A different sort of health care/religion debate
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
By Megan Sweas
Comments (3)
There's an interesting debate about religion and health care insurance reform that has nothing to do with abortion, sort of.
A small town NY paper is reporting that the Amish have an exception from purchasing health care. According to the Watertown Daily Times, the Amish "generally rely upon a community ethic that disdains government assistance. Families rely upon one another, and communities pitch in to help neighbors pay health care expenses."
The provision doesn't specify the Amish--you can't have a law directed at a specific group. So the commenters on the article (all anti-government health care) are saying that anyone could get an exception for "religious reasons" (or perhaps they'll all become Amish to avoid it). Could Catholics get a religious exemption because of abortion?
The idea of pooling risk is diminished if nobody contributes.
We are working on a story on the spirituality of money, and one debate that came up is between the idea of not worrying about savings/retirement and trusting God completely (the woman who gave away the only two cents she had) and the idea that you should put money away in your 401k.
I admire the Amish greatly and would like to think that I could live without insurance and trust my neighbors to pay tens of thousands of dollars of bills I'd have should I get cancer or diabetes or get in an accident, but I think our society is no longer structured like that.
That's why we have insurance, and somebody has to pay for it. Setting aside the question of abortion, can any of us afford to opt out of insurance these days?
Posted in: In preview mode
great story
By Seth (not verified) on Friday, April 2, 2010I hadn't heard of this, but a very interesting read indeed. I think of my experience with Amish communities in my part of the country. Here, the Amish families represent a disproportionate number of visits to the ICU. Things get out of control and the children don't make it to the hospital in time to deal with the problem in an outpatient fashion. So, the families have long, expensive stays in the ICU to deal with relatively minor disease that have been left to fester. Their communities can't deal with 100k's of medical bills and, as you point out, they have no Health Insurance ...this drives up all our costs. while interesting, this story leaves out some important threads!
Amish and health care
By Megan Sweas on Thursday, January 21, 2010Really interesting read on why the idea that a bunch of conservatives are going to become Amish just to get out of "Obama care" is demeaning: http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/damnation/whos-amish-now/. It touches on why all the comments on the article I linked to disturbed me, though I couldn't exactly tell why at the time. As Jim says, there seems to be some bit of collective entitlement here, a desire to reap the benefits of an Amish system or insurance without having to pay for it. I love this:
"While this talk of conversion may make a fantastic image—Michelle Malkin fastening her clothes on each morning with straight pins, giving up makeup and the spotlight, baking four shoe-fly pies on a wood stove, and not speaking unless spoken to (ok, that’s appealing)—what they display is a resolute and impassioned ignorance of religious nuance."
Amish v. the rest of us
By Jim (not verified) on Thursday, January 14, 2010This is kind of like requiring motorcycle helmets-we require them, because if someone has an accident, they have a better chance of survival if they are wearing a helmet. And, we can't trust them not to make us pay if they choose not to wear a helmet and have an accident. Hospitals can't refuse to treat an accident victim even if they were not behaving with commonsense.
With the Amish, I think that they don't have the same sense of entitlement that the rest of America has had since the 1930's. They don't pay in to the system, and they don't take out. I can't think of any other group that does that-maybe individuals, but not groups.
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