I composed seven pages last week but when I read it over realized that there's no reason to post it. People who believe in Imaginary Beings will do so no matter what I write. Also, there are positive things about Religion when it forwards values - most of which I'm in agreement with. Here's an article from National Catholic Reporter that is appropriate to the current nastiness and self-righteous "I worked so very hard so I should be able to have what I want and the hell with you because you don't deserve it" kind of thing.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_36_42/ai_n16740641/
Health care for all is crucial for the common good
National Catholic Reporter, August 11, 2006 by William J. Byron
The following is an excerpt from Jesuit Fr. William Byron's forthcoming book, The Power of Principles (Orbis Books, 2006).
We are losing a sense of working together to achieve common goals and protect the common good. Behind that loss is a reluctance to identify and articulate deeply held values. If, for example, the principle of human dignity is understood, accepted as a value, internalized and permitted to function as a prompter of personal choice, the person thus prompted will defend human dignity wherever and whenever it is under assault. Look around the workplace and the larger community for assaults on human dignity. Try to get behind the unemployment statistics. Look at urban decay. Examine the drug culture and its economic underpinnings. Ask about the physical environment within which low-income children seek both education and recreation. How about the estimated 45 million who have no health insurance? How does any or all of this relate to the common good?
In its document on "The Church in the Modern World," the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic church (1962-65) described the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily."
Another way--less abstract and far less lofty--of picturing the common good is to imagine it as an automobile tire, either the belted radials or the old-fashioned inner-tube tires. If tire or tube viewed as a whole looks integral and strong but has a cut, leak or other point of vulnerability at just one small point, the whole thing soon will collapse. Think of this as the "collapse of the common good"! One small, unattended point of weakness or vulnerability can lead to a collapse of the whole. If the wheel needs alignment, that one point of imbalance could run the whole thing off the rim (and the vehicle off the road). Patch the tube, plug the leak, repair the belt, balance the rim--or else it will all collapse. It is in the interest of the rich and powerful to assist the poor and powerless; they are all part of the same tire. It is in the interest of business to attend to the maintenance of the common good, to be socially responsible, to attend to the demands of corporate social responsibility, because any business firm is part of a larger whole....
It is regrettable, I think, that the notion of the common good is so seldom invoked in public policy debates over issues like health care insurance, minimum wage, welfare reform, immigration, foreign aid. It is doubly regrettable that business is usually presumed to be on the negative side of these debates.
It is not often that workplace health, safety, civility and compensation issues are discussed in terms both of the common good of the workplace community, as well as the good of the broader community of which the workplace is a part. In both the private and public sectors of policy making, the common good has to be factored into the decision-making process, if that process is to promote the good of all....
Anyone who takes a moment to reflect on the fact that approximately 45 million Americans participate in no health insurance program today will be forgiven for expressing outrage at this obvious assault on the principle of the common good. The obligation "to contribute" has financial implications for all of us, but not all are willing to face up to them. The right "to participate in the benefits" that a society can offer applies, of course, to the uninsured. Big business, automakers in particular along with employers in general, is concerned about the business expense of employment-based (hence employer-provided) health insurance, the predominant form of health insurance in the United States.
During the period of wage and price controls in the United States in World War II, employers offered a health benefit in lieu of wage increases. That benefit found its way into collective bargaining agreements. Today, employers want to reduce or eliminate the benefit. Those who retain it are looking for ways to have present employees pay a larger share, and past employees lose their claim to the benefit altogether.
This is a problem that will not go away; and because health care accounts for about 15 percent of our gross domestic product, the economic implications of how we handle this one dimension of the application of the principle of the common good are enormous.
Only recently have I met and become friendly with Morton Mintz, now retired from a distinguished career as a reporter for The Washington Post. He is still quite active, however, as a writer and lecturer. Mintz is puzzled over resistance in the business community to publicly financed universal health insurance. "During the 1990s," he told a Long Island audience in April 2005, "I found myself increasingly struck that corporations that would do anything for a buck would do nothing for the buck that would easily be theirs were the current system of private health care insurance based on employment to be replaced by publicly financed but privately run health care for all." ...
Mintz argues that publicly financed but privately run universal health care, including free choice of physicians on the part of patients, "would cost employers far less in taxes than their costs for insurance. Universal coverage could also work magic in less obvious ways. For example, employers would no longer have to pay for medical care under workers' compensation." He also believes that this is something that the taxpaying public would generally support. Why then does the business community have no enthusiasm for it? The opposition is, among other things, emotional and ideological, says Mintz, who spoke about this with Raymond Werntz, who for many years ran health care programs for Whitman Corporation, a Chicago-based multinational holding company. Werntz told Mintz that a single-payer solution to the health care financing crisis should appeal to Americans because it would be Medicare for everybody, and Medicare is a popular program that business endorses and draws few complaints from its millions of beneficiaries. (If Medicare-for-everybody became a reality in the United States, those who could afford it would still be free to enhance their coverage by buying private supplemental insurance, so no one would be required to have less to guarantee minimum or basic coverage for all.) So where is the problem? CEOs of large corporations see it as something "that smacks of socialism," Werntz said, and therefore as "heresy." ...The cost to the nation's private sector employers who are now providing health benefits, is, on average, about $3,000 per employee, and employers are chafing under the burden. America's big-three automakers operate in Canada as well as the United States. They know that Canada's single-payer system reduces their labor costs, relative to what they pay labor in the United States, significantly. But neither Ford nor General Motors, only Daimler-Chrysler, supports any proposal to introduce publicly financed health care insurance in this country ....
Mintz and those he has been talking to about this problem think that access to affordable, high-quality health care should be regarded as a "public good," like highways, fire protection and police, all of which get paid for by the public purse, One of his allies in the drive to convince business that single-payer is in the cost-saving self-interest of corporations is Deborah Richter, a Vermont physician. She believes that making this "a practical issue works. Trying to win support for it by making it a moral issue never works." I find that sad; Mintz finds it puzzling: "By resisting the merger of practicality with morality that universal health care embodies, corporate America is blowing a supreme opportunity, to do well by doing good. Enlightened self-interest this is not." ...
For better or worse, all of us in the human community are in the same boat. All of us have to work to keep it afloat and pull our respective oars if progress is to be achieved. Growth-minded, tax-resistant business decision makers who believe that "a rising tide lifts all boats" are challenged now to partner with the public sector in making sure the health care boat remains in the fleet. This challenges business creativity to be of service to the common good.
Reason, not just religion, stands behind this assertion of the Second Vatican Council's constitution on "The Church in the Modern World": "The obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good, according to his [or her] own abilities and the needs of others, also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life."... Spread out between justice and love is the notion of the common good, which without justice and love is simply unattainable.
Regis University in Denver houses an Institute on the Common Good. It describes its purpose as providing a "forum for the discussion of significant social issues among knowledgeable people representing diverse perspectives." Wisely, the institute favors conversation over argument, because there are no winners or losers at the end of a thoughtful conversation, just better-informed participants. The institute brings people together to listen and speak to one another "with mutual respect in the hope that understanding might replace mistrust and consensus might be reached to serve the common good." This suggests the importance of other principles under consideration in this book, if the common good is to be served. Without participation, there will be no conversation. Without respect for another's human dignity, there will not be much listening. Without wide participation and attentive listening, no consensus will be formed, and without consensus, the common good will not be served.
Should room be made in all of this for the principle of patience? Without it, the common good will remain a desirable but elusive reality.
[Jesuit Fr. William J. Byron, past president of the University of Scranton and The Catholic University of America, teaches corporate responsibility at the Sellinger School of Business and Management, Loyola College in Maryland.]
Uninsured Children
9 million U.S. children do not
have health insurance.
UNINSURED POPULATION BY AGE
18-24 19%
Under 18 21%
55 & older 8%
45-54 12%
35-44 18%
25-34 22%
18-24 19%
Note: Table made from pie chart.
UNINSURED CHILDREN BY RACE
Hispanic 22%
African-American 14%
White 8%
Source: Campaign for Children's Health Care @2006 CNS
Note: Table made from bar graph.
COPYRIGHT 2006 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
wheels
15 years ago
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