Can we embrace "the common good" and implement health-insurance reform

Republicans, appealing to radical individualism at the expense of the the common good, asked in the weekend radio address on health reform, "Will this improve your life?"

Yet Western religious traditions have strong traditions of pursuing the common good - a moral dimension that is all but lost in the debate. Distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University David Gushee wrote for Associated Baptist Press:

The national debate over health-care reform has lost, or never developed, a truly moral focus. It has not been treated as the great moral crusade that it is. To find a way to extend quality health care to 50 million Americans who do not currently have it would be an extraordinary moral victory for this country. But except around the fearful edges of the debate -- “pulling the plug on grandma,” “death panels,” abortion -- the moral case has been muted, shouted down, abandoned or never made.

Paul Moses at DotCommonWeal reminds us that "for Catholics, this [the Republican] question on health care ought to be the wrong one, given our faith’s emphasis on the common good." He refers us to Daniel Callahan, who wrote in the Oct. 9 issue of Commonweal:

Except for Catholics and a few others, however, the common good as a moral value has little purchase in American culture and politics. The closest some come is to speak of the “public interest,” but that notion seems more political than moral, useful perhaps but not quite the same. European health-care systems are based on the idea of solidarity, which is closely related to the common good, but the term “solidarity” has even less resonance here than the term “common good” does. For Europeans, it is a matter of solidarity that everyone have access to health care because it is a necessity for human welfare; and government, they believe, is the appropriate institution to guarantee this access. For Europeans, the 46 million uninsured Americans, together with the excessively high cost of care for those Americans who have insurance, is a source of astonishment. How can an affluent, civilized country tolerate treating millions of its citizens this way? Since every other developed nation provides universal care, it is worth exploring why we are different and whether anything can be done about it.

Moses persuasively argues that "the question 'Will this improve your life?' takes clever advantage of Americans’ lack of concern for the common good." And we would add that faith leaders in general should not be shy of reframing the question.