HEALTH CARE AS A SOCIAL GOOD: RELIGIOUS VALUES AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Excerpt

The vast majority of Americans doubtless believe that slavery in the USA was abolished quickly 150 years ago during the Civil War. Another view would hold that slavery was abolished slowly over more than a century starting with individual northern states in the early nineteenth century, progressing to the banning of the Atlantic slave trade, to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with vestiges of forced labor lingering until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (or even today). Likewise, the movement toward universal health insurance for residents of the USA will likely be seen as a similarly long progression over most of the twentieth and some of the twenty-first century. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 will doubtless be seen as a milestone. Historian Douglas Blackmon has published evidence that African-Americans were in effect re-enslaved in the South soon after the Civil War and not liberated until the mid twentieth century. Will the ACA be wholly or partially repealed by the joint efforts of the Supreme Court and the next Republican administration? Or will a national consensus emerge in the USA that health care is a human right and some variation on Medicare be enacted for the entire populace? Either way, what role will religion play in the deciding the outcome? …