant, formulaic, not very Benedictine, and he wrote not very good theology — and the speech he gave before he died was inappropriate and badly received. Phew.

I am not quite certain of the exegesis of “phew,” but I confess to sharing some of Weakland’s unease. Without gainsaying that many have found Merton’s writings helpful, they often struck me as more “notional” than the fruit of a matured experience.

But I would be interested in others’ views, based on their reading of Merton.

This post finds me on the camino de Santiago de Compostela, the 1000 or so year-old pilgrimage trail that runs across the top of Spain, ending at the place St. James is said to have been buried after evangelizing his way across the Iberian peninsula. A friend of mine and I are doing a project concerning pilgrimage, so we thought we´d start by getting back to basics. And so we have–we´re now a week into our trek.

I came to Spain early, and was a tourist for a while before becomng a pilgrim. As a tourist, I was struck by the number of churches that charge admission to enter, some not even bothering to use the euphemistic “donation.” It´s not that I don´t understand the increased costs to pay for guards, maintenance for the extra mess caused by tramping tourists, etc., but it made the experience of entering a church feel like entering a muesum of historical artifacts. It was hard to discern a living community in many of them.

On the camino, it´s different. Most churches are locked except for a few hours a few days a week. We got lucky once to find a lovely old sanctuary open for prayer, but, as fellow pilgrim Bernard from France remarked, “the churches–all cerrado!” [closed.]

Yet–we pilgrims are a kind of community of our own. We see some familiar faces day-to-day, while others either pass us by or we pass them, hoping that their camino will continue well. We share food, tips on how to deal with blisters, and stories of the road. We join polyglot tables for dinner, trying to express however we can the varying motivations that brought us to the road. Some come for healing, some for renewal, some for the community of the trail, some to discover themselves, some to redirect themselves, some to experience the echoes of centuries of journeying mystics and misfits, and some simply to stretch themselves in a difficult endeavor. There is a powerful spiritual communion on the camino, even if not always, or only haltingly spoken in terms of Christian tradition. I wonder if that wasn´t always part of the power of the camino–Jesus, after all, spoke of himself as the Way. The churches are mostly cerrado, but…didn´t our hearts burn within us?

Growing up as I did in Manhattan and Long Island, I should be a Mets or Yankees fan. But my father had no interest in sports and I ended up forming my first and last baseball attachment…through the TV set.

It was 1967. I was 8. And the St. Louis Cardinals had one of the greatest teams ever that year. I worshiped speed — and there was Lou Brock, one of the great base-stealers of all time. Then there was Bob Gibson, a pitcher of consummate skill. He was a lefty, like me, and he had asthma, like me. My identification with Gibson was complete: if you had come up to me and pointed out that he was a black man and I was a white boy I would not have understood what you were saying.

The Cards beat the Red Sox in the World Series that year and lost to the Tigers the following year. My loyalty was established. And it has never wavered.

But it has been tested. After 1968 the Redbirds didn’t make a lot of trips to the World Series. Over the last four decades there have been some high points…and a lot of low points. The steroids scandals nearly destroyed my love of baseball, as they have for so many.

And then came Albert Pujols, a Cardinal whose career is less than a decade old and who is already destined for the Hall of Fame. He’s being mentioned in the same breath as Ruth and Dimaggio, Aaron and Mays.

I love him most not for his prowess as a hitter but for his decency and his sincere Christian faith. He has restored for me the possibility that a great ball player can also be…a gentleman.

I thought of all this when I came across this story about Pujols and a fan. It’s a long story, but a moving one, and typical of him.

The Cards are red hot right now. 2009 is feeling a lot like 1967. Chris Carpenter is pitching like Bob Gibson and Pujols is leading the league in home runs.

I don’t know if they will make it to the World Series or not. But I know this: Albert Pujols has restored my faith in baseball. And perhaps some other things as well.

Ricky Gervais, the creator of The Office, thinks about the real meaning of nursery rhymes in his recent stand-up show on HBO.  This one, on the meaning of “Humpty Dumpty,” made me laugh so hard I cried.

Warning:  Scattered foul language.

A Daily Dish reader reports on his school’s absurd response to President Obama’s planned nationally televised speech to students:

I teach in a midwestern, upper-middle class suburban school.

(…)

Today there were two more e-mails about the speech from my principal.  The first re-affirmed that only two teachers were planning on taping the speech to possibly show later, and if anyone was to do this they were to contact him, contact the parents and be sure it matches standards and not to make it mandatory.   Another e-mail was sent to say that the district would be sending a letter home to parents about this.

But the letter was pre-empted by a phone call from our district’s automated phone system where a district official notified parents that no teacher would show it live, that only Social Studies teachers might consider showing the video but only if it correlated with state standards and that it would not be mandatory and parents could opt them out of it.

This is our first week of school, and there is the typical nuttiness that goes on in schools during a first week.  This was a priority the last 24 hours for administration?  Three staff e-mails and an automated phone call home about a presidential speech that is slated to encourage students to stay in school and do well.

Two years ago we had a student bring what looked like an improvised explosive device into school, toss it in a trash can and flee the building.  Luckily it was not explosive, but the school went into a lockdown for two hours while the building was secured and the student apprehended.  There was one staff e-mail and one automated phone call to the parents.

Two decades as a teacher and I’m absolutely incredulous watching a school cater to a minority of loud, fearful and irrational voices.  Sadly, our district has a higher rate of minority students (by far) than the other suburban districts in the region.

The Washington Monthly has a piece up profiling Ave Maria and its law school’s travails.  Here’s a taste:

From the beginning, Monaghan insisted he wouldn’t meddle in the law school’s daily operations. As he put it in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, “When I owned the Detroit Tigers, I didn’t climb into the dugout and tell Sparky how to set his lineup.” But behind the scenes, he was quietly amassing control. Monaghan appointed himself chairman of the board. According to deposition testimony that Monaghan and his deputies later gave, Dean Dobranski was also given an employment contract with Monaghan’s private foundation rather than with Ave Maria law school. This meant the dean answered directly to Monaghan and not the board of governors, which was supposed to be in charge. Dobranski was also obligated to send the former pizza mogul daily writeups of his activities, to which Monaghan would reply with detailed instructions. What’s more, money for both the law school and the colleges was doled out in dribs and drabs, which allowed Monaghan to keep a tight rein on their operations. (St. Mary’s administrators, for instance, recall pleading with Monaghan’s foundation for $75 to pay the referees at a baseball game.) None of this really mattered as long as he and the faculty were driving toward the same vision. It was only when Monaghan hit on his next grand scheme that things began to unravel.

I’m not sure what’s more disgusting — Pat Buchanan’s Nazi sympathies or MSNBC’s decision to provide a platform for this drivel.   One of the more bizarre features of his argument is the way he turns Hitler’s impatience and irrationality (why didn’t he develop a 4-engine bomber?  why did he launch the war before building a German surface fleet?) into evidence that he really was — contrary to all available evidence — not actually intent on invading Poland in 1939.

The Consortium of Jesuit Bioethics Programs has just posted a statement, “The Moral Case for Insuring the Uninsured,” on its website.  The statement breaks no new ground, but it is a succinct statement for why we need health care reform.

You can find the statement here.

A quick correction to Eric’s post from the vantage point of an academic dean. The maternity/paternity policy for faculty, at least, is more than Eric implies. Women faculty are generally excused from teaching in the semester they give birth, effectively giving them a four month or so paid leave. Male faculty who are primary caregivers have the option of delaying their tenure clock. Comparable policies assist any faculty person adopting a child.

This is not to say Notre Dame shouldn’t do more, or do it differently. But in fact the university has put considerable energy into these issues recently, and, for example, is now studying whether to expand (in age availability and number of spots) its highly successful childcare facilities. Terming Notre Dame’s efforts “a contradiction” to the elusive culture of life seems a bit overstated.

Cardinal O’Malley responds on his blog to critics who wanted him to deny Senator Kennedy a Catholic funeral, or a public funeral, or that at the least, he should not have attended or presided. (I’m actually not clear as to what it was in his power to do–could he have denied Kennedy a Catholic funeral?)

The cardinal’s column is, I think, a forceful response to his critics and a forceful enunciation of the pro-life message, and a perceptive appreciation of what the Kennedy clan has done.

Oh, and His Eminence reveals that he got in some health care lobbying time with President Obama at the funeral, which was very Kennedyesque–and likely to confound critics of both men.

O’Malley writes:

There are those who objected, in some cases vociferously, to the Church’s providing a Catholic funeral for the Senator.   In the strongest terms I disagree with that position.   At the Senator’s interment on Saturday evening, with his family’s permission, we learned of details of his recent personal correspondence with Pope Benedict XVI.   It was very moving to hear the Senator acknowledging his failing to always be a faithful Catholic, and his request for prayers as he faced the end of his life.  The Holy Father’s expression of gratitude for the Senator’s pledge of prayer for the Church, his commendation of the Senator and his family to the intercession of the Blessed Mother, and his imparting the Apostolic Blessing, spoke of His Holiness’ role as the Vicar of Christ, the Good Shepherd who leaves none of the flock behind.

As Archbishop of Boston, I considered it appropriate to represent the Church at this liturgy out of respect for the Senator, his family, those who attended the Mass and all those who were praying for the Senator and his family at this difficult time.  We are people of faith and we believe in a loving and forgiving God from whom we seek mercy.

[snip]

We are for the precious gift of life, and our task is to build a civilization of love.  We must show those who do not share our belief about life that we care about them.  We will stop the practice of abortion by changing the law, and we will be successful in changing the law if we change people’s hearts.  We will not change hearts by turning away from people in their time of need and when they are experiencing grief and loss.

At times, even in the Church, zeal can lead people to issue harsh judgments and impute the worst motives to one another.  These attitudes and practices do irreparable damage to the communion of the Church.  If any cause is motivated by judgment, anger or vindictiveness, it will be doomed to marginalization and failure.  Jesus’ words to us were that we must love one another as He loves us.  Jesus loves us while we are still in sin.  He loves each of us first, and He loves us to the end.  Our ability to change people’s hearts and help them to grasp the dignity of each and every life, from the first moment of conception to the last moment of natural death, is directly related to our ability to increase love and unity in the Church, for our proclamation of the Truth is hindered when we are divided and fighting with each other.

You can also read my take on it at PoliticsDaily.

Also likely to generate discussion on things Kennedy is the NYT’s sneak peek at Teddy’s memoir.

The lovely first reading for today’s liturgy in honor of Pope Saint Gregory the Great is from the Second Letter to the Corinthians, and concludes:

We do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for the sake of Jesus. For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to bring to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Christ Jesus (2 Cor 4: 5&6).

Appropriating that glory in our bodies, minds, and hearts is a life-long task. And we the Church, the body of Christ, strive to assist one another in that appropriation.

Peggy Steinfels’ link to Dan Barry’s column yesterday is an example of such mutual assistance. As is the book I’ve been reading and appreciating for its wisdom and common sense: Michael Casey’s Fully Human, Fully Divine.

Casey in one of his chapters offers this reflection from Gregory the Great:

The Lord has instructed us who come to him that we renounce what we own, because whoever among us comes to the contest of faith must assume the task of wrestling against malign spirits. Now these malign spirits possess nothing of their own in this world. We must be naked to wrestle with a naked opponent.

If someone is wearing clothes when wrestling with a naked opponent, there is something to grab and so he is quickly thrown to the ground. All who hasten to wrestle with the devil must strip off their clothes or they will succumb. They may possess by love none of the delights of passing things lest this desire that covers them be grabbed and so cause them to take a fall.

I was just recently oriented to my new health insurance benefits by the human resources folks at Notre Dame, and oral contraception is not covered by the prescription drug plan:

Oral Contraceptives:  Drug treatment for correction of existing pathologies of the reproductive system only.

• To establish medical necessity, physician must fax a letter of medical necessity to Benefit Associate at 574-631-6790. Authorizations will be input into Medco’s system and are good for 12 months.

No payment will made for expenses incurred:

• For oral contraceptive or contraceptive devices, except when specifically requested by a physician based on medical necessity and for purposes other than contraception. Contraceptive implants, such as Norplant, are not considered Covered Prescription Drugs.

This is, perhaps, not surprising given the Church’s teaching and the Catholic identity of the Univerisity and should probably give those flustered by Obama’s visit some cause for relief that all is not lost at America’s flagship Catholic Univerisity.  However, the University’s stand on contraception is not without contradiction.

One would hope that this putative commitment to life would mean that the University is in the vanguard of institutions seeking to provide support for child bearing and rearing.  Unfortunately, the University does not offer paid maternity/paternity leave:

The Family and Medical Leave Act provides for unpaid leave time. The University requires employees to use available paid sick time, personal days and vacation days first for their own serious health condition, to the extent available, before the leave becomes unpaid.

By way of comparison, bastions of secularism, Yale, Princeton, and University of Chicago, all offer paid maternity/parternity leave, even to graduate students!  Furthermore, I have yet to find any child care services at the University for children under the age of two, and for children over two, there is, at least, sliding-scale (based on household income) childcare available.

It is contradictions like these that undermine the practicability of the Church’s teachings.

UPDATE:  John McGreevy alerted me to the recently developed maternity leave policy for graduate students, which does offer 6 weeks of paid leave: http://ame.nd.edu/graduate/ghb09-10/medleave.html

I spent part of the afternoon reading the Joint Pastoral Statement on Health Care Reform issued by Bishops Naumann and Finn.  I have to say that I was deeply disappointed.  I believe that bishops, both individually and collectively, have the right and the duty to guide the faithful in the formation of their consciences on important public issues.  However, from the perspective of someone who has worked for 15 years in the health care sector, I feel the document ultimately fails, both as an explication of Catholic social teaching and as an effort to apply that teaching to the key issues at play in the reform debate.  I don’t think the bishops have been well served by whoever advised them in the preparation of the document.

First of all, for a letter that bills itself as a reflection on Catholic social teaching, the document is remarkably thin on references to the major documents of that teaching.  The letter cites Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI very briefly (and in a highly selective way) and cites no other conciliar or papal documents.  Nor does the document cite any of the many documents prepared by the U.S. bishops’ conference which have attempted to apply Catholic social teaching specifically to social policy in the United States.

The result is a document that, in my view, presents a truncated understanding of Catholic social teaching as it applies to health care.  The bishops write that the “notion that health care ought to be determined at the lowest level rather than at the higher strata of society, has been promoted by the Church as “subsidiarity.”  Aside from the fact that there is little evidence that the Church has, in fact, historically applied the concept of subsidiarity to health care in this way, the principle is extremely vague.   What does it mean to “determine” health care?  And just what is the “lowest level?”

There are very few health care decisions in which “higher strata of society” are not implicated in some way. Hospitals seek accreditation from the Joint Commission.  Employers set limits on what kind of health insurance benefits they offer their employees.   The health care system in this country is a complex web of relationships that involve both private and public actors operating at the local, state and national level.  In many cases, local is not always better, as can be seen by the ways in which physician practice varies widely by geography in ways that cannot be justified by patient characteristics.  There are reasons—sound ones—why various levels of government have intervened in the health care sector.  The idea that such intervention expands, as the bishops write, “the reach of government beyond its competence” displays a lack of understanding about the health care system as it currently operates in the United States. 

Secondly, the document argues that the Church’s defense of a “right to health care” does not necessarily imply “government socialization of medical services.”  I’ll concede the point, particularly since no one has actually proposed this.  At some point, though, hard questions need to be asked how easy it is for a person living in the United States in 2009 to exercise a “right” to health care if they don’t have health insurance.  People who think the public hospitals can take care of this problem really ought to travel out to Los Angeles, where one-third of the population lacks health insurance and the public hospital system is perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse.

The implicit suggestion of the document is that Catholic social teaching is comfortable with a two-tier system in which those with traditional health insurance have access to a full range of health care services while those without such insurance would rely on some sort of “safety net.” This solution sounds very much like the system we have now, with all the inequality in access and quality of care that it produces.  At some point, these inequalities simply have to be seen as violating fundamental principles of justice.

Finally, and perhaps most disturbing, is that the document makes a number of statements that are simply factually incorrect, statements that seem to display a disturbing lack of knowledge about the health care system.  The bishops write, for example, that “mandated health insurance benefits for full-time workers have created an incentive for companies to hire part-time rather than full-time employees.”  Mandated by whom?  Unless there is a union contract in place, employers (outside of Massachusetts) are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any health insurance at all and an increasing number of employers are either cutting out dependent coverage entirely or pricing it out of the reach of their employees.

Similarly, the bishops write that “our country, in some ways, is the envy of people from countries with socialized systems of medical care.”  Who are these people? In which countries? Do they constitute anything close to a majority of people in these countries?  While it is certainly true that all health care systems have their flaws, the polling that I have seen suggests that even the systems with the highest levels of socialization (e.g. Canada and the UK) enjoy overwhelming levels of support.  Those supermajorities could be wrong, of course, but to suggest that there is widespread envy of the American system is a statement that has no factual basis.

I share the concerns of Bishops Naumann and Finn regarding certain aspects of the bills working their way through Congress, such as how they treat abortion.  But legitimate concerns about these issues need to be separated from the quasi-libertarian criticisms of “government-run health care” that have little basis in reality and, in fact, stand in significant tension with the mainstream of Catholic social teaching.

Dan Barry has been cited over the last week, first for his story of the Boston parish getting up to speed for an important funeral on Saturday, and then on Sunday his account of the funeral (in which he actually used the words Holy Communion on the front page of the NYT).

But today, he has this. Fans of Dan, and I am one, should read it, and it wouldn’t hurt the rest of you. (Let me also plug his book, Pull Me Up, an amazing story of his chilhood and beyond.)
Today this: My Brain on Chemo: Alive and Alert
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01case.html?_r=2&scp=4&sq=dan%20barry&st=cse

(After writing this I realized Dave Gibson already posted on the statement. But, because my post does something a bit different from his, I’m leaving it up.)

Via John Allen: Archbishop Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas and Bishop Joseph Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph have released a “Joint Statement on Principles of Catholic Social Teaching and Health Care Reform.” Allen’s nut grafs:

Opening a new front in official Catholic reaction to health care reform, the two bishops of Kansas City have issued a joint pastoral statement  warning not only against an expansion of abortion or mandatory end-of-life counseling, but also the dangers of “excessive centralization” and “government socialization” of medicine.

Experts say that the critique goes beyond pronouncements offered by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or by other American prelates, which typically have called for preserving “pluralism” in health care but otherwise seem neutral, or even favorably inclined, to new government initiatives.

The bishops identify several problems with the U.S. health-care system, including the 47 million uninsured, the rising costs of health care, the state of the Medicare trust fund, and the fact that people with preexisting conditions are often denied insurance coverage.

But, the bishops write, the American way of health care also has strengths. To wit: “Most Americans like the medical care services available to them. Our country, in some ways, is the envy of people from countries with socialized systems of medical care.” And don’t forget, “85 percent of citizens in the U.S. do have insurance.” Sure, 47 million may be uninsured, but, the bishops write, a 2007 Kaiser Commission study showed that 11 million of them were “eligible to receive care through SCHIP or Medicaid, but were not enrolled.” And, hey, competition works; the market produces innovation! “Doctors and other scientists immigrate to our country because of the better compensation given to those who provide quality medical care or produce successful research.” And the final strength of the U.S. system listed by the bishops: Medicare and Medicaid work–despite their limitations.

Read the rest of this entry »

John Allen has the latest from the bishops of Kansas City, Naumann and Finn, from a pastoral statement that seems to make a prophet out of the NYT’s David Kirkpatrick, as posted earlier. The two bishops, who have earned some headlines for various statements on abortion and crusading and communion, seem to strike out on a path against current health care reform that is decidedly different from that set out by the Pope or even the rest of the American bishops.

From John’s article, which quotes the joint pastoral statement:

“In evaluating health care reform proposals, perhaps we ought to ask ourselves whether the poor would have access to the kind and quality of health care that you and I would deem necessary for our families,” they write. The bishops include legal immigrants among groups which merit improved care.

Nonetheless, Naumann and Finn also warn that “change for change’s sake, change which expands the reach of government beyond its competence, would do more harm than good.”

The bishops assert that “our country, in some ways, is the envy of people from countries with socialized systems of medical care.” Grounding their critique in the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that higher levels of authority should not usurp what can be done better or more efficiently at lower levels, the bishops write that a “centralized government bureaucracy” poses three risks:

• “A loss of personal responsibility”
• “Reduction in personalized care for the sick”
• “Higher costs”

Although Catholic teaching asserts a right to health care, Naumann and Finn say that this right “does not necessarily suppose an obligation on the part of the government to fund it.”

“In our American culture, Catholic teaching about the ‘right’ to healthcare is sometimes confused with structures of entitlement,” the bishops write. “The teaching of the universal church has never been to suggest a government socialization of medical services.”

A hasty expansion of government programs, the bishops warn, could create “a future tax burden which is both unjust and unsustainable” as well as fostering “permanent dependency for individuals or families upon the state.”

I’m not sure who they expect would fund health care for those unable to afford it. And I think the rest of their analysis is deeply suspect. But above all it seems counter to everything the church has been teaching on this score. More Acton Institute than Caritas in Veritate, ya know.

What gives? Apart from the political influences that may be at play, I have been viewing this intra-ecclesial debate over health care as a kind of tug-of-war between the principles of subsidiarity (as emphasized by Naumann and Finn) and solidarity. Thoughts?

David Barash has a thought provoking article in the Chronicle of Higher Education comparing our relationship to the natural world to a giant Ponzi scheme.  Hence the title, “We are all Madoffs.”  Here’s a sample:

“Make no mistake: Our current relationship to the world ecosystem is nothing less than a pyramid scheme, of a magnitude that dwarfs anything ever contemplated by Charles Ponzi, who, before Madoff, was the best-known practitioner of that dark art. Modern civilization’s exploitation of the natural environment is not unlike the way Madoff exploited his investors, predicated on the illusion that it will always be possible to make future payments owing to yet more exploitation down the road: more suckers, more growth, more GNP, based—as all Ponzi schemes are—on the fraud of “more and more,” with no foreseeable reckoning, and thus, the promise of no comeuppance, neither legal nor economic nor ecologic. At least in the short run.”

It’s hard to think of oneself as a Bernie Madoff, but it’s also hard to dispute Barash’s basic point that we live lavishly today at the expense of humanity’s future.

You can read the entire article here.