Sermon Sunday

Health care is a moral issue and a pragmatic one. Those who support the current system support a profoundly immoral system which is causing people to die and suffer needlessly and costs more than the completely obvious alternative. They almost certainly do it out of some misguided belief that a bad result from the private sector is morally preferable to a good result from the public sector – or perhaps they do it because they’re at the trough and benefiting.

But it is a moral issue and being against single payer healthcare says something about the person with that belief. And it isn’t anything good (and certainly isn’t anything Christian, but I’ll leave that to those Christians who remember that Jesus cared for the poor to remind people of.)

So choose whether you support single payer health care. But remember that in making that choice you are making a profound statement about what you consider important – free market ideology or saving lives and pain – and that single payor healthcare has been proven to actually be cheaper than the current system. Immoral and impractical - all in one.

The whole argument is here, hattip to Ian Welsh, of Firedoglake.