Health Care

With the vote on the new health care bill tonight, we decided that a discussion of the United Methodist Church's stand on health care would be an interesting topic for today.

The UMC Social Principles says that Methodists should try to pursue a healthy lifestyle for themselves and others, oppose all barriers to peoples' health, and recognized the government's involvement (there is a line in the Social Principles that mentions the government's role).

To be perfectly honest, most people in our classroom didn't want to debate or get involved with the health care debate.  It was fairly obvious, however, that there were a lot of different opinions about health care reform.  Some people are against the bill because they believe it will socialize health care and put too much control in the government's hands.  Others believe that it is in the best interests of all to provide health care to everyone.  Based on the Social Principles, Methodists should generally agree with the latter so that we may better do God's work by helping as many as possible to live a full and healthy life.  Nevertheless, the debate for health care continues.

We ended the health care debate rather quickly and started to discuss how our Sunday School teacher was coming along with his Shelter 2.0 project.  Our teacher has been doing well and has cut down the cost for the 10x16 model by over half.  He has also started to work on other models of similar design, including larger buildings.  We still hope to be able to send some of these models to places like Haiti where there is still a great need for help.

We decided to return to the health care debate.  Almost immediately, there was a great deal of debate over public and private hospitals.  Trying to turn away from the new bill, we tried to discuss the Social Principle's stand again.  Although our teacher tried to disagree, we teens agreed that our generation is very lazy, and providing health care to everyone will cost a fortune.  People are going to be working less, and those who do work probably won't make enough to live comfortably.  Providing health care to these people will cost way too much on everyone with taxes, and the laziest of them probably don't even deserve health care.  However, as good Christians, we must support everyone and try to provide needed services and supplies to everyone, even the laziest of us.  The sad truth of life is that we need money, and lots of it.

We turned to Matthew 25:31-46 to talk about how we are called to help those who need it.  Everyone on this earth is our brother and sister whether we like it or not, and it is not for us to decide who is or isn't deserving of our help.  It is our obligation of Christians to provide health care for everyone.

One of us asked, however, if it was the government's responsibility to provide health care.  Some of us, including our teachers, thought that it was the government's responsibility since we work through the government to achieve our goals.  Others, of course, disagreed.

We really didn't find a real consensus except for our Christian duty.  We also cut our discussion short for youth ministry reasons, so our apologies for the short blog this week.