- Bishop Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, warned that health care should not be subject to "federal monopolization." He wrote "... the proper role of government is to regulate the private sector in order to foster healthy competition and curtail abuses. Therefore any legislation that undermines the viability of the private sector is suspect."
The church, Nickless wrote, "does not teach that 'health care' as such, without distinction, is a natural right."
- Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Ill., wrote that health care should be thought of "as more of a market than a system." He added: "Our federal bureaucracy is a vast wasteland strewn with the carcasses of absurd federal programs which proved infinitely worse than the problems they were established to correct."
- Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote that "a proper government role in solving the health-care crisis does not necessarily demand a national public plan, run or supervised by government authorities. Real health-care reform need not automatically translate into federal programming."
- Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo, N.D., cited the danger of thinking "the national government is the sole instrument of the common good."
The most thorough critique, however, comes in a joint pastoral letter from Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Kansas City, Kan., diocese and Bishop Robert Finn of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese in Missouri. [My father was born in that diocese!]
Posted online Tuesday, the letter says: "The right of every individual to access health care does not necessarily suppose an obligation on the part of the government to provide it ... The teaching of the universal church has never been to suggest a government socialization of medical services."
Bump.
Thanks, I should have scrolled down. (Saving this thread too.