Obama Violating Separation of Church and State?

[East of Eden]

Obama recently attempted to get Pastors to use their pulpit to convince their congregations to go along with the his Health Care Program. He accused the opposition of violating the 9th commandment. He spoke of our obligation to be our brother's keeper.

Shouldn't those of you who oppose Christians trying to get their Biblical views enacted into law in regards to abortion, gay marriage, etc. be equally concerned about this?

It would be nice if Obama would be his own brother's keeper, who last time I checked was still living on $5 a month in Kenya. Perhaps while on vacation at that $20,000,000+ Martha's Vinyard retreat he'll have time to reflect on that.

[micatala]

Two wrongs dont make a right. What I mean is that the wrong of going without medical care because of poverty (which is rare in the United States) is not corrected by the wrong of force-funded, centrally planned system of health care insurance.

Please quantify "rare". I have a close family member who nearly died because she lost her job, resulting in loss of her health care, resulting in her not being able to afford important medication, which greatly reduced her quality of life and nearly resulted in her death. She would have been classified as poor, at least on a temporary basis.

Those of us who are compassionate should give to worthy charities that are responsible and accountable to those who donate and those who receive the charity and who can be prosecuted by the civil government if any wrong-doing crops up. And if we discover they arent worthy, then we can withdraw our financial support.

What people "should" do is up to them. I certainly support people giving to charity. I fail to see how this means we should not assign to government appropriate roles of action. I get calls from the VFW, police and sherriffs associations, etc. Should we move to a system where the military or the police are supported by charity? OR that people who get inadequate police protection be told to raise money from charity to recitfy the situation?

If the civil governments socialized medicine program is ineffective or even involved in fraud or is ill-managed and bankrupt, who will prosecute the civil government? Do you think the civil government will go out of business if they mismanaged or misallocate resources or become too bureaucratic or otherwise inefficient and fail in the health care business? No, they will limp along, declaring not enough money the remaining market-based infrastructure to be the problem.

This is a fair concern.

On the other hand, we currently do not really have much capacity to change the actions of insurance companies or rectify their fraud EXCEPT by appealing to government action. I am not persuaded that allowing government to participate in the health care system to a further extent (it already does through medicare and medicaid) will be worse than the current situation.

And why would illegal immigrants, who do not pay taxes, be covered under this new socialized health care proposal? (For more on this confusion, see pages 143 and 170 of the pdf of H.R.3200 above.)

Uhhhh. I looked at page 143. The bill very specifically says the opposite of what you are claiming.

5 Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments
6 for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are
7 not lawfully present in the United States.

Page 170 that you cite says:

1 (2) NONRESIDENT ALIENS."Subsection (a)
2 shall not apply to any individual who is a non3
resident alien.

As far as I can see, the bill very specifically says illegal aliens CANNOT be covered. If I am missing something here in the text, please correct me.

Also, how is providing abortions medical care? It is ending life, not promoting life. Yet, millions of Americans who believe abortion is murder will be forced by this program to pay for the murders of unborn babies, as Associated Press (AP) now admits after getting caught.

I consider myself pro-life and have voted more than once for measures which restrict or ban abortions. Thus, I have some sympathy with this concern. However, the problem I see with holding legislation hostage to this concern is that any number of people can make this case with any number of expenditures.

Pacifists who consider war immoral could say they should not be forced to pay taxes for the defense department.

Atheists can object that taxes NOT collected from tax exempt churches results in a de facto support for religion on their part, as they end up paying more taxes to make up the difference.

Those who object to the death penalty on religious or other grounds (as I do) could object to their taxes paying for this procedure.

And on and on. . .

Now I would like to see fewer abortions and support legal restrictions on abortions. Howver, they are now legal. To say the government should in no way shape or form, even indirectly, end up paying for a legal activity that many people DO consider a medical procedure, and in fact, occasionally is a NECESSARY medical procedure to save the life of a woman seems to me to be trying to inappropriately use the legislative process to force through restrictions that supporters of those restrictions have not been able to enact through the appropriate political and legislative means.

And isnt it ironic and weird that on the Health Reform web site, it says that the threat of Medicare insolvency is one reason we need the civil government to pass health reform legislation?

Again, this is a legitimate point. I think what we need to investigate is why the medicare trust fund is in trouble. As part of this investigation, I think it would be appropriate to analyze how cost effective medicare is. I cannot vouch for the information, but I have heard claims that medicare uses fewer dollars to achieve similar results as compared to the rest of the health care system. IF this is truly the case, this bolsters the case for allowing the government to have a larger role in health care. The insolvency may not be due to problems with how medicare utilizes resources, but changes in our demographics in conjunction with a lack of funding.

So I contend where charity fails, and the free market fails, government should step up to ensure all its citizens can receive decent medical care. I don't doubt we can all quible about what constitutes "decent", but I would contend there needs to be some mechanism in place where folks who really need medical care can receive it, before it becomes a medical emergency.

We do have that system, limping on through decades of help the civil government has given it by giving special protection to the AMA, establishing the Food & Drug Administration, and passing the HMO Act, etc. With required taxes people will be less likely to give voluntarily to charity. The result of a universal health care will be less compassion, less responsibility, less accountability, and less health care for those who truly need it. People will think the state is like a bank, holding their taxes for them for when they get sick, like people now think Social Security is.

I would agree that this possibility exists. I do not accept that the scenario painted is inevitable.

Second, the medical care crisis is not nearly the problem socialists say it is, and the rise of medical care costs over the last forty years have more to do with socialist interfering in the health care market than a rise in the real cost of medical care.

I object to the characterization of people who support a government option or who believe we have a major problem with respect to health care as socialists.

I would ask for specifics regarding what you consider "socialist interfering" and evidence that this is what has led to the rise in health care costs.

I will point out that places that truly DO have "socialized medicine" have costs much, much less than us. As I understand, we are spending 16% of our GDP on health care. The next highest country is France at 11%. The average of the 30 OECD countries is 9%. The majority of these countries get better results than us with respect to things like life expectancy, infant mortality, and other objective measures of health.

To me, it seems like we have a big problem. The health care system is acting as a huge drain on our economy, relative to other nations, and we are NOT getting uniformly better results. Now, we DO get better results in certain areas, like treatments of certain cancers, or treatment of some other serious diseases. But although we do not intentionally mean to, we are sacrificing the lives of many many more people to subsidize these successes. People like those who fall into circumstances like the family member alluded to above.

Third, medical care is not a right, its a responsibility of individuals, families, churches, charities, and the marketplace. People dont want to examine their lives but just want free money, impersonally given to them to throw at their health problems, without taking responsibility for their own health care.

I would agree that it is not necessary to consider health care a right. I would point out that the preamble of the constitution does say that one role of government is to "promote the general welfare" and health care certainly falls into this category.

The fact is that many medical conditions are caused by promiscuity, homosexual sex, using drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, eating too much junk food, using birth control pills, poor hygiene, injuries sustained while high or while committing foolhardy or even criminal acts"in other words, there is a moral component to some diseases and injuries for which people want to avoid taking responsibility.

Well, some of what you have here is to me overblown rhetoric. I would agree that some of our health care problems are due to choices people make. How much each of the particular examples you point to contribute to the problem will widely vary and it would be interesting to see data on this. For example, I would bet $20 on the spot that eating too much junk food contributes at least 100 times more to the cost of health care than promiscuity or homosexual sex.

I would absolutely support the government taking action to encourage people to make better choices, and possibly even some more coercive measures, provide they are reasonable. For example, we might consider it fair for smokers to pay more for health care. However, I think it would be incumbent on us to provide resources for smokers to kick their addition in this case.

In these cases, especially, I dont believe people have a right to force others to pay for their foolish or immoral lifestyles.
Remember all the hue and cry over OctoMom receiving public assistance" (redistributed tax money)? And she received some charity, as well. Subsidizing immorality and foolish behavior is something we all would have to accept as being the responsibility of civil government and our collective responsibility as taxpayers, if we accept universal health care.

Morality is in the eye of the beholder. We all pay for choices others make, often indirectly, whether these choices are "immoral" or not. The abortion issue is one example. To give another, I most certainly would not say having a lot of children is immoral. However, a couple who has 8 kids, even a more normal manner over a number of years, is on average going to use more health care resources AND pay less taxes. Why should a single person subsidize the couple in raising their family? It was their choice, not the single persons?

I think the question is a good question. My objection is that we end up having such discussions selectively. People tend to use such arguments against examples they object to, forgetting that the same arguments can be used against examples they like or that have become acceptable.

And he seems overly interested in aborting the unborn and "euthanizing" the elderly in violation of the 6th commandment.

LOL The "death panel" myth lives.

Once again, I did not say anything about a death panel. That is your hyperbole.

I'll leave that one for the observer to decide. I personally see an implication in "'euthanizing' the elderly" of the death panel myth.

Im not making that up as some kind of rhetorical hyperbole. Read pages 425 to 440 of the H.R.3200

pdf.

[/quote]

Hmmm. Perhaps you are not "making it up" but you are very severely mischaracterizing or misunderstanding this. Based on my reading (and additional reporting I have heard on this) what is happening is that this passage is describing what would be payed for regarding so-called "end of life counseling." You need to keep in mind that (1) this counseling ALREADY IS OCCURRING between doctors and patients all the time and that their is a difference between the government (or an insurance company for that matter) deciding what is covered and the government actually performing the services covered.

I do not believe it is at all accurate to say this bill allows for euthanasia, employs death panels, or any such things.

Read this interview with Obama. Heres a section of the interview regarding end of life decisions regarding the elderly with anti-socialistic commentary.

OK. Here is the crux of the issue from the second article.

THE PRESIDENT: ...you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. Its not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And thats part of what I suspect youll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.


[so-called anti-socialist commentator]
In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington -- not your family -- will decide whether your grandparents live or die.

I am sorry. What this commentator is doing is simply lying. He is claiming Obama is saying something he is not saying at all. Obama specifically says "not determinative" and this guy recasts it as "faceless bureaucrat" decides to let grandma die.

He trivializes the difficult decisions faced by those with elderly and seriously ill relatives. He forgets or ignores that these decisions are already being made with exactly the type of counseling that Obama is talking about in this article. He trivializes the fact that family members sometimes simply cannot afford to pay for care that they would like to be able to provide. He completely ignores that people die every day under the current system we have because they can't pay, or the insurance companies refuse to pay, and he ignores that, as much as we would like to provide the best care for everyone, we do not do so now, and in fact cannot because resources are inherently finite.


I very strongly object when this type of dishonest and paranoid hyperbole drives the debate and affects the decisions we make. I understand there are difficult and emotional issues at play. I do not think this justifies this type of incredible distortion, dishonesty, and scare tactics. I personally would have a hard time taking anything else this "anti-socialist commentator" had to say seriously after reading this.



[/quote]

[JoeyKnothead]

From Page 5 Post 48:

Being a veteran is different from being an ordinary citizen...

You asked why I should have my care paid by the government.

But it can be dangerous to veterans' health to have people who believe euthanasia is good to be administrating and extracting money from taxpayers for their health care. I don't think this was "in the contract"

I'm just not hearing calls to create these "death panels". This is nothing but misunderstanding at best and fear-mongering at worst.

Two wrongs don't make a right. What I mean is that the wrong of going without medical care because of poverty (which is rare in the United States) is not corrected by the wrong of force-funded, centrally planned system of health care "insurance."

Those of us who are compassionate should give to worthy charities that are responsible and accountable to those who donate and those who receive the charity and who can be prosecuted by the civil government if any wrong-doing crops up. And if we discover they arent worthy, then we can withdraw our financial support.

Who is so great they can determine who deserves medical care? I contend doctors are in the best position here, when families are allowed to voice their concerns.

f the civil government's socialized medicine program is ineffective or even involved in fraud or is ill-managed and bankrupt, who will prosecute the civil government? Do you think the civil government will "go out of business" if they mismanaged or misallocate resources or become too bureaucratic or otherwise inefficient and fail in the "health care business"? No, they will limp along, declaring "not enough money" the remaining market-based infrastructure to be the problem.

Not enough money, and the current market-based infrastructure are the problem now.

Why are members of Congress exempt from this wonderful socialized medicine program? And unions exempt from paying taxes for it? Wouldn't they be eager to sign up themselves, if they thought "universal health care" to be such a good and compassionate program?

Because they already have a health care plan.

I get your point, but the fact remains far too many are without decent medical care. I don't see any reason to keep it from one group because another group has a better plan.

And why would illegal immigrants, who do not pay taxes, be covered under this new socialized health care proposal? (For more on this confusion, see pages 143 and 170 of the pdf of H.R.3200 above.)

I agree that adult illegals shouldn't be offered these plans.

Also, how is providing abortions "medical care?" It is ending life, not promoting life. Yet, millions of Americans who believe abortion is murder will be forced by this program to pay for the murders of unborn babies, as Associated Press (AP) now admits after getting caught.

I agree the issue of abortion is contentious, and would only want "government sponsored" abortions under the decision of the doctor, with the mother ultimately giving the go ahead. Here I mean the doctor decides if an abortion is medically necessary, and the mother would have the final yes or no.

And isnt it ironic and weird that on the Health Reform web site, it says that the "threat of Medicare insolvency" is one reason we need the civil government to pass health reform legislation?

Not properly funding something, then declaring it insolvent is a bit off IMO.

We do have that system, limping on through decades of "help" the civil government has given it by giving special protection to the AMA, establishing the Food & Drug Administration, and passing the HMO Act, etc. With required taxes people will be less likely to give voluntarily to charity.

My point is the reliance on charity is insufficient; has been, is now, and likely we remain so.

First, if people decide that avoiding hearing the gospel is an excellent reason to avoid going to Christian charities for help with their medical care, then that is their free choice to make. (Why don't they go to atheist charities for help with medical care?) It is necessary for Christians to get serious about providing abundant care via Christian medical charities.

Of course, "hear me preach or be left without medical care". Right Christian that. Charity, regardless of religious position has failed in this regard. I agree we all need to do more, but in the failure of such, I contend the government needs to be involved.

Second, the "medical care crisis" is not nearly the problem socialists say it is, and the rise of medical care costs over the last forty years have more to do with socialist interfering in the health care market than a rise in the real cost of medical care.

I'm not a socialist per se. I do contend medical care is important enough to get the government involved.

Third, medical care is not a "right,"

Not currently. Hopefully we'll be able to convince enough folks it should be.

A weak argument for sure, but Americans have a right to carry a deadly weapon, but not a right to receive treatment as a result of that weapon.

People don't want to examine their lives but just want "free money,"

Oh please. Especially in this economy there are folks who've gone without insurance through no fault of their own.


Your euthanasia references will go for now, I've read the bill, and I understand how important end of life decisions are. Nobody wants to kill your grandma.

If you think your insurance company doesn't make the same sorts of decisions you're wrong.

Of course we must, in difficult financial times, think rationally about what sorts of care are "worth it" in regards to cost, effectiveness, and other criteria. Here I propose the doctor should be responsible, in consultation with his staff. The family should be well informed, and their concerns considered, but the ultimate decision should be the doctors'.

If this notion needs to be placed in the bill (and other more powerful voices have spoken) then so be it, but let's not scrap the idea of care for all.

You don't have to believe in God to know whether Obama is violating the 8th Commandment or not; all you have to be able to do is read. I brought up "breaking commandments" because, according to the OP, Obama accused Christians of violating the 9th commandment, himself bearing false witness against Christians.

Fair 'nuff. I still don't see how we can consider anyone in violation of "God's commandments" when we can't show God gives a hoot to begin with.

Then you have a problem with Obama, as he is the one quoted in the OP. I think the OP was referring to the story covered this article and this article.

I've already admitted from the POV of a Christian the commandment was violated. My point was it's kinda silly to say someone is violating God's commandments when they can't show God has an opinion on the matter. All we have is a book declaring these commandments, with no way to confirm these are indeed God's opinion.

[Science101]

Actually I think it's more than normal.

Jesus is way more of a socialist.

The first man raised communism is a chatholic theologian (if I remembered correctly)

Hugo Chavez is a well-known christian-socialist.

The whole brotherhood idea conflicts with free-market, as later one observes that ppl are self-interest beings.