‘America deserves better’: A call for health-care reform

Providing quality, universal health care as a core societal obligation is a 2,000-year old command in the Jewish tradition. It speaks across millennia to us today. Consider the words of the Jewish tradition on health care:

• “Whoever is in pain, lead him to the physician.” (Baba Kamma 46B)

• “It is obligatory from the Torah for the physician to heal the sick and this is included in the explanation of the phrase and you shall restore it to him, meaning to heal the body.” (Moses Maimonides)

Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

• “God created food and water; we must use them in staving off hunger and thirst. God created drugs and compounds and gave us the intelligence necessary to discover their medicinal properties; we must use them in warding off illness and disease.” (Moses Maimonides)

• “No disciple of the wise may live in a city that is not provided with the following 10 officials and institutions: [the first two being] a physician and a surgeon, [a bath-house, a lavatory, a source of water supply such as a stream or a spring, a synagogue, a school teacher, a scribe, a treasurer of charity funds for the poor, a court that has authority to punish with stripes and imprisonment].” (Moses Maimonides)

• “Our Rabbis taught: the non-Jewish poor are to be sustained along with the Jewish poor, the non-Jewish sick are to be visited along with the Jewish sick … for the sake of the ways of peace.” (Gittin 61a).

Indeed, the very word “shalom” comes from the root “l’shalem” – to make whole, to heal. People of faith have always understood our responsibilities to include the obligation to bring health to all, and healing to the sick and infirm. With optimism and determination, we are on the cusp of fundamentally changing the way that Americans ensure health care to all.

To those who would say that religion has no place in the health-care reform debate – that this has become too much a partisan political issue – organizations representing a broad consensus in the mainstream religious communities insist that this is a quintessentially religious issue. The health-care crisis touches nearly every citizen, every community, every church, mosque, temple, and synagogue; every member of the clergy and every congregant. The failure to provide universal health-care coverage challenges the simplest and clearest biblical command expressed by Ezekiel, that “[e]very living thing shall be healed.” It is these values and these concerns that bring the religious community here to say: America deserves better than the reality.

What is the reality?

“We live in a country with a pitifully inadequate health-insurance system that causes horrors every day so tragic that they could rip the heart out of a stone…. The time has long since passed when our leaders should have done what every other advanced country has somehow managed to do: provide all its citizens with essential health care.”

With these words, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of our Union for Reform Judaism, called on all of our synagogues to join the struggle to pass universal, affordable, accessible, and portable health-care reform.

The moral test of health-care reform is whether it provides accessible, affordable, quality health insurance for all, including our country’s low-income seniors, children, the disabled, and immigrants. These are the people most at risk of falling through the cracks, and these are the people who rely on us to ensure that they can find decent health care when they need it. Indeed all Americans, wealthy and poor, children, the elderly, and, yes, women, deserve care that meets all their needs – including reproductive health needs – and keeps them healthy throughout their lives.

Yes, America deserves better than the reality.

For the 10 million uninsured children, we say: America deserves better! For the millions of the disabled whose health care is threatened, we say: America deserves better! For the more than 80 million who at some point this year will lose health insurance, we say: America deserves better! For those millions of hard-working Americans who have lost jobs and with them their health benefits, we say: America deserves better! For all of those tens of millions of Americans who fear that they may lose their access to comprehensive coverage, and whose life savings are threatened by catastrophic illness, we say: America deserves better! For the soul of our nation, we say: America deserves better.

Our traditions demand better. Our nation seeks better. God’s children deserve better. This Congress can do better. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call of the fierce urgency of now should animate the decisions each senator will make in ensuring universal health coverage. We pray and advocate that they will do better – for all Americans and for our nation’s future.