A Christian Response to Healthcare

   

    The most disenfranchised group in America may be the “working poor.” These are people who work hard, full-time jobs and are not trying to find handouts. Yet, they often fall through the crackles when they hit a crisis. For example, this past year, I have a sweet 62-year-old cancer patient who had worked her entire life in healthcare. She was too young for retirement or Medicare to kick in, so when she started on hospice, she was still working parttime to maintain her insurance. When she became too sick to work and had exhausted her limited FMLA, she was fired. She was the sole provider for herself and now had just a little too much in assets (she owned a modest home in a bad neighborhood) to qualify for Medicaid. Additionally, she was still trying to pay off an ambulance trip when she first became ill because her insurance at the time did not cover it. I am proud to say that my hospital’s foundation (after four months and dozens of pages of paperwork from our social worker) finally stepped up to help her cover her hospice costs, so she could receive healthcare in her last days of life. Everyone looks at this situation and says, “that’s horrible,” but whose problem are situations like these to solve?

In the mid-nineteenth century, the modern nursing profession was born in both the United Kingdom and United States. Florence Nightingale felt a strong call of God to live out her faith by ministering to the needs of the sick and injured. Her time in a field hospital in Crimea taught her that good intentions and a Christian attitude were not sufficient to show the love of God to the hundreds of injured soldiers that crossed her path. Such love needed willing hands and a sharp mind filled with the latest in scientific knowledge. She slashed the death rate at her hospital with this philosophy. When she returned to London, she founded the first modern nursing school. The first American to study there was a Civil War widow named Linda Richards. She brought these ideas back to the United States, helping form one of America’s first nursing schools. Yet, her desire to bring the tangible love of God to others was not content to stay in this English-speaking bubble, so she packed up and moved to Japan, founding their first nursing school. She developed that program and was able to mostly surrender it to Japanese leaders when she returned to the United States.

These two remarkable women and thousands like them embody the intwined relationship between healthcare and Christian love. Thousands of hospitals bear names like “Lutheran,” Saint Joseph,” “Saint Vincent,” and “Baptist” because these were founded by Christian denominations. Millions of doctors, nurses, CNAs, and other healthcare professionals will tell you that their Christian faith was a major reason they chose their professions. Countless missionaries like Hudson Taylor, Alice Luce, and Albert Schweitzer used their healthcare knowledge to open doors for the Gospel and improve the lives of the nations they ministered in.

In the Bible, God makes many references to himself as our Healer and medical analogies are frequently used to describe God’s relationship to his people. In Scripture many titles and analogies are used to help the reader understand who he is: Father, Kinsman-Redeemer, Bridegroom, King, Prophet, the wise woman, a mother, a lion, etc. Just because God compares himself to these roles does not mean that all fathers, mothers, kings, bridegrooms, etc. are good, but they do communication a favorable view of the institutions of these roles. God invites his people to join in his mission to bring spiritual and physical healing to the world.

In the third century, the Bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, wrote a treatise explaining why Christians died “along with the pagans” when an epidemic broke out in Carthage. One of his defenses was that, of course, Christians would die; they were the ones carry for the sick, and therefore, exposed. He assumed that the sick in their community were the responsibility of Christians to care for. Pulling from the Old and New Testament, Cyprian systematically established care for the poor, the infirmed and widows as one of the hallmarks of a Christian: “Never has the divine admonition failed and been silent in the Old as well as the New Testament in always and everywhere urging the people of God to works of mercy.” Elsewhere in his writings, he commanded charity to “the infirmed” from his own funds. In this he identified “the infirmed,” not only as a group that had a claim on the church in general, but as a group that had a claim on him as the bishop and a wealthy Christian. Pontius’ Life of Cyprian, an apology for Cyprian’s ministry written shortly after Cyprian’s martyrdom, emphasized Cyprian as a patron-like figure for the poor, the widows, and the infirmed. “His house was open to anyone who came; no widow departed with an empty stomach, no blind person was not guided by him as a companion, no lame one was not carried by him as a support, no one devoid of the help of the very powerful was not protected by him as a defender.” Christians in Carthage clearly expected their leader to be one identified with caring for blind persons and lame ones.

Like “the poor,” “the sick” are the special responsibility of Christians. And like “the poor,” the church can use the government as a tool to help care for “the sick.” In American, most the funding for hospitals founded by Christian groups transited from the group that founded them to the government and for-profit organizations such as insurance companies over the twentieth century. This was practical. As healthcare costs increased and the science and bureaucracy surrounding it expanded, no denomination in the United States had the funding or infrastructure to sustain these health systems. What Christians should not have surrounded was their responsibility to ensure the sick were cared for.

The very fact that programs such as Medicare (which provides healthcare to the elderly) and Medicaid (which provides healthcare to those in extreme poverty, many children, and people with disabilities) are acceptable facets of the United States government reflects a fundamental assumption that the government has some role to ensure that its citizens have healthcare. If people do not believe that the government should have any place in healthcare, they should be advocating to end these programs, but no one is.

Christians bear the ultimate responsibility to meet the healthcare needs of my patient who fell through the cracks and others like her. If Christians are comfortable using the government as tool a to meet our responsibility to care for the sick in our community, we need to entertain the possibility of expanding these programs or other programs or regulations to ensure Americans have healthcare. Creative, science-based, accessible solutions were the foundations that Florence Nightingale and Linda Richards built the nursing profession, and it could be a foundation for whatever comes next in American healthcare.