CHA again steps forward to remind us of health reform's benefits

Sr. Carol Keehan, DC, President of the Catholic Health Association (CHA) reminds us that the Affordable Care Act is providing new or better insurance coverage to children, young adults, seniors and small business owners:

The Catholic health ministry worked hard to enact this law because it would defend life and human dignity, provide health care access to vulnerable persons and hard-working families and reflect the values of a fair and compassionate nation. In large measure, the law is already achieving these important goals.

Just a few examples of how provisions in the ACA are helping Americans right now:

• At least 3 million young adults (under the age of 26) have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance plan.
• Some 54 million people of all ages have received free or preventive services like mammograms, colonoscopies, physical exams and cholesterol screenings.
• At least 3.6 million seniors have saved $2.1 billion on their prescription drugs, an average of $600 per senior.
• More than 50,000 people with serious illnesses have obtained coverage through state high-risk plans put in place by ACA.
• Small businesses across the country have received tax credits to help offset the cost of providing coverage to their employees.

The law also includes funding for states to develop programs that assist pregnant and parenting women. The funds grant women access to a network of supportive services that can help them complete high school or postsecondary degrees and gain access to health care, child care, family housing and services for those who are victims of domestic or sexual violence .The ACA’s provisions for pregnant and parenting women have often been lost in the clutter of coverage but represent pro-life policies that CHA strongly supported as the law was being written.

In 2014, additional parts of the law will take effect, beginning with state-based health insurance exchanges where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for affordable health insurance policies. Those who qualify for subsidies will receive help paying premium costs. Medicaid will expand to cover more people who do not currently qualify for the program but also can’t afford insurance on their own.

For low-income families, and for the hospitals and other providers that treat them, Medicaid is a lifeline – a crucial program that connects vulnerable persons with the medical and preventive care they need.

These benefits are for the CHA, and were from the beginning intended to be, a reflection of Catholic religious values:

In 2007, CHA collaborated with our members across the country to develop a set of principles outlining our expectations for health reform. That document, “Our Vision for U.S. Health Care,” drew inspiration from Catholic social teaching and named the core values of human dignity, concern for the poor and vulnerable, justice, the common good and stewardship as the optimal foundation of a system that “creates and sustains a strong, healthy national community.”

The document included six principles for a smart and equitable health care system, starting with 100% access, and it became an advocacy tool for CHA and our members. In 2010, we published an updated version of the document, “Realizing Our Vision for U.S. Health Care” to show how the ACA corresponds with most of the expectations we had named.

This is in refreshing contrast with those among the Catholic Bishops and evangelical protestants who have been busy trying to cripple health reform, rather than celebrating its benefits.

[H/T dotCommonweal]

Why are the abused angry with Pope Benedict XVI?

Andrew Sullivan gives an example in plain English.

Catholic/Baptist anti-abortion convergence

Somehow, not mysteriously, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) chose the days preceding the Southern Baptist Convention "Sanctity of Human Life Sunday" [today] to renew their anti-choice attack on health care reform.
No overt Batholic/Catholic coordination was required, although there is convergence.

The SBC officially celebrates Sanctity of Human Life Sunday every year at Roe v. Wade anniversary time, and again this year, those promoting it mirror the USCCB arguments, saying, for example, that health reform would set off a "surge in taxpayer funded abortions in this country."
In some regards, this celebration tends to make over the issue a delusion.
Among Southern Baptists, however, it is most visibly Richard Land, the SBC ethics chief, who raises the rhetorical stakes beyond the possibility of reasoning together to argue that the entire nation is "offering up its unborn children in a kind of pagan sacrifice."
Land offers up those who argue a pro-choice position as worshippers of Molech:

I can still remember as a young boy having a Sunday School lesson about how the children of God had become so paganized that they sacrificed their little children to the pagan god Molech. I could never have imagined then that I would live to see my country offering up its unborn children as a type of pagan sacrifice.

Narrowing to a Catholic/Batholic convergence

InsideCatholic.com director Deal Hudson's denigration of two progressive Catholic groups as "fake Catholic" provoked push-back from Bryan Cones, managing editor of U.S. Catholic magazine. Cones
wrote:

Well, I disagree with him, and if he wants to have a debate about whether I'm a Catholic, I say: Bring it, Deal. It's time for Catholics with actual knowledge of the breadth of the Catholic tradition to start speaking up for themselves before we all get read out the church.

This is no mere parochial quarrel. It is part of a conflict over how much the Catholic right will use church discipline to bend national policy to its will.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent interview with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, and reaction to it, indicates what the right has in mind.

In the interview, Pelosi expressed concerns about the Catholic Church's position on abortion and gay rights and touched on the difference between pastoral care by her bishop and lobbying by bishops.

Patrick Archbold at the Catholic blog Creative Minority Report called this "text-book definition of scandal (a grave offense which incites others to sin). He argued that "it should, at this point, be dealt with in a direct and public way lest no one else think that you can hold these positions and consider yourself a 'practicing' Catholic."

"Direct and public" appears to imply something more than the 2007 letter Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., received from Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, R.I., requesting that he not receive communion because of his stand on abortion. The letter was revealed in the wake of a conflict between Tobin and Kennedy after Kennedy criticized the U.S. bishops for threatening to oppose health reform unless the legislation banned the use of federal funds to cover abortion. Kennedy said their stance was "fanning the flames of dissent and discord." And Tobin demanded an apology.

Archbold's shaping and interpretation of Pelosi's studied answers into an assault on the Catholic Church is less important here than the coherence of his conclusions with Tobin's application of force and perhaps even Randall Terry's theatrical attempt to pressure bishops into denying communion to Catholic public officials who take positions like Pelosi's.

The emergent pattern is one of using the hammer of church discipline to direct the behavior of Catholic public officials and through them to shape public policies to a narrow view of Catholic theology.

Defining some as "fake Catholic" follows the pattern of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) fundamentalist takeover which among its effects made the SBC a mainstay of the right wing of the Republican Party. Those bidding for power tarred opponents as "liberal" (rather than "fake") in order to drive them out. That process of narrowing continues as the SBC shrinks.

The resulting SBC is more politically right-wing than the Catholic Church is currently.

Most recently, the Roman Catholic Church found ways to oppose Uganda's anti-gay legislation. Yet the SBC through its political arm -- the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission -- remains scandalously silent on that matter. One which has otherwise attracted sweeping opposition from religious leaders and human rights groups.

A part of what has been ironically dubbed Batholicism, there lies the future of a Roman Catholic Church whose members permit some to be defamed and either silenced or driven out because they dissent from ideological narrowness.