If only Sodom and Gomorrah had a single-payer health insurance system

Wow.

Every now and again someone makes such a mind-numbingly ignorant claim that it just demands a response. An article Monday in USA Today’s On Religion column is fits the bill precisely. Most of the articles published in the On Religion column are written from a weird, wishy-washy ecumenical position but the one today takes the cake. Titled Would God back universal health care?, the author Oliver Thomas makes a (very poor) case that God supports universal, government run health care. His logic is a faulty as Pat Robertson’s when calling for the U.S. government to assassinate Hugo Chavez.

When someone makes a statement like this, the entire argument is cast in poor light:

In ancient Israel's agrarian society, even the land itself was to be returned to its original owners every 49 years so that a family's underlying source of income could be protected and sustained. While some Christians conclude that the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of their militant homosexuality, I think the Bible reports otherwise. Instead, Ezekiel 16:48-49 suggests that it was because they neglected to care for the needy.

Really? God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of a failure to provide single payer health care? That is funny because Jude 1:7 specifically references the sin of sexual immorality, i.e. homosexuality, when speaking of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not to mention the fact that the account of Sodom and Gomorrah itself depicts the desire for ungodly sexual congress as at the very least a contributing factor in the destruction of Sodom. Was there other sin going on in Sodom and Gomorrah? Surely. In their pride they lived in all manner of ungodly ways and indeed they flaunted their ungodliness. The final straw was the desire to commit ungodly homosexual acts with the angels staying with Lot. Regardless, it is dishonest to suggest that the account of Sodom and Gomorrah is a support for government run universal health care in America in 2009.

The silliness continues with a paragraph that suggest that the parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable about health care. The parable about the Good Samaritan is a response to the question of “who is my neighbor” and not a recommendation that health insurance is a universal right. Notice that in the story of the Good Samaritan, he freely and willingly gave from his own pocket to care for the man waylaid by robbers. That is vast difference from a confiscatory tax system run by a secular bureaucracy.

Here are the problems (two of the myriad of problems starting with playing fast and loose with the text) in this column. First, America is not ancient Israel. If Mr. Thomas wants to return us to ancient Israel’s theocratic system so that the poor are cared for, perhaps he would also like to return to the systems of capital punishment that came along with it. You can’t cherry pick the parts of the Old Testament you like and leave out the stoning.

Here is the other problem. Jesus cared for the poor. He called on His people to care for the poor. To make the leap from that to a system of confiscatory taxes that provides lower quality care at higher costs is unwarranted and dishonest. You cannot substitute Christian charity with a secular national system of health insurance. Jesus commanded His followers to care for the poor themselves, not to overthrow the Roman government and institute universal health care. The New Testament is not any more a support for universal health care than it is for socialism because the early church freely gave all that they had and shared all things in common. A secular government cannot be substituted for the Body of Christ.

So what should Christians think of universal, government run health care? Well, the most important thing I think to keep in mind is that there is not a “Christian” position on universal, government run health insurance. Not in support and not in opposition. The government providing a system of insurance funded through taxes is not a Christian issue. Jesus was neither a socialist nor a libertarian. Trying to use the Bible to support or oppose universal government run health insurance is false on its face. I oppose government health insurance because I think that the history of government interventions like this universally have poor results. I don’t oppose this system based on Christian convictions because it is not a Christian issue. Government programs are not a form of Christian charity.

If you want to make an argument in favor of single-payer, government run health care, I say go for it. I don’t buy it, but go ahead and make it. Just don’t twist the words of the Scriptures to support a position that is not even vaguely referenced in the Bible.