What if I don’t believe in the modern medicine (as I don’t) ? Why should I be forced to buy their ‘service’ if I’m totally against it. I don’t ever intend to go to any doctor because I don’t think they can help. They are a bunch charlatans and frauds in white coats. Why was this not ever an issue for the Catholic bishops ? This is just a legalized robbery designed to steal money from people like me who would otherwise never pay them. I thought stealing was a mortal sin.
I don’t agree with your premise about doctors being charlatans.
Taxation, in of itself, is not unjust.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says:
379. Jesus refuses the oppressive and despotic power wielded by the rulers of the nations (cf.* Mk 10:42) and rejects their pretension in having themselves called benefactors* (cf.* Lk* 22:25), but he does not directly oppose the authorities of his time. In his pronouncement on the paying of taxes to Caesar (cf.* Mk* 12:13-17;* Mt* 22:15-22;* Lk* 20:20-26), he affirms that we must give to God what is God’s, implicitly condemning every attempt at making temporal power divine or absolute: God alone can demand everything from man. **At the same time, temporal power has the right to its due: Jesus does not consider it unjust to pay taxes to Caesar. **
At the same time, we are warned about creating a dependence:
In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of State, the so-called “Welfare State”. This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the “Social Assistance State”. Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again *the principle of subsidiarity *must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
**By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. **In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbours to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not simply material but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need.
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 48
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.
Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 79
Bottom line is that you are not all wet about your thought that it is immoral for the State to be involved in this kind of thing. My thought is that the role of the State should be to guarantee access to health care: that is that nobody should be prohibited from receiving the health care that he or she desires. But I also think that the provision and payment for that health care should be done on a more distributed basis than having a centralized State basis (whether it is directly administered by the State or administered via various private entities at the direction of the State).
But within various parameters that have been laid out in the Social Magesterium, there is room for lots of prudential judgment.
While I don’t see anything in the Magesterium defining that the State cannot force you to do something; I think in this case, it is a direct violation of the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution. But that is a legal issue, not a moral one.
