Health Care Reform, by Philip S. Keane
Holler, Christopher F.
HEALTH. JUSTICE, COMMUNITY HEALTH CARE REFORM A Catholic View Philip S. Keane Paulist Press, $14.95, 233 pp. Christopher F. Koller uick—what is the Roman Catholic vision for health-care...
...And the vision must be persuasive...
...This has been the cornerstone position of most Catholic commentators, but the argument ignores the reality that the insurance premiums of millions of Catholics are being used right now to fund abortions...
...Keane proposes fifteen "conclusions" for a reformed U.S...
...Philip Keane has jumped in to fill the void of systematic analysis and advocacy with his book Health Care Reform: A Catholic View...
...Growing up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut—where all the ladies met at the clothesline and chatted over a real backyard fence, where all the kids played kick-the-can in the street, and where Morris Plotnick, our fruit-andvegetable man, drove through in his converted bus three times a week—was probably the best of times...
...Pious exaggeration, I know...
...By the conclusion, the reader is left feeling somewhat like a traveler at the end of a long airplane journey: happy to have reached the destination, but not quite sure of the topography covered to get there...
...Myriad activities continue at the state level—scaled-down versions of the federal debate...
...Fortunately, for this reader, the destination is the right one...
...A strong Catholic voice is needed to help inform a debate shaped by powerful interests of self-preservation, to give voice to those unable to participate in the community to which, as Keane points out, we all belong...
...health-care system, proposals to fix it as well as other systems, and worked our way through the theology of the human person, the ethics of dying, and the roots of concepts of community...
...I'll give Mr...
...Apart from the rank hatred exhibited, a problem with that argument is that when Hitler came to power one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw abortions in the Third Reich...
...Individual greed has corroded much of what passes for medical care—from questionable surgeries to the growth in new technologies and pharmaceuticals...
...RAY E. INGRAM We fund abortions now Fremont, Mich...
...it had to come from the Spirit...
...In this case, yes...
...A more selective focus on the foundations of his reform "conclusions" would have sacrificed Keane's desires for comprehensiveness, but permitted fuller discussion of principles such as distributive justice...
...He takes us on a veritable Cook's tour of Catholic moral theology and social thought, health-care ethics, public-policy analysis, and Christian spirituality...
...At this writing, Congress continues to dissemble on the subject of health-care reform while the momentum of public opinion wanes in the face of policy minutiae and the prospect of new taxes...
...To the Editors: Liz McCloskey's column, "Neighbors Need Neighbors" [April 22] brought me a happy recall of days long gone "in the old neighborhood...
...I like that...
...Notions of the common good and distributive justice are not introduced until two-thirds of the way through the work...
...Second, reinvigorating the language of community shifts the focus from the personal and the societal obsession to prevent, or at least control, death...
...There is little, moreover, in Keane that compels the reader toward the Catholic vision...
...she'll leave it to the Paraclete...
...However, the need for such a vision is acute...
...Citing Jacques Maritain and more recent work by Charles Curran, Robert Bellah, and others, he attempts to retrieve the notion of the responsible community as the nexus of moral agency and urgency...
...We, too, could observe all the activity from our front porches (stoops...
...Such a faith gives comfort in facing the reality of death and personal limits...
...In part this lack of forcefulness is due to some lax writing and inattentive editing...
...If Catholics could use this provision as a reason for setting up health-care plans that would not fund abortions, they would have a real choice...
...Answers to this question solicited from "experts" or laypeople would lack much unanimity or force, for reasons which include conflicting institutional interests and the complexity of subject matter...
...Individual rights to liberty (nonintervention from a governing body) and responsibility for self-maintenance are subordinate to our need to care for one another...
...First, he moves the language of reform away from "the right to health care," which inevitably engenders a policy-oriented calculus over exactly what and how much is covered by this "right...
...health care...
...But the book also bears the weight of its considerable ambitions...
...To the Editors: On reading Marian Burkhart's article "In the Paraclete I Trust" [May 6], I knew she could not have written so magnificently without help...
...His exploration of this question is unfortunately truncated...
...My educated guess is that Limbaugh knows better, and is just rewriting history to bolster his right-wing agenda...
...Although any system that consumes almost 15 percent of every dollar produced and still leaves a quarter of the population without adequate coverage and the rest less healthy on average than the citizens of other industrialized countries is worthy of our attention...
...Under the original Clinton health-care plan, as I understand it, every person was to be offered a choice among several health-care plans...
...Finally, had the author chosen to forgo his systematic approach, he could have introduced more narrative, allowing him to reflect and apply his principles and "conclusions" to specific cases...
...Many, if not most, of the existing private health insurance plans offered today include abortion in their coverage...
...The ability to provide "similar treatment for similar cases" (a phrase coined by the nonCatholic moral theologian Gene Outka) becomes the gold standard of distributive justice...
...Rather, this view argues, the obligation to provide care equitably to all should drive reform efforts...
...RAYMOND H. HOFFMAN Neighborhood memories Waterford, Conn...
...She spoke not as a woman but as a Christian and a human being when she refused to engage in the politically correct castigating of the patriarchal church and its male leaders: "The hierarchy may be made up of patriarchs, but they are Christian patriarchs, and Christianity modifies patriarchy...
...It can be argued that these are not tax dollars but, on a moral level, I would argue that this is a distinction without a difference...
...With this shift, the objective of health care becomes, as Keane quotes a maxim, "Sometimes to cure, often to relieve, and always to console...
...And the health-care financing and delivery "industry" continues to restructure itself for those fortunate enough to have the admission ticket of health insurance...
...Not because the 27 cussion of Catholic values in a secular world and of levels of cooperation with evil still lies ahead...
...Carlin the benefit of the doubt, and assume his excuse could be ignorance...
...Meanwhile, the everyday tragedies and miracles of illness and cure, fear and hope, play themselves out for patients and their families...
...we had backyard picnics, friends whose doors were never locked...
...Burkhart wrote rang evangelically true...
...health-care system informed by a Catholic vision...
...To the Editors: David R. Carlin, Jr., decries the injustice of making Catholics help pay for abortions through the use of their tax dollars...
...The dignity of the individual, for a Christian, springs not from one's autonomy, but one's relations to others and a loving God...
...Those principles include a singlepayer financing system, universal coverage, private delivery systems, an acceptance of death as a part of life, explicit distribution of limited resources (i.e., rationing), and additional attempts to secure access for marginalized members of society...
...Our society's obeisance to a notion of individual autonomy which trumps all other concerns has blocked discourse and societal consensus about collective obligations and reasoned limits...
...By then, we have looked at the U.S...
...To ordain women or not: a labyrinthine question tormenting so many—but not Ms...
...Burkhart...
...With such a foundation, Keane accomplishes two important tasks...
...The essence of the "moral framework" upon which Keane builds rises out of the Catholic notions of community and the moral imperative of distributive justice...
...yet what Ms...
...Any attempt to cover a terrain so broad, no matter how systematic in intent, will be idiosyncratic in nature...
...Our system of financing and delivering care may only be a symptom of the disease...
...A dis26 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) Dear me, I wondered at first why he was bringing Ronald Reagan and Oliver North into the abortion debate, and then it dawned on me that he was only dittoing Rush Limbaugh's "femi-Nazi" argument by referring to Hitler and Goebbels...
...Only a morally forceful argument can bore into what we are truly trying to reform in U.S...
...Today the "warm glow" she mentions is only a sweet memory for so many of us, living as we do in neighborhoods where a distant wave from a passing car once or twice a year is worth mentioning at the dinner table—"I think the guy next door waved at me today...
...Rather, a Catholic vision for health-care reform should attempt to reform the way we look at ourselves—in sickness, in health, in life, and in death...
...Christopher F. Koller uick—what is the Roman Catholic vision for health-care reform in the United States...
...In addition, elaboration on what makes his foundational concepts distinctively Catholic would be illuminating...
...Keane could have mounted a stronger Catholic critique of the cultural factors that drive many of the problems of the current system and the inadequacies of certain reform proposals...
...If it is God's will that women be priests, in the fullness of God's time, they will be, and they will be ordained under the aegis of the Roman hierarchy...
...Is it necessary to be compelled by moral theological reflection when it comes to health care...
...HELEN KANE Burkhart got it right Stone Park, 111...
...Keane is a professor of moral theology at Saint Mary's Seminary and University, of Baltimore, and is a consultant to several Catholic health systems...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 12
