FPL worked with Sister Mary Ellen Howard on this op-ed
A year ago this week, Congress passed landmark health care reform that stands as one of the most important achievements since President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law more than four decades ago. This first anniversary will provoke fresh debate over a law many Americans still remain confused about, even as its benefits are already taking effect.
As a Sister of Mercy and executive director of the St. Frances Cabrini Clinic in Detroit, the oldest free clinic in the country, I’m on the front lines of our national health care crisis every day. Our doors are open to a steady stream of this city’s sick and most vulnerable who lack insurance.
I know that the more than 50 million uninsured Americans are not statistics. They are mothers, children and grandparents who deserve to be treated with dignity. In the wealthiest nation in the world, it’s a moral scandal that our broken health care system has left behind so many for so long.
This is why I’m hopeful that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is charting a new course. Because of this law, fewer patients will face dire circumstances. Insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. This means a young girl with cancer or another serious illness can’t be denied the care she needs.
In addition, new health plans must cover preventive services such as blood-pressure checkups and routine vaccinations without co-payments. This is an important victory; costly and life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses are often preventable, but research shows most of us avoid preventive care when it’s not covered. And over the next several years, 795,000 uninsured citizens of Michigan will gain coverage.
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A faith-based organization is holding celebrations in Kansas City and seven other cities this week in recognition of the one-year anniversary of passage of the Affordable Care Act.
The events will highlight how health care reform is benefiting communities, said Gordon Whitman of the PICO National Network, an alliance of about 1,000 congregations nationwide.
“A tremendous amount of work is being done at the local level to implement the law,” Whitman said.
In Kansas City, the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center will hold a news conference Wednesday at the construction site of its new building. The new center is being built in part with money from the Affordable Care Act.
The Rodgers event is being held in partnership with Communities Creating Opportunities, a PICO affiliate.
The Rodgers clinic cares for patients in old facilities, CEO Hilda Fuentes said. The new clinic will be able to handle 7,500 more patients.
“We need the support of everyone to see that health reform remains on its path to alleviate suffering and provide health care to all,” Fuentes said.
Kansas City also is among four cities where PICO and the organization Faithful America are running advertisements that feature people with health coverage issues addressed by the Affordable Care Act.
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FPL provided media support for this event
Florida religious leaders are holding a prayer service to denounce bills recently introduced in the Legislature they fear will hurt immigrants, particularly those in the country illegally.
Thursday’s interfaith prayer service at the First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee targets bills moving in the Florida House and Senate.
The religious leaders dislike proposals that would require law enforcement to enquire about individuals’ immigration status during an arrest. They say in domestic abuse cases all those involved are frequently arrested initially, so the bill would discourage victims in the country illegally from talking with authorities.
They also oppose a proposal to require all employers to use the federal government’s system to electronically check whether someone is eligible to work. They say the system makes too many mistakes and could hurt legal immigrants.
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FPL provided media support for this event
Religious leaders leaders and bishops from across Florida oppose anti-immigrant legislation that will divide communities, separate families, and prevent churches from ministering to those in need. They urged political leaders to instead focus on real solutions that protect our values.
“Creating and passing laws that make it more difficult and even unlawful to provide care and assistance to the immigrant in our midst runs counter to the very fabric of the Christian faith and our moral fiber,” said Bishop Edward R. Benoway of the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), based in Tampa.
The state legislature, which began its legislative session last Tuesday, passed a stringent anti-immigrant measure out of the Judiciary Committee of the House last week. The legislation is similar to the controversial SB-1070 in Arizona, mandating the use of an employee verification program and requiring checking immigration status of anyone who has been arrested, regardless of the charge. The legislation could have similar repercussions to Arizona’s law, including legal challenges, steep costs of implementation, and national outcry with ramifications for the tourism industry. Numerous other anti-immigrant bills are also under consideration in both houses of the legislature.
“The bills make a vice of compassion and a virtue of retribution. They offer no justice that is not punishment, and they fail to embrace the worth and the beauty that immigrants bring to our culture,” said Ray Johnson, coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Florida, based in Lakeland. “As a person of faith and hope, I call upon the legislators of the state of Florida and all good people of faith to reject the use of fear to gin up support for the abuse of vulnerable people.”
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Then on Thursday, a group of prominent evangelicals with a more conservative cast (though some signed onto both initiatives) launched a “A Christian Proposal for American Debt Crisis” that focuses on the deficit as a moral issue — much as House Speaker John Boehner did this week — but which also opposes the Republican-led effort to address the debt by slashing discretionary spending.
“Effective programs that prevent hunger and suffering and empower poorer members of society must continue and be adequately funded,” the latest petition says.
Yet even as these Christian leaders, many of them card-carrying conservatives, push to spare the poor while reducing the deficit, they face serious internal tensions and fractures on two fronts: among themselves, on the one hand, and between these leaders and the folks in the pews, on the other.
Among the leadership, one clear difference of opinion is over what ought to be cut. Some would spare foreign aid to the poor and sacrifice more on the domestic side, while others disagree about whether defense spending should be significantly reduced. And the minefield of entitlement reform is treaded on ever so lightly, much as it is on both sides of the aisle in Washington.
At the same time, these faith-based campaigns focus almost exclusively on the issue of cutting spending and largely avoid the dreaded “t-word” — taxes — which has the potential to splinter any coalition.
For example, the “Christian Proposal for American Debt Crisis” launched on Thursday has only a broadly worded phrase near the end that says Congress “should remove many special exemptions, end many special subsidies, and keep the tax code progressive.”
“Our general statement says we keep the tax code progressive. It doesn’t say exactly how we do that,” Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, a chief organizer of the petition, said on a Thursday conference call with other signatories that was organized by the liberal-leaning group, Faith in Public Life.
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