Health Insurance or Health Care?

Congress is all wrapped up trying to solve the wrong problem right now. "Health insurance for everyone!" is the cry as the debate rages on in Washington and across the nation. What we need is health CARE for everyone - a much different proposition. The problem is that we have become secularized to the point that the federal government is assuming roles that used to be performed by family and church. In the great Chicago fire, not one dime of federal money was spent to assist. None was ever expected. No one suggested impeaching the president because he didn't respond fast enough. No one imagined that as a role for the federal government. Now it's expected to fix every little scrape and bruise for everyone in the whole country. The wrong people are in charge of health care: money-grubbers and financial wizards who are focused on dollars instead of patients. We think it's normal to have giant health-care corporations. That's not normal, it's sickening. Hospitals should be non-profit, Christ-centered, people-oriented havens where love and health care are dispensed in equal measure. A trip to the doctor should involve questions like "what's going on in your life?" as a regular and normal part of the examination. The only people who really benefit from health insurance are the insurance companies. There was a time in our existence as a nation when no one had health insurance. Doctor fees were reasonable, treatment was much more careful and specific, drug companies were not in cut-throat competition to push out the latest copycat drug that they could charge outrageously for, and when a family faced medical expenses they could not afford, friends, family, and church gathered their resources to help. I believe that is much closer to the way God intends for us to live than anything being proposed in Washington.

Luke 10:27

"...'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Energy Policy as Religion

I was doing some research to guide my thinking about the current Energy bill before Congress, H.R. 2454, known formally as "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009." I thought I was on to something useful in the form of a government-wide research program report from the United States Global Change Research Program. ("The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606)...") Sadly mistaken was I, as Yoda might say. In Washington, it seems that all responsible scientific inquiry has been thrown, nay catapulted violently, out the window. The particular report I just referred to is a vigorous defense of the human-induced global warming hypothesis, combined with an undisguised partisan diatribe against the opposing view. Your tax dollars at work. There are plenty of alternative viewpoints. For example, see the U.S Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works minority page here.

My personal view is that our Creator, the Lord God, has created the world and its environment for the benefit of his special creation, namely us. We have a very serious responsibility to use resources wisely and in a way that demonstrates our love for our Creator and utmost respect for His creation. Sadly, many people in the world have become worshipers of creation rather than worshipers of the Creator. My free-thinking, tolerant liberal friends, for example, can't seem to tolerate the idea that the climate might actually change (doesn't it do that anyway?). They keep changing the terminology on us. When (and why) did we switch from "global warming" to "climate change" as the name of the evil thing. I think God gave us oil reserves to use wisely, and so we should. The current idea that we should replace them with solar and wind is techologically, economically, and environmentally unsound. I recently calculated the area of solar cells needed to power my medium-sized town, population around 40,000. We would need about 1 square mile of panels to replace the grid. That's one square mile of sun not falling on the ground. Talk about environmental and economic impact. Wind farms are at least as bad- very costly and also harmful to the environment through low-frequency noise, bird injury, and airstream deflection. We should conserve energy (waste not, want not my parents always taught), but we need not be afraid to use it if it provides a benefit. Unmasked, "green" is a religion, not a science. It is idol worship, the idol being planet earth.

Exodus 20: 3-4

3 "You shall have no other gods before me.

4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.