The Independent News Source
NCR on Kindle - NCR classifieds - YouTube - Twitter - Facebook - Email Alerts - RSS
Printer-friendly version
PDF versionObama to join faith-based national teleconference on health care reform
by Jerry Filteau on Aug. 17, 2009
President Barack Obama will participate Aug. 19 in a national teleconference on health care reform sponsored by an interfaith coalition.
The 5 p.m. (EDT) conference call will also be available as a live audio stream on the Internet at www.sojo.net/obamacall or at http://faithforhealth.org.
Health care reform “is a theological, biblical, moral issue,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, executive director and CEO of Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization that is hosting the teleconference. “Our health insurance system is broken. Our system is sick. It is a threat to the nation’s soul.”
In an Aug. 10 conference call with journalists Wallis and other faith leaders expressed dismay at what they termed the lies and misinformation being spread widely by opponents of health care reform.
“Moral people can disagree” on details of the proposed reform, said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, “but this is not going to be about the details, but on the moral imperative to act.”
“Forty-seven million people are falling through the cracks. They’re as likely to be Republican as (they are to be) Democrat,” Saperstein said. “We come to this because it is a human rights issue.”
“Every so often an issue is so clear and compelling, or so alarming and disoncerting, that it galvanizes the faith community,” Wallis said. He called health care reform “one of those fundamental human and religious issues” that fits the category.
“There are people in the country who want to stop an honest, fair, civil discourse” on the issue, but religious leaders across the country are insisting that “there will be a conversation, and it will be a moral conversation,” he said.
The Obama teleconference is part of a national interfaith “40 Days for Health Reform” campaign that has included scores of regional prayer events with members of Congress and a call for clergy of all faiths to preach on health care the weekend of Aug. 28-30.
In September the interfaith coalition plans meetings across the country with members of Congress, prayer rallies, and grassroots online and call-in campaigns to encourage Congress to pass a health reform act.
“Forty-seven million people
“Forty-seven million people are falling through the cracks." Rabbi Sapperstein reminds us, “We come to this because it is a human rights issue.”
This is more than a national crisis; this is a crime against humanity, all so a few may immensely profit from the suffering and pain of millions of others.
Nearly fifty million people "fall through the cracks" which means receive little to no health care.
I remember those bodies left to float in New Orleans by the Bush FEMA while volunteer rescue workers were turned away by our military, while grandmothers died without care dehydrated in the stadium.
Which nation is this, that a few must profit from our suffering and sickness or fifty million of us go without?
And people are so deluded by our monopolistic commercial media as to protest the provision of health care to all in our nation?
Let us pray we for once join the community of civilized nations for whom health care is a service compassionately given as a human right, not just another means for the few to reap like vampires immeasurable profits from the pain of others.
See Michael Moore's Sicko, and weep . . .
"I was sick and you refused to visit me."
The most distinguishing sign we receive in the Gospels of the public ministry of Jesus Christ is not so much the words he used, recorded only in a very few precious moments, such as on the Mount or the Plain, but in his constant and compassionate healing. Let us too do as He has done, as example. Let us heal ourselves and one another. Let us have health care, not for profit but for Life.
(For this too is a pro-Life issue.)
Amen.
This is good news to me!
This is good news to me!
Health care is a clear case
Health care is a clear case where moral imperatives and politics are joined in the pursuit of the public interest. Religion and politics do interface, but phony religion makes for phony politics, i.e., "neoconism" and religious right absolutism.
Post new comment