Health is a Halo
Each week the Texas Voice for Health Reform blog will feature a guest blogger from our network of partners. This week’s guest blogger is Bee Moorhead, Executive Director of Texas Impact. Bee can be reached at bee@texasimpact.org
“Health is a halo worn by the unaware”
This quote—from a young Texas mother who died of leukemia—explains why it’s so important that we reform health insurance in the United States. It also explains why it’s hard to invest the public with a sense of urgency and purpose about the issue.
The quote was retold by Reverend Kathryn Ransdell in her August 2nd sermon at First United Methodist Church in Dallas. The sermon, which won first place in Texas Impact’s recent sermon contest on health justice, also included Ransdell’s personal story of dealing with the financial issues around her husband’s cancer last year. Facing expensive treatment that their insurance would only partially cover, Ransdell said, “We needed the kind of prayers that Christians don’t know how to pray, because we don’t know how to talk about these things.”
Most Texans, and most Americans, don’t know how to talk about the hard financial issues around health care, and most of us don’t have to. On any given day, most of us have health insurance. We wear our health like a halo, and our insurance like armor. Only when that halo dims, or the armor presents weak points—when we enter the category of the “vulnerable”—does health care reform look like a critical issue.
Working to make health insurance secure for everyone is an important part of the faith community’s health ministry. People of faith should be having two important conversations around health insurance reform.
The first conversation is about how we treat “the least of these.” Our faith traditions share a common message that our attention to the most vulnerable members of the community is the moral measure of the whole community. People in poverty, people with chronic health concerns, people with little personal power, are most likely to suffer under the current fragmented system, and we have a collective responsibility to ensure their needs are met.
But the second conversation is about our common vulnerability. The truth is that every person’s health is inherently fragile—as Ransdell says, “We aren’t any of us getting out of this life alive.” We can’t overcome or outfox our common mortality, but as a loving community we can together ease the financial insecurity that has become part of the larger insecurity of poor health.
Working for a secure, sustainable and just health insurance system is as much a part of the pastoral work of the faith community as bringing the proverbial casserole—and while the casserole will last for one or two meals, a reformed insurance system will serve our whole community for years to come.
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