My Temper Tantrum

How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?  1 John 3:17

This verse has been haunting me since I read it this morning. It is so much what I feel like I am fighting for – for us to see those with needs and to offer to help them.

Instead, too often what I see and hear is judgment. “If they can’t afford healthcare, why do they have a cell phone?” “THOSE people just want a handout.” “They smoke.” The list of complaints is endless. Like none of us have any vices, right?

For those of us living as Christians, we are told pretty clearly that it is not our job to judge. I don’t believe the scripture is in any way equivocal about that. What we are to do is to love; to serve the least of these. Really, we are to see all people as being of the same value in the eyes of God.

But, what we do is judge.  There is a YouTube video called Empathy that was put out by the Cleveland Clinic. It talks about putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes in order to understand what they are experiencing. It is a powerful reminder of how each person we encounter is dealing with something.

One of the things I have learned as I have gotten older is that every one of our lives has joy, sorrow, trials and hardships; for each of us the journey is different. Each of us is dealing with our life in the best way we are able to given our circumstances.

Yes, there are those that take advantage of the system. They are not always the poor – many rich people take advantage of the system by cheating on their taxes; there are doctors and healthcare centers that commit Medicaid and Medicare fraud. 

Why are we so afraid to make available to all people access to quality, affordable healthcare? Isn’t that one of the easiest and best ways to take care of everyone? And in taking care of everyone we also take care of ourselves. The Affordable Care Act provides healthcare reform that benefits each of us – more preventive care, more of our premiums spent on healthcare delivery, eliminating the fear of policy cancellation due to illness, eliminating pre-existing condition clauses – the list goes on and on of the benefits we will all enjoy.

One argument I hear is “we can’t afford it!” Well, we can’t afford to not implement the Affordable Care Act. While we twiddle our thumbs and moan and groan about it, my patients are dying for lack of access to healthcare.  As I review stories for this blog, too often the stories I know are the ones of the patients that died. They had such limited access to healthcare that they died. Some while waiting for care, others as a result of too little care way too late.

If we are going to call ourselves Christians, it is time to live up to our calling which I think Matthew 25:44-45 makes pretty clear: “‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’  He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”