User-prays Solution to the Heath Care Crises.

The perfect solution for Alberta’s heath care crisis has been found! The user prays!

The Calgary Herald published the solution this morning in the letters, nay, epistles, to the editor section. With a little work, it could work. Or not. The author, a guy with the intials W. E., writes:

Re: “Health crisis enrages Tory MD,” Nov. 18.

The dedicated men and women working in the medical field are doing their best amid a crisis. What needs to be said is that it’s not the government’s mandate to look after the sick. It is the church of Jesus Christ. Jesus charged the 12 disciples to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without pay, give without pay.” (Matthew 10:8).

This is not to say that we do not need hospitals, doctors, nurses, specialists and emergency facilities. But there is much available through believers who understand what Christianity has to offer. Christianity is not a passive religion.

Christianity is a way to give it the name by which it was first called. God is the source of all supply. Christian Science, for example, shows us there is a way by which the great facts of God’s nature can be demonstrated to man, and that this is the way pointed out by Jesus Christ. The way can do much to relieve the stresses in the health-care system.

So, get the government out of health care. We can’t have them taking jobs away from Christians!  What a crock. How can it NOT be a government’s job to look after its own people and visitors?

I suppose the Mr. E.’s version of the Christian option is cheaper, he suggests that Christians do it all for free. And that includes casting out demons! I bet they don’t teach that in medical school!

Ah, but the limits of faith! We will still need hospitals and medical staff. But who should pay for them? Not the government, if paragraph 1 is to be accepted. Should it all be privatized? That’s not very Christian (Tea Partiers notwithstanding) since ,as Epp points out, Christians are supposed to work for free (and at least in some places in the New Testament, hold common property Acts 4:32-35). COMMUNISTS!

God being displeased. But at who? (whom?) The lefties or the righties? Does he want cup of tea?

Ahh, the greatest Canadian of all time, Tommy Douglas, must be rolling over in his grave to hear how another Christian thinks that the government has no role in healthcare. (But perhaps he ISN’T in his grave! Perhaps he hass been raised from the dead by a “Christian Scientist” and had his socialist demons exorcized! (Sweet Zombie Tommy!)

Tommy and his gun-men. The Not-Exactly-Salvation-Army!

The father of Canada’s evil, government organized Health Care and Evil Communist Plot (let the reader understand) was a Baptist preacher turned politician. And, for all my raging fundamentalist atheism, I’m rather glad he did. He had some good ideas and cared about people and his country. What more could you want from a politician?

It is always refreshing while putting the finishing touches on a conference paper to get up in the morning and read how some other poor slob went public with a worse written and thought out pile of drivel than I’m likely to produce. W. E. really doesn’t have a plan. If he wants fellow Christians to pitch in and help some people’s sufferings then fine. Many Christians, like lots of other people, religious or otherwise, are quite good and that and committed to their neighbours. But the shortcomings in our healthcare system is not the lack of Christians realizing their true calling, but lack of resources, political will, and a system the government seems hell bent on replacing rather than repairing. Simply appealing to religion is NOT a solution or even a part-solution. No health care system could or should depend on charity. It should depend on recognition that everyone, not just Christians, have obligations to one another. Who is better positioned to organize this than the government? If the government is broken then it needs to be fixed too.

Alas, Albertans just keep voting for the same right wing retards, election after election, by linking western myths of the rugged individualism to the interests of big business and big oil.

Here are some ideas for health care, just off the top of my head,  not all of them are totally flippant.

1) Stop the privatization

2) Fund the public system properly.

3) Worry more about finding the money for salaries that will keep the best doctors, nurses and other professionals in the province rather raising the salaries of the senior administration to keep them.

3) Bring back the health care charges folks with good jobs like me had to pay to help offset the costs for folks of modest means.

4) Listen to the Health Care professionals for ideas on how to improve the organization etc. of the public system and implement the most promising ones.

5) Make sure all senior admin and government health care officials are selected from folks are, or have least one loved one suffering from an on-going chronic illness that requires frequent use of the public system.

6) Place the offices of all senior admin and government health care officials so that they are accessible only through the crowded emergency and other over-stressed hospital wards.