Health care?

I read a Wall Street Journal article yesterday (and my details may be fuzzy) about a woman with limited health insurance who had to pay $105,000 up front to get life-saving treatments for acute leukemia. The Texas medical center where her local hospital sent her (the local hospital didn't have the equipment to treat her safely) wouldn't serve her without getting the money immediately, on that same day (it did relent, apparently, on the last 30K of the $105,000, giving her and her husband a couple of days to find the cash.) She still owes the hospital $145,000. Some of the hospital's billing has been called into question, eg, $20 for a pair of latex gloves. She has also been charged at a higher rate for some procedures than insurance companies pay (the hospital explained that insurance companies get lower prices because they bring in "volume.")

The article pointed that the hospital has had a spike in non-payments by people without health insurance, so it has become more vigilant about collecting money, including sending billing department representatives to hospital rooms with doctors to demand payment before medical procedures begin. The hospital calls this a "team approach" to delivering health care. The article also noted that the hospital is a non-profit, meaning it pays no taxes, is very well-endowed, financially solvent and often the only place people in the area can go for complicated cancer treatments.

The woman, who left a job as a bus driver, could have purchased better insurance, though it's possible she couldn't have afforded that. However, I wonder what have happened to her if she hadn't been able to come up with the cash. She and her husband weren't indigent or poor, but they weren't rich either. She apparently had a stark choice: pay the hospital whatever it asked in cash or die.

What do you think of this story? Should the ethic of payment trump every other? Should our mental health (adding financial stress to emotional stress) be traded for our physical health? Are our priorities out of whack?

Correction

Bill points out that eight of us attended Bible study Sunday, not seven.
That's a robust number that bodes well for the group. Thanks for the correction!

I have much going on and hope to be able to start blogging about it soon.

Claiborne: demonic suburbs?

In the Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne continues to argue for seeing the entire human family as our family, without national borders or genetic borders. To me, this is the true Christian universalism: not accepting everyone's religion as the "same," but serving others regardless of their faith or ethnicity.

Shane goes to Iraq and witnesses the war first hand. When he comes back, a woman criticizes him for being "careless" with his life and putting his mother through terrible anxiety. She goes on to say that Jesus himself would scold Shane for this.

What Jesus is she talking about? Shane wonders. This becomes a launching point for discussing Christianity as a dangerous faith, not a safe faith. We're asked to take risks, and those risks can include dying or making our families uncomfortable.

He talks about safety as a possibly demonic force: "the suburbs are the home of the more subtle demonic forces -- numbness, complacency, comfort--and it is these things that can eat away at our souls."

Is that true?

Bible study: woe to the hypocrites

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity. You blind Pharisees! first cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate that the outside may also be clean.
Matthew 23: 25-26


We had a lively discussion of Jesus' excoriations of the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23 and Luke 11 at last night's Bible study. Jesus condemns them for being hypocrites with misplaced priorities. But underlying that is a sense that they really are unable to see beyond the physical world to the spiritual realm all around them. Thus they get caught up in trying to appear good and in demanding petty adherence to the rules, while missing the bigger picture of compassion and mercy to all people. And because they can't perceive the spiritual, they lack faith in it: thus they grab material goods and honors. Jesus condemns the way they mislead the people and misrepresent the kingdom of God. Nothing is worse to him than leading people astray about the loving heart of faith.

We talked about the bit of Pharisee in all of us and examples of Phariseeism in our culture. David mentioned that these passage reminded him of the Old Testament prophets and their excoriations of injustice. Ken "illuminated" us from a exegesis he'd brought along, and Jean, as always, kept us in tea and good conversation. Bill made sure we stayed on track while Johanna, as usual, was able to personalize the Bible passages.

Kathy came for the first time in a long time and looked quite well and cheerful. We were glad to have her back after her bout with cancer. There were seven of us around Jean's table, an indication of the continued robustness of the group. We missed Michelle, Lisa and Alan.

Claiborne: Theology of Enough

As we move though the center of The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne repeats a recurring argument of his book: that to be a Christian means to live in contact with the poor. He critiques the current church as "a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff." This is not the best model, he argues, because until rich and poor come into real contact, neither can be transformed. When Jesus says the poor will always be with us, this is not resignation about poverty. Instead, Claiborne, says, Jesus is pointing to the church's identity as a body of people who live close to the poor and suffering.

Shane goes on to talk about a subject dear to Quaker hearts: simplicity, and he has some interesting things to say. He sees many of the problems with contemporary Christianity rooted in bad theology, not bad people, and sees a life's work in replacing bad theology with good. And he talks about what he calls "theology of enough:" Embracing neither poverty nor wealth but instead embracing and sharing the abundance of God's earth.

"So I would suggest we need a third way, neither the prosperity gospel nor the poverty gospel, but the gospel of abundance rooted in a theology of enough. As Proverbs says, 'Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise I may have too much and disown you and say "Who is the Lord?"' (Prov. 30:8,9). After seeing plenty of poor folks forced into economic crimes by their poverty and after seeing plenty of rich folks so content in their riches that they forget they need God or anyone else, I think we are all ready for something new."

God's economy relies on mutual interdependence and is exemplified in the miracles of the loaves and the fishes, the creation of abundance through sharing, faith and generosity.

I agree with Shane that much of the fear that leads us to make economic choices that lead to stressed-out lives comes from buying into the secular culture's theology of scarcity. This theology of scarcity is self-fulfilling: as some hoard to stave off scarcity, others starve. I agree that the more we can lean into God's abundance, the more we can make decisions that contribute to that abundance.

Yet much of Claiborne's rhetoric in these central chapters focuses on play, on a sort of childlike irreverence towards institutional authority that strongly echoes the "flower power" ethos of the 1960s. It can seem more style than substance. I think there is substance undergirding Shane's more antic-like actions, such as distributing money on Wall Street. But how do we navigate building a culture of enough while not careening into naivete?

Shane Claiborne: Comfort becomes Uncomfortable

In Chapter 4 of The Irresistible Revolution, Shane returns from India to work and study at Wheaton and Willow Creek Church. He experiences culture shock as he makes an abrupt transition from lepers and the dying to wealthy white Americans. In this chapter, he "longs" for more contact between the rich and the poor, and for each to see the face of Christ in the other. He believes more interaction between rich and poor will end poverty.

Certainly many groups, such as the Church of the Savior, have organized, in part, around putting rich and poor together. Claiborne yearns for the peaceable kingdom, a yearning that permeates the Bible.

One "comfort" he discusses is Willow Creek's refusal to hang crosses because crosses are not "seeker sensitive" or comfortable to people who may have been wounded by earlier church experiences.

He writes: "I fear that when we remove the cross, we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable." In light of the Quakers' shedding of earthly symbols, what do you think of Claiborne's comments?

Hillary for President?

Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary and people seem mad at her. How come she can't "get out of the way?" Off the playground?

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that we set up an electoral process, a method of doing things, and then get mad at Clinton for wanting to follow the rules? Shouldn't voters in places like Pennsylvania and Indiana get the same chance to have their voices heard as voters in Iowa or New Hampshire? If the primary process is so bad, why do we have it? And if we have it, why do we get angry at a candidate for using it? Why not simply change it for the next election and have all the primaries within, say, a four-week period? It seems hypocritical to have a process and then want to circumvent it when it becomes inconvenient. And it seems typical to me of how women so often get kicked for trying to follow the rules.

Clinton has been criticized by, among others, Maureen Dowd, for scratching Obama's reputation. But isn't she doing him a good service in preparing him for the the general election should he get the nomination? I'm sure what she's thrown at him is nothing compared to what he will get should he be the nominee.

One of the more bizarre columns I read complained that the white world was putting Obama in his place for daring to be too uppity. Hello universe. Who is putting him "in his place?" A woman. Hasn't this same woman been endlessly punished for daring to step out away from the edges of the playground and take a place in the center of it?

My money is still on Clinton getting the nomination, odd as that may seem. And I think she would be a good president. What do you think of all this?