Our Overly Medicated Society

There is a story on the AP Wire today, ”More Americans are taking prescription medications,” about a study that finds half of all Americans with health insurance are taking prescriptions for chronic conditions. 

Two observations:

• As a culture, we are either slowly killing ourselves with poor dietary and lifestyle choices or we are over-medicated
• When we complain about the cost of health care, at some point the focus has to turn to our own behavior, whether that be our collective unhealthy lifestyle and diet or our gullibility as a society for the fear-based marketing efforts of the pharmacuetical industry

Good health care services needs to become a two-way process in our society.  We get good health services, but we also must take some initiative to live in a way that prevents chronic disease.

Ideally, we get to that point by taking employers and government out of the health delivery process.  I firmly believe that eliminating tax preferred status of employer-based health insurance will go a long way to achieving this goal. 

The steps necessary for making us more accountable for our own health are:

1. Give employer-based and individual health policies equal treatment with respect to taxes, encouraging development of a robust individual insurance market and will help to create price sensitivity in a market that currently does not have any.
2. Nationalize insurance regulation.  I am not advocating a new bureacracy, but rather allow consumers to by health policies from a plan regardless of which state the policy was approved.  Insurance plans will flock to the least burdensome state, thereby lowering the costs to the consumer.  This feature will also increase price sensitivity, and, therefore, reestablishing a traditional supply and demand marketplace.
3. Substantially increase the maximum contributions allowable into Health Savings Accounts to encourage consumers to save and to allow each of us, over time, to effectively become self-insured.
4. Allow the states and communities to create high-risk pools and health care services for those people not able to secure affordable individual or employer-based insurance.  There will always be people unable to afford health insurance, no matter the cost, so we have to have a system to take care of “the least of these.”  My preference is to meet this group’s needs through charitable operations rather than through government programs.  Government programs have a tendency to remove the price sensitivty feature necessary for a functioning marketplace.
5. Encourage citizens to pursue careers in those health care related fields where shortages exist by providing tax-favored status for those careers in areas (geographical or specialty) with identified shortages.  Improving supply of health care services will ultimately reduce the costs of those services, especially if the price insensitivity is removed by implementing the other four items in this preliminary plan.

These ideas are nascent, so if you’ve got any comments on how to improve on them, I’d love to hear about them.

A Hurt, Scared, Little Boy

I had a dream a couple of nights ago that has bothered me since.  In my dream, I am in an auditorium with all my high school classmates from some twenty-odd years ago.  The setting seemed to be one where we were discussing our good memories of high school, and a woman was facilitating this discussion.

At one point, one of my classmates stood and spoke about how his high school days were filled with good times and a sense of inclusiveness with almost all of his classmates.  He finished and the woman facilitating was about to move on to another subject when I stood up and asked to speak.  Groans came from around the room.  Everyone was dreading to hear what I had to say.  I spoke about how that sense of inclusiveness the previous speaker recounted was probably very true, but some were excluded.

In the dream I was hurt, angry and, if I might say, quite eloquent.

But that dream has bothered me because, like many dreams that enter my consciousness, it revealed a part of me that I thought had long since been destroyed.  Deep inside of me is that lonely, scared, hurt, bitter adolescent. 

I guess that part of me still is not dead.  Part of me is stuck in the ’80s.  How can I live in the here and now, if part of me still harbors feelings from events that happened 20 to 25 years ago?  That scared little boy in me must die, but how to destroy that part of me is the big question. 

I love dreams.  They reveal so much about me to me.  But this dream is so very scary to me, because I though I had outgrown the resentments I had as a sullen, brooding teenager.

Charity, Love and Faith - and the Church

In a post I made a few days ago, “The Secular Evil of Instituional Charity,” I received from Ariah Fine.  In her comment to my piece, which was a reaction to something he wrote, Mr. Fine asked the question,

“My only other thought is to ask why the church isn’t caring for the needs of the poor right now to the degree that we could?”

The only answer I can come up with is that the church does not have love.

The modern, Western church has been institutionalized into its various denominations.  Like any other institution, the various denominations have as their primary, although often unspoken, goal self-preservation.  It does not take long for a member of a church who has had a real conversion experience to see through the veil of hypocrisy that an institutional church exhibits. 

Tithing is promoted as a Christian virtue or commandment, but the proceeds end up largely paying for salaries and facilities.  We enter into “the msision field” as a way to justify our church’s existence, but often come away with nothing more than a good feeling and a self-congratulatory attitude.  We feed the homeless - on Thanksgiving Day.  We have charity golf tournaments and say we are working for/with the church.  We attend retreats to surround ourselves with the familiar and to maybe get another fix of the spirit only to find the church we’ve retreated from to be a whitewashed sepulchre.

We do all these things with one goal in mind, to justify this identity we’ve created in our own mind - that of Christian.  A “church” full of people with this same ego-centric goal is a church focused on itself.  By Jesus’ very definition of love,

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. - John 15:13

an ego-centric “church” has no love.  An ego-centric “church” is made up of ego-centric people. So if you are looking to a church to “do unto the least of these” you are looking in the wrong place. 

Faith means that we go out and do with love, without regard for our own well-being, and that we do these things without expectation of a result.  So if you go out and do acts of charity with the expectation that others of your church will do the same thing, you are not acting out of love.  If you go out and do acts of charity with the expectation that the recipient of the charity will repent and join your church, you do not act out of love. 

This is an impossible thing for the human mind to comprehend, but can only be understood through the mind of Christ.  John the Baptist said it far better than anyone before or anyone since,

He must increase, but I must decrease - John 3:30

The ego must die, so that Christ can live in us!

When you expect companions, you are the clanging cymbal, when you need results, you lack faith, when you can’t see Christ through your acts remember what Jesus said,

“…because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” - John 20:29 

So go and do your acts of charity, do your acts of love, but do not expect a result, do not expect companions in your good works, do not even expect to see Christ in your good works, but have faith.

A Christian Veil

The Australian Press is reporting that the demoted mufti of Australia, Taj al-Din al-Hilali, has written a book encouraging Christian women to wear a veil.

I don’t think this is a bad idea, from a guy’s perspective. What do we all know about Christian women? Well… they are supposed to either be virgins or married, or have at least recaptured their virginity or monogamy through their conversion to Christ.

From a single guy’s perspective, this is a wonderful thing (I guess this holds for the non-Christian married guy, too. Then again, that is the service that sites like ashleymadison.com provide). Now our hero will be able to identify a woman with presumably looser morals and a greater willingness to go to bed outside of matrimony. Or, if he is a sporting fellow, he may try his abilities of persuasion to entice the Christian woman away from her moral code. If our hero is a Christian, then he will more easily be able to identify a potential mate that is “equally yoked.” Or in the case of the FLDS men, another potential mate.

The real key here is to make the veil so unattractive that non-Christian women will not want to wear them, but not so unattractive that Christian women will not wear them. This very dilemma is what the Fashion Design program at Baylor University was destined to solve.

Religion: A Private Affair?

From the Washington Post:

In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul.”

What the Pope was expressing comes straight from Second Peter.

We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts: knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. - 2 Peter 1:19-21

Christianity is not like other religions. In the Judeo-Christian faith tradition there is only one truth.

Unlike in Hinduism, with its millions of personal gods, and unlike Buddhism with its notion of personal divinity, the Jewish and Christian faiths have but ONE God and one truth. The Pope’s speech was not some coded language about the supremacy of the Catholic Church, but rather a statement about the supremacy of Scripture and of Christ over our individual ideas on what truth is.