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Pseudoscience in Healthcare Reform Bill?
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The healthcare reform battle is discouraging enough. Democrats, elected by a landslide in 2008 n a platform of change, quickly erected a circular firing squad and began shooting wildly at one another and their most ardent progressive supporters. Healthcare insurance companies greased their way into the halls of power in hope of quashing a public option. One form of the bill mandates that uninsured Americans purchase health insurance from the very companies who have made billions by denying care, rescinding policies on gravely ill customers after the fact on absurdly flimsy excuses, and eliminating preexisting conditions from coverage. Following the great tradition of the financial meltdown, it seems that no crises can be addressed without shoveling trainloads of taxpayer money to the same corporations that enabled or created the crisis in the first place. Now members of both parties are reportedly pandering to fundamentalists with this provision:
Reporting from Washington - Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
It certainly makes sense that a Republican might be interested in this. The religious right is a big, loyal part of their constituency. Why Democrats think they have anything to gain is more puzzling. And seeing Sen Kerry's name there is every bit as disheartening as the painful salute he gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 as he said he was "reporting for duty."
A recent study by the Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance fund that about 45,000 Americans die every year due to lack of healthcare insurance. It's a fair bet many of those people and their loved ones did not suffer from a lack of prayer, god wishes, positive mental energy, or access to various forms of quackery. They died because they were not properly treated by doctors using modern medicine.
There's a reason doctors use surgery, antibiotics and other medications, MRIs and X-ray machines and all the other modern techniques developed at great cost over decades to diagnose and treat diagnose disease and injury: they work. Say what you will about faith healing or prayer. No doubt there's some comfort afforded or value added, even if it's purely a placebo effect, for patients with strong religious beliefs. But pray all you want over a patient suffering an acute anaphylatic reaction -- a few cc's of adrenaline will stop it in its tracks. If a child has a torn spleen or an infected, ruptured appendix, you can use Holy Water, wave around magic wands or recite verse from dozens of religious texts, but a routine operation will cure that patient well over 99 out of 100 times leaving behind little more than a scar. Furthermore, prayer can be offered throughout the procedure, before, during, and after. But is it appropriate to pay someone to pray or lay on the healing hands? Is prayer supposed to work that way?
The provision would add negligible cost to any bill. If it helps people feel better, or includes end of life or other critical counseling during a tragic time, or helps the bill pass, maybe it's worth including. But consider what the reaction would be if a lawmaker introduced a similar idea, only instead of Christian prayer or Biblical faith healing, the provision provided taxpayer funding for Islamic spiritual medicine, or paid a new ager to 'audit' the patient or whatever it is they do. Most people would object, some would be apoplectic, and understandably so.
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