Chuck Colson must have used his time in the federal pen for something other than working on his shanking skills and putting down riots with prayer. By now, he has almost magical writing powers, cramming a world of misleading, stupid, and just plain insulting into a mere 534 words penned for the Christian Post.
For anyone who reads the Christian Post regularly, this is about as surprising as noting the wet-making powers of water, or the disturbing character of Michael Jackson’s biography.
Let’s take these in reverse order. Stupid: finding the provocations of Peter Singer objectionable. This is as difficult as finding Michael Jackson’s parenting skills…well, you get the idea.
Insulting: comparing Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel to a Nazi based on this quote ripped from its context:
Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.
This, admittedly, makes it sound like Ezekiel is going to snuff Granny for having the gall to get old and dotty. But it’s the work of ten minutes to read the article it’s taken from to realize that it’s simply a what-if hypothesis thrown out to help clarify the actual point. Namely, that conceptions of the good do actually influence how we ration health care, whether or not they should according to liberal philosophy.
And that brings us to the “misleading”: all of this amounts to FUD meant to distract senior citizens from the truth: health care is already rationed in the United States. Rather than being rationed by sensible fiscal policy or public health considerations, though, it’s apportioned by the desire of large corporations to turn a buck. We’ve already got bureaucrats making life-and-death decisions; they’re just private sector bean-counters rather than government pencil pushers, is all.
Colson and his conservative buddies would like their religious readers to believe that they’re taking a principled stand in defense of the imago dei when in fact they’re just shilling for insurance companies’ right to cherry-pick healthy clients and exclude the sick.
Colson says, “leave it to the family and the doctors as it is today.” If only. “And managers and the accountants and the executives and the investors and Wall Street” is more like it.
