Focus Article: Health Care: The New Ground Zero
by Dr. Robert D. Crane
Ground zero is where everything either blows apart or comes together. Ground zero is where civilizational paradigms clash. The real clash of civilizations has always been within each civilization rather then among them. Ground zero may be defined as where one paradigm destroys all hope of civilization and another paradigm offers its only hope.
The most vivid example is the clash between those who advocate doing what is best for the medical profession’s bottom line of maximum monetary return and those who are determined to revive the paradigmatic Hippocratic Oath do what is best for the patient. The least understood battleground is over end-of-life care, specifically between the classical hospice movement and the political movement to brand “Obamacare’s obnoxious End of Life counseling” as nothing but a call for “death squads” to “terminate the lives of useless senior citizens.”
The secularist surge that has drained the transcendent spirit out of American politics, sometimes under the cover of politicized religion, obscures the compassionate justice that lies at the heart of the hospice movement and more generally of President Obama’s health care policies. Hospice is being politically demonized, either through ignorance or ideology, because its paradigmatic shift from curative to palliative care for terminal patients is still so little understood. Unfortunately, the practical effect of the scare tactics is to maintain the most corrupt health care system on the planet earth by ignoring the moral theology of compassionate justice that lies at the heart of all the world’s major religions. Read more…
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World Commentary
- “Now Make Me Do It” by Ralph Nader
- Dear President Obama: A Modest Medicare Proposal by Thom Hartmann
- If Obama Discards Public Option, What’s Left of Reform? by John Nichols
