By Dennis Gruending

President Barack Obama appeared on national television recently to promote his plan for reforming his country’s health care system. He is involved in a high stakes contest against the massive American health insurance lobby and its political friends among Republicans, but also some so-called  “Blue Dog” Democrats who are opposed to reform. Obama is not proposing a publicly-administered, single-payer system such as we have in Canada (which, it appears would be too much for Americans to accept) but rather a patchwork of private and public insurance that would assure coverage to everyone, including those 47 million American who lack it entirely. The provision of health care to citizens is an ethical as well as a political issue and one would expect that churches and religious organizations would have something to say about it.

The Catholic bishops’ conference in the U.S. has long favoured health care reform but is now focusing on its fears that the plan might provide money for therapeutic abortions, which are legal in the U.S. even if access is restricted in many states. The National Association of Evangelicals is focusing upon abortion as well, and the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention appears to be lining up with Obama’s opponents. Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said this: “They’re going to take money from our pockets and force us to take part in health insurance programs that will subsidize and underwrite the baby-killing industry.” The Episcopal Church is on record as supporting universal access to health care (and supports choice) but its priorities appear to be tilted more toward race relations and gender equality than health.

This debate occurs in a context where health care is exclusionary and increasingly expensive. Most Americans with health insurance receive it through their employers. Those whose employers do not offer it or who are unemployed must either buy costly insurance or pay medical bills out of pocket. The elderly and indigent receive coverage from the government and 47 million Americans have no coverage at all.

The Washington-based National Coalition of Health Care reports that the U.S. spends more on health care than other industrialized nation. Total health spending in 2007 was $2.4 trillion, representing an expenditure of $7900 per person. In 2008, the annual premium for an employer health plan covering an individual worker averaged over $4,700. For a family of four that premium averaged nearly $12,700.

American health care spending in 2008 represented 17 per cent of the gross domestic product and it is rising by nearly 7 per cent a year, well above the rate of inflation. By comparison, health care spending accounted for 10.9 per cent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 per cent in Germany, 9.7 per cent in Canada and 9.5 per cent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

What do Americans get for that vast expenditure? The rich get a designer service while the poor may get little or no service, and as Michael Moore pointed out in his documentary Sicko even those who have an insurance plan are regularly excluded from benefits through shady dealing by their insurance companies. The National Coalition of Health Care concludes: “Experts agree that our health care system is riddled with inefficiencies, excessive administrative expenses, inflated prices, poor management, and inappropriate care, waste and fraud. These problems significantly increase the cost of medical care and health insurance for employers and workers and affect the security of families.”

It is that situation that Obama wants to tackle and he is investing his popularity to do so. If he cannot achieve health care reforms early in his presidency, the opportunity may be lost for another generation. An earlier attempt by the Clinton administration to reform the system was opposed by the powerful health lobby and it went down in flames.

With the U.S. spending almost twice per capita what Canada does on health care, it is interesting to say the least, that the American health lobby and Republican politicians are using Canada’s “socialist” health care system as a bogeyman to instil fear into their own population. Canada’s system has its problems but on balance it is superior to that of the U.S. in providing a good quality of service to every one of its citizens – whether or not they have a fat wallet.

Churches have been involved in the Canadian debate from the beginning. Saskatchewan’s premier Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister, promised in the 1960 election campaign to introduce public health care if his CCF was re-elected. He was opposed strenuously in that election by the Canadian medical establishment and the American Medical Association. Later, when the Saskatchewan government introduced the continent’s first public health insurance plan in 1962, it triggered a 23-day strike by doctors. The CCF government of the day faced a situation similar to the one that President Obama faces today — an attempt to introduce a basic health care reform in the face of powerful opposition. Obama’s of course, is a much larger theatre.

The Saskatchewan government won the battle in 1962 and the action then shifted to the national scene. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker appointed Supreme Court Justice Emmett Hall to lead a royal commission into health care. Hall weighed the evidence in a most judicial way and concluded that publicly insured health care was the way to go. He found that Canada’s existing patchwork of private health care insurance was highly inefficient and that it failed to cover 30 per cent of the population, something eerily reminiscent of the situation in the U.S. today.

Hall took the view in his report that a commitment to improved health services for the common good took precedence over the self-interest of individuals. Hall was a devout Catholic and to buttress his point made reference to a papal encyclical of Pope John XXIII. In 1966, the Liberal government of Lester Pearson accepted Hall’s recommendations and Canada introduced publicly financed health care modeled on what the CCF had done in Saskatchewan.

Fast forward to 2007, when the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) released a book called A Health Care Covenant, which described the involvement by churches in Canada’s various debates about health care, including their appearance before the Hall Commission in the 1960s to support medicare. The churches also appeared before a recent royal commission in 2001-02 led by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow. They asked him to reaffirm the public health care system and called for improvements to it, without the various, specific caveats demanded by religionists in the U.S.

One of the authors in the CCC’s book is Janet Sommerville. She writes that public health care not only makes good economic sense, but that the choice of systems is also a matter of what she calls applied ethics. “[The] principles guiding our health care system,” she says, “have an unmistakable affinity with the love of neighbour urged on us by God’s word in Scripture.”

Obama would be well served if he had more church spokespersons such as Sommerville on his side during the current health care debate.

By Dennis Gruending

Bob Carty is an Ottawa-based journalist best known for his consummate radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation but he has another skill as well. He is a fine musician and singer and has released an album called Desert Eyes: Songs of Justice and Spirit. They are songs about justice with a Christian sub-text carrying titles such as Let Justice Roll and lyrics such as this: “Let justice roll, like a mighty river/A-movin’ fast, down to the sea/It will erode, all our foundation/Touch every heart and every nation.” Carty launched his album in Ottawa to an audience of about 200 people in March. He said at the time that the songs had been many years in the works and that it was a great joy to present them - “especially after a couple of difficult years.” Those who know him are aware that Carty has been dealing with cancer during that time, although he plans to go back to work for CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition this fall.

Carty says that he began to write songs in the 1960s, a time of social protest. “My early influences included Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, and John Prine, and my musical skills were honed at coffee houses, protests, grape boycott pickets, folk masses, and coffee houses.” He performed for events with Jean Vanier, Mother Teresa and Cesar Chavez.  Prior to entering journalism, he spent a decade working on human rights and international development in Latin America. In the 1980s, he says, “the new music of Latin America became a strong influence”, reinforced by his living in the region for five years, reporting for the CBC.

Carty says in a booklet packaged with his album that he draws its Desert Eyes title from a philosopher, ecologist and sanctuary activist named Jim Corbett, who used to take people into the Arizona desert for retreats. For several days they would be depressed and desperate, perceiving nothing, Carty writes, but “parched barrens, bleached out colours and the lack of life.” But then they develop “desert eyes”, seeing plants, seeds, animals, a full spectrum of colours by day and wonderful stars at night. “They’d begun to understand,” Carty writes, “that even in the most desperate of times – even in time of great evil and death – there is still life and hope.”  It is the  world’s structural evil, confronted by life and hope, that Carty writes and sings about in his Desert Eyes title song: “We live in a time so dry and forsaken/Empty of joy, full of such greed.” The temptation is to avoid it all and to retreat into personal comfort, yet we are drawn to the desert life: “Embracing a God who embraces the homeless/We reach for the cup we can share/trusting the hand of a sister and brother/we work for a world that is fair.”

Carty wrote most of the 21 songs on the album and he produced it along with James Stevens. The Ottawa launch featured Carty and half a dozen other musicians, including Stevens, but it didn’t end there. Two young women singing harmonies and members of a children’s choir accompanied him at different times during the evening. “If you have great kids,” Carty  says, “it means you have a great community.”  He was accompanied in his finale, We Are Love, in the concert (and on the album) by perhaps 20 members drawn from among his friends and people at his Catholic church in Ottawa. There is a strong justice theme running through the album, but there are also two Psalms put to music and other songs as well. Carty has done a modest amount of touring with Desert Eyes and plans to do more. His website indicates that he is available to perform house concerts.

By Dennis Gruending

Canada’s bishops have rejected allegations that the Catholic aid agency Development and Peace (D&P) provides money to organizations or projects in Mexico that promote abortion. The bishops created D&P in 1967 to support projects in poor countries and to undertake development education in Canada and two bishops sit on D&P’s board. The string of accusations began on March 11 when a web-based publication called Lifesite News claimed that D&P “is funding groups in Mexico that are pressuring the Mexican government to legalize abortion.”  LifeSite carried more than 45 articles on the topic between March and June of 2009. In April the CCCB announced that two Canadian bishops would lead an inquiry to Mexico to investigate the Lifesite allegations. The seven-person group also included the CCCB general secretary, an official from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and three people from D&P. The delegation met with representatives of the Mexican bishops’ conference and with groups that had been accused by Lifesite of promoting abortion.

On June 29, the CCCB released its report. In an accompanying statement, CCCB president Archbishop James Weisgerber summarized the inquiry’s key finding in the following manner: “The Committee of Inquiry has determined that the projects funded by Development and Peace did not promote abortion, and that the five Mexican organizations do not support abortion … the allegations by LifeSiteNews.com against Development and Peace are unfounded.” Weisgerber added that while the inquiry cleared the organization, the bishops would have “a full discussion” regarding D&P’s policies and practices at the CCCB’s annual meeting in October 2009.

D&P, in a statement issued on March 20, had denied Lifesite’s allegations but said that its Mexican partners were involved in a nation-wide consultation on the human rights situation, and were contributors (along with 100 other organizations) to an omnibus document on human rights issues. Other civil society groups participating in the exercise brought forward concerns that did relate to family planning even though that was not the focus of D&P’s partner groups. Lifesite seized on the existence of this document and other information it claimed to have as the basis for its allegations. The CCCB, in its report, said that the Mexican organizations assisted by D&P were “imprudent in signing the report in question”, but that their major preoccupation was to work for human rights. The bishops said that D&P should be “more vigilant” in analyzing requests from possible partners. The bishops also suggested that while their relationship with D&P is a good one, the organization should consult more closely with the bishops, particularly the two who sit on its board of directors.

Lifesite says report a “whitewash”

LifeSite responded defiantly on its website to the inquiry report: “This story is not over,” LifeSite said. “Many bishops have withheld funding from D&P over this and the CCCB report has not yet changed that, and we suspect that it won’t. Because it is a whitewash, the report will cause even greater scandal.” Lifesite’s web publication is a creation of the Campaign Life Coalition, which describes itself as the “political wing of the pro-life movement in Canada.” Lifesite staff share an office with Campaign Life in Toronto but Lifesite also lists a Pittsburgh address for itself and a many of its articles deal with American matters. LifeSite also said the inquiry team assembled by the bishops was not competent to investigate the allegations and that D&P personnel who accompanied the group “led the bishops in their investigations”. The bishops indicated in their report, however, that the D&P personnel organized travel and other arrangements but had no hand in writing the report.

The bishops’ report also appealed to the people behind Lifesite to “establish an open and fruitful dialogue” with the bishops and other Catholic groups. “Negative actions of this kind,” the report says, “encourage suspicion, scandal and division in the Church.” Finally, the CCCB report urged Canadian bishops, and the leadership of social justice and pro-life groups “to recognize there is a continuum and integrity to all human life issues  . . .  there is an urgency to all that threatens the dignity and sacredness of human life, including violence, hunger, poverty and oppression.” This was an appeal to everyone, including bishops, not to be selective in choosing any one issue as being of ultimate importance, as Lifesite continues to do with its emphasis on abortion and contraception and its willfully ignoring issues relating to poverty and human rights.

Lifesite’s continuing attacks have placed both D&P and the bishops on the defensive.  The signal from the CCCB is that the bishops will place D&P under the microscope. There is nothing unusual about this since the CCCB has long made it a practice to focus attention on one or two of its departments or agencies at the bishops’ annual meeting – but it will likely be doing so this year in the face of continuing negative attacks on D&P by Lifesite and its supporters. Lifesite has been emboldened by the belief that it has succeeded in creating division among the bishops. The CCCB has also placed itself into a position of requesting dialogue with an organization that many bishops have long considered to be on the church’s extremist fringe, and one that has no official status as a Catholic organization.

Archbishop Weisgerber, in a June 19 interview with Salt + Light television, expressed his frustration that the bishops’ integrity and their teaching authority was being challenged by a group of mostly unknown and self-appointed people from Lifesite. “There’s a big issue there,” Weisgerber said. “It seems that there is a tendency on the part of some people to trust allegations on websites more than they trust the bishops.”

More than a Catholic matter

The controversy may appear to be an internal Catholic matter (it has received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media) but it has broader implications. The nature of Lifesite’s attacks could well hamper the way in which D&P conducts is development work in poor countries. Lifesite insists that agencies described as Catholic should be prohibited from being involved in projects related to family planning of any kind, including contraception – and that Catholic groups be prohibited from associating with other organizations who are so involved. Such a policy, if enacted, would prevent Catholic groups from working for justice in many circumstances. This would be a victory for the Catholic right and would signal a return to a form of triumphalism that was supposedly discarded by Vatican II in the 1960s. Accepting this protocol would also set back the cause of women’s rights by decades and place Catholic organizations in the company of some of the world’s most religiously fundamentalist regimes.

It is worth noting, as well, that Lifesite strongly supported George W. Bush’s decision to refuse American support for international aid programs that dealt in any way with abortion or contraception. Bush was providing payback to the religious right for its political support. Lifesite has been particularly hostile toward President Barack Obama who moved quickly after his 2008 election to strike down Bush’s prohibition.

There are a growing number of areas in contemporary society where the religious right is having a negative impact on international development, and Lifesite’s attack upon D&P for its work in poor countries is one such example.