August 20, 2009

The debate over national health-care reform has devolved along predictable party lines. Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center has joined a national faith campaign in support of the “moral imperatives of fixing our nation’s broken health-care system.” The RAC has long been a proponent of a single-payer, universal health-care system but has gotten behind a more limited “public option” to rein in costs and extend coverage to the millions of uninsured.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, meanwhile, opposes President Obama’s health-care plans in their entirety. Instead, the RJC supports tort reform, “full and fair debate,” and “a bill that addresses real problems in health-care coverage without taking us down the road to a government takeover.”

But whether you share the politics of RAC or RJC, it’s not okay to lose sight of the stakes. The president and his congressional allies are not pushing reform for reform’s sake, but identifying a crisis that puts enormous strain on individual Americans and the nation as a whole.

Conservative commentator Rod Dreher, who blogs for the religion website Beliefnet.com, aptly describes the costs of doing nothing, especially in this grim economy. Writes Dreher:

Look, I’m not saying that we should not be concerned about, and not oppose, Obama’s proposed healthcare reform, if it truly is a bad deal. But it’s not enough to say, “Hey, it’s going to mess with my healthcare, and I’m going to fight it tooth and nail.” The situation we’re in now is intolerable, and unsustainable, and we don’t do the country any good by adopting the Democratic Party’s line on Social Security — namely, that any attempt to reform a broken system that would cost any current recipient anything is completely wicked and must be opposed….

We have to do better by the uninsured folks in this country — even if it costs the rest of us (and it will). In this economy, any one of us could find ourselves there.

The health-care debate is a historic opportunity to declare where this country stands in relation to those who are vulnerable, unwell, underprivileged, or just down on their luck. As a community, we have to say what we’re for — or live with the unacceptable consequences of inaction.

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