Does no one have an answer to these questions? Did church charity handle this problem adequately in the past? Are any religious organizations offering to take on this burden now?
My grandmother worked in a cancer ward for the Catholic Church for years. She was lay, most of the nurses were nuns. Nuns work for nothing. They require almost nothing. They sleep in cells or dorms attached to the hospital, wear habits provided by the convent, and live off charity. In this case, the hospital provided dorms, they were fed and clothed through donations.
Last I checked, there were not lines of young women entering the convent to serve.
When my grandmother started - there were lots of nuns. There was also very little that could be done for cancer. It was mostly palliative end of life care - some surgery recovery. When she retired, she retired because they closed the ward in the 1970s. Charity could no longer support the need for expensive chemotherapy drugs (my brother in law’s are $6k a session, my sister’s were similarly priced), even if they had the nuns and lay people willing to work for nothing or little.
There are successful charitable health care organizations - Planned Parenthood sort of stands out in meeting the basic health care needs of women (pap smears, birth control, and your basic physical). But when you get beyond “wellness care” - health care usually becomes a burden on whomever is paying the bill. Chronic illnesses, cancer, major surgery - few can be fixed by the volunteer efforts of doctors and nurses alone.
Could “let the poor die quietly, out of sight and out of mind” be what some conservatives mean when they say that religious charities can handle the problem?
Even if they did, health care costs in the past were a fraction of what they are today, so the math alone makes it unlikely that your local church could foot the bill now. Maybe Paul wants to roll back actual medical care for the poor to what we had 100 or 200 years ago? Seems consistent with the rest of his platform.
edited to add:
Ha, just saw this, great minds…
Maybe the preacherman can just lay hands on the people and make them well again.
That’s what Jesus did.
The “Mother Theresa Insurance Program?”
There is a lot to be said for comforting the sick and dying. And there is something to be said for not pouring money into hopeless cases (Teri Schiavo). But weren’t we just up in arms over “death panels?”
The odd thing about all of this is that so many of the conservatives ARE poor.