Editorial
Why? In speaking on "A Theology of Illness," John Carmody observes that "illness is.. .something extraordinary, because illness strips human existence to the bone." It is, he says, "as much...
...Steadily, death stalks, grows, in my blood and bones...
...But I find it surpassingly fitting—apt, condign, what my heart has been made for...
...question...
...It would be foolish to imagine that the larger meaning of illness, of the kind Carmody elucidates, could make its way into the polling and posturing that go with the legislative debate on national health-care reform...
...Finally each of us will die no matter the state of medical progress—or health-care reform...
...is to make explicit the finite nature of human existence...
...If your dying child, why not mine...
...is to be asked and dealt with at all, others must raise the question...
...Is it realistic to suppose that health-care reform will or can force Americans to face up to the question of limits...
...And, like you, I am fully sinful—as little like God in my moral life, the quality of my love, as in my physical life, my being...
...And it can evoke, as it has from Carmody, a theologian as well as a man suffering from cancer, a compelling array of reflections...
...Why this death...
...This has resulted in at least some companies agreeing to pay for treatment simply on the threat of a legal suit...
...If only because I have grown up on them, these images that I have been laying out for you, this passionate faith that I have been sketching, nourishes my memory, my hope, what I need to keep going, what I know, in no provable way, 'has' to be, if not just Christ, not just God, but human being itself is not to be a terrible fraud...
...Why illness...
...Certainly policymakers do not see it as appropriate subject matter for political debate—and perhaps they are right...
...Why death...
...Sympathetic juries have been unwilling to enforce contractual restrictions on such treatments, especially perhaps because the patient is dying...
...They may do so with the long-term goal of affecting health-care poli3^ cy, but the more reasonable and short-term goal is to focus public attention on "why...
...Isn't this because we cannot ask why...
...They are implicit because there are diseases, or stages in the course of a disease, for which there is no medical remedy, and others for which the cost of treatment would be simply prohibitive...
...It is partly because our society is unwilling and unable to set limits—even in instances where treatment is clearly futile—that medical care costs have risen and, in some measure, created the crisis that health-care reform is trying to relieve...
...But, as John Garvey points out in this issue (page 9), even though religious language and perspectives are less welcome in public discussion, they do go to the heart of life's meaning and purpose...
...If one litigant has forced an insurance firm to surrender, why not all cases similarly situated...
...There is no evidence that patients or families are better off...
...For I, like you, am completely mortal...
...To ask Carmody's "why...
...Selling Limits and The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality (Simon & Schuster), Daniel Callahan has framed the question of limits, and with it rationing, in philosophical language accessible and acceptable to many Americans...
...In two recent books...
...In the midst of the health reform debate, the words of a man suffering from terminal cancer are a sobering reminder that illness, by which he means "the experience of disease—the full impact, physical and emotional, spiritual and social"—is always a larger subject than the medical means we have devised to treat the diseases that make us ill, the diseases that finally take us from life...
...Yet this larger meaning is implicit in questions about the limits to medical intervention and limits to the provision of health-care services...
...This is a reality that medicine prefers to keep hidden behind the veil of progress...
...Religious faith can ask the "why...
...A dramatic example: Cancer patients are successfully suing insurance companies forcing them to pay for experimental procedures in a last effort to fight terminal conditions...
...In the Warren Center Lecture and a new book, Cancer and Faith (Twenty-Third Publications), Carmody bypasses the often narrowly framed debate of moral theologians about death and dying to look directly at what the fact of death says to the Christian: "Everything about [this radical Christian theology] from beginning to end, is grace—the free bounty of God's love...
...in a way that makes individuals and communities more thoughtful themselves about medical-care choices, especially in the last weeks or months of life...
...It is, he says, "as much about why this is happening to me, or why someone I love is in peril, as it is about what is happening or how we got to this pass" (The Warren Lecture Series...
...In the meantime, insurance premiums increase for everyone, and the cost of medical care heads steadily upward...
...So if "why...
Vol. 121 • April 1994 • No. 8
