Health Care Hopes?

I’ve been in a conversation about health care over at Allan B. Bevere’s place. That, combined with driving today for a couple of hundred miles listening to a bit of this and that talk radio, has been an enlightening experience. There is genuine fear out there that America is spending itself into bankruptcy, and the most serious threat is anything the president has proposed about health care reform. There seems to be no recognition that our health care costs are the highest in the developed world at 17% of GDP, as opposed to a range of 8% to 11% for other nations. For that we get the least comprehensive coverage, an excessive waste factor due to high insurance company overhead, endless delays and bickering over what is and is not covered, and plenty of room for fraud.

Critics trot out an entire menagerie of horror stories about delays in treatment and surgery, sloppy medicine and bureaucratic bungling in nations with socialized health care, and all of them are true. Which is why we are not interested in having those kinds of systems. What they fail to mention is the over abundance of stories just like that and worse that populate our own health care system.

There is an absolute conviction that any federal government program is, by definition, wasteful, inefficient, bloated with bureaucracy, and detrimental to individual freedom. Is that true? As it turns out, at least according to several government and industry sources, private insurance company overhead in 2004 as a percent of all health insurance payments was about 14%. That’s compared to around 2%-5% for Medicare (You can look this stuff up for yourself on the web; it’s all easy to find.) I’m sure there is a lot of fudge factor in these numbers, and one has to be careful that apples and oranges are separated, but it’s hard to believe that a thorough audit could eliminate a nine-point spread.

Right now congress is debating how to craft a health care reform bill and pay for it, and it’s going to be rough. Paying for it is a budgetary issue that cannot take into account whether the nation as a whole can lower its total health care costs as a percent of GDP. It can be concerned only with the effect on the federal budget. Moreover, congress is loathe to do anything to curb insurance company excesses, and will probably end up with some addition to our current Rube Goldberg contraption providing second rate coverage for many of the uninsured without changing anything else. Conservatives will gloat that they stopped socialized medicine, but they will have done so at an enormous cost to human suffering and waste. If that’s the case I hope the president vetoes it and tells them to start over.

Goldman Sachs and the American Ethos

Much of the Christian Century Network blog conversation over the last year or so has been about the need for a new economic ethos in the United States, one that is based on honest productivity, fair compensation tied to real contributions, equitable distributions of compensation that mitigate against extreme differences between the very highly compensated and everyone else, and a national character that is not driven by unwarranted consumerism.

The recent news of a $3.44 billion second quarter for Goldman Sachs combined with their announced bonus pool of $11.36 billion is a troubling, but not unexpected, sign that things may not be headed as hoped for. There seems to be some mystery, and more than a little suspicion, about how they generated that $3.44 billion in earnings. Was it from the expansion of credit to small and medium size businesses? Or was it from some financial version of three card monte? And how does one generate over $11 billion in bonuses from $3 billion in earnings? Moreover, exactly who would be eligible for a share, and what did they do to earn it? In related news it has been reported that the banking industry is gearing up for a fight to kill the Consumer Financial Protection bill that would, among other things, make contracts for loans and credit cards simple and easy to read.

The point is that an industry’s corporate culture based on engineered duplicity and greed does not come easily to a conversion experience. They live and succeed in a world governed by greed, and however many of their colleagues go to jail for malfeasance simply culls the herd of competition and sharpens the taste buds of their avarice.

The easy thing to do would be to lay all the blame on Wall Street, but that would be unfair and self-deluding. Goldman Sachs and other investment bankers provide a necessary service that makes the ebb and flow of credit possible; the very ebb and flow of credit that allows main street shops to stay in business, new startups to borrow the capital they need, houses to be built an cars to be bought. There is nothing wrong with that. We need it. But couldn’t they do that with less greed driven compensation?

If we look a bit closer it becomes obvious that most of us play by the same rules that we condemn on Wall Street. We actually lust after the debt laden over consumption that we abhor when we are not a part of it. Economic recovery, to many, means getting back to building millions of oversized, overpriced houses, and inefficiently manufacturing cars in too many plants, selling them through too many dealerships, and plying us with ads encouraging inappropriate use of predatory consumer credit to keep it all going.

The virtues of a more ethical society that we so highly praise would mean more new kinds of jobs at less extravagant wage and salary levels producing a wider variety of products and services of more utilitarian value in smaller lots. Population shifts might result in a greater distribution of people into more modest cities located in more environmentally sustainable areas. These are not changes that we are likely to endorse in real life. They could mean the loss of jobs and products we are used to. Cities in unsustainable places such as L.A., Los Vegas, New Orleans and the like could become much smaller. Credit cards would be harder to get. Houses would be less expensive, probably smaller, and one would have to have a decent down payment to get in. A flatter corporate structure would mean less opportunity for income potential as a rising corporate bureaucrat. That might make teaching, family medicine, general farming and the like more attractive as long term careers. Who wants that?

The fact is that we are inclined to go along with a more authentic, transparent and equitable private enterprise based economy until we see that unique opportunity to slam dunk our neighbor and gain an unassailable competitive advantage. Then the old game is on again in a rampage of legal but morally questionable greed driven consumerism.

Maybe we are on a path that will not go in that direction. I hope so. But it will not be a comfortable path for some, and it may take a full generation to become comfortable with a new and better way of being American.

God and Chance

Chance is one of those words we use a lot without thinking much about its meaning. In general use it seems to mean unpredictability. A chance event is one that could not have been predicted. No doubt some statistician would be happy to predict a certain chance happening as a probability of once in so many thousands of events, which is an essentially useless prediction of any practical value.

English translations of the Bible use the word sparingly. The Philistines who had captured the ark of the Lord wondered if their tumors were simply a matter of chance, and not the Lord’s doing. The writer of Ecclesiastes suspected that a good deal of what happens to us in life is simply a matter of chance. The meeting between the Good Samaritan and the beaten man was by chance. During Paul’s final voyage, his ship set sail for Phoenix on the chance that they might make it before winter set in. There are certainly other references to unpredictability, particularly in moments of offering up prayer while wondering whether God might change his mind about this or that, but the English word chance is not used to describe them.

Still, it seems to me that one of the wonders of creation is the role of chance. High possibility with very low probability and no means of predictability leads in so many directions of creative potentiality, so many adventures in life, and so much opportunity for unlimited fecundity. It also reveals some small part of the enormous room for God to do what God wills to do in and amongst the ebb and flow of chance events.

But living in a world of chance is hard. It’s scary not knowing exactly what will happen to us and those we love. The news is quick to report public outrage when those in authority fail to predict the exact moment of high probability events. It always seems that someone must be to blame, and that if it wasn’t for them the whole mess could have been avoided. We are even quick to blame God for not being a good enough or caring enough God when things go wrong. We do our best to arrange things to our liking and try our best to surround ourselves with ordered predictability, and it can work for a while. In the blink of an eye it can all come tumbling down – and it does. Robert Burns famous poem about the accidental unearthing of a field mouse’s winter home ends with these familiar words (in standard English):

But Mouse, you are not alone,
 In proving foresight may be vain:


The best laid schemes of mice and men
 Go often askew,


And leaves us nothing but grief and pain, 
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!


The present only touches you:


But oh! I backward cast my eye,
 On prospects dreary!


And forward, though I cannot see, 
I guess and fear!

Paul seemed to come to that place where he could take the chances of life in stride without complaint, and without blaming God for everything. To the contrary, he rejoiced that in all things God was his constant companion and the ultimate ruler of what was to be. What was unshakably certain to Paul was the absolute possibility and probability of his eternal life, but to say that it made his earthly life irrelevant would be a big mistake. What he came to learn was that, in following Christ, some part of living in the eternal kingdom of God could be his now, and the sheer delight and wonder of that could be shared with others who could also begin living into that kingdom. Unlike the closing lines of Burns’ poem, we need not look backward only in regret, nor forward only to guess and fear. In following Christ we are able to look backward at a life redeemed and forward with delight into a world of exciting chance with new adventure lying ahead, and also with the sure and certain faith that, whatever happens, we are already safely in God’s hands for all of eternity. It is that which gives us both the strength and courage to do what we can to bring the kingdom of God into this life, leaving it with a little higher probability that God’s goodness will be more defining in the lives of others, and a lower probability that evil and injustice will prevail.

The Bedtime Nooze

I started watching CNN news this evening. The first announcement was that the story of the week was the death and funeral of Michael Jackson. The G-8? Russia? Ghana? China? I switched to a program about underwater hockey at the University of BC (that's British Columbia for some of you). More relevant.

Kingdoms? What Kingdoms?

I am going to be the guest celebrant and preacher this Sunday at a church about 70 miles from here, and I’m struggling with the text. The lectionary has given us Mark’s story of the beheading of John the Baptist. Just that and nothing more. But consider this, what precedes it is the calling and sending out of disciples two-by-two into the nearby villages to cast out demons and heal the sick. They don’t even get out the door when the narrative changes to the beheading story. It ungraciously interrupts a perfectly coherent flow that rejoices in the return of the disciples. So why do you suppose Mark, or some editor, dumped the beheading pericope right in the middle? Perhaps it just slipped out of his hands and plopped down there by accident? No? I don’t think so either.

Kingdom language is not as prevalent in Mark as it is in Matthew or Luke, but it’s not lacking and shortly before this episode Jesus had quite a bit to say about it. Sending his disciples out two-by-two was intended to manifest evidence of that kingdom in the lives of those on whom they would call. Before we can find out how it went we get the story of Herod beheading John. When that is concluded we learn about the wonderful things the disciples witnessed on their adventure. It’s really a tale of two kingdoms isn’t it?

Now here’s the real question. Which kingdom do we live in most of the time and often fiercely defend. Is it the one of power, riches, selfishly sensuous delights, rampant injustice, hubris, cowardice and death? Or is it the other one? If we are honest, I think we know which one, and it's the one that keeps interrupting the story of God's work. So here’s the follow up question. What would it mean to be more like the disciples sent out two-by-two to bring the power of God’s love into the lives of the people they met in the places they visited? I don’t think it’s anything like an LDS or Jehovah’s Witness door knock campaign. I've got some ideas, but what do you think it might be like?

Mundane Thought For The Day

The Limits of Tolerating Intolerance

I’m used to some pretty odd letters to the editor in our local paper. We’ve got a couple of regulars who would prefer a return to a pre-Roosevelt America (Teddy, that is). But the other day one of them wrote a letter that truly disturbed me. In it he counted up the number of Jews serving in congress and the White House, equated them with Zionism, alleged that they were all agents of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and concluded that they are the puppeteers of Obama for the purpose of dismantling American democracy. Obviously there was more, but you get the idea. That kind of thinking, if it can generate any followers, is what results in violent bigotry of the worst kind.

So what’s the right response, if any? Just let it go and trust that a reasonably informed reading public will recognize it for what it is? I wrote a draft response, but my editor-in-chief (wife) turned it down. It was a bit on the snarky side; really some of my best H.L. Mencken style work. Not priestly at all, but possibly Pauline, as in one of his 2^nd Corinthians temper tantrums. Made me feel better though.

I was reminded by my editor-in-chief that I have my own letters to the editor supporting a bond issue for a new police station, and occasional columns extolling the love of God in Christ Jesus, which means that a snarky Mencken style response was probably not in order. She was right of course, but what is the right response, and is any needed? I’m sort of waiting to see what, if anything, might show up in the paper over the next several days. What do you think?