I don’t know that carrying insurance specifically is part of your parental obligation, but paying for their medical care in the most prudential way certainly is. If you can self-insure great, but that does not make it immoral for families who need it to accept it from their employer or pay for part of it, even if the plan happens to cover, for others, procedures that are questionable. If you extend them moral reasoning to this extent you should also be prepared to stay out of pharmacies that sell contraceptives, hospitals that perform such procedures and the like, nearly impossible to do these days.
If you have the resources to pay for any amount of medical care your family might ever need then go ahead and don’t buy the insurance available to you. Or alternately, if you will only accept the amount of care you can pay for regardless of the consequences of doing so, then go ahead and decline the insurance coverage. Are you aware that a diagnosis of leukemia in a child can cost **hundreds of thousands **of dollars for treatment? Treatment for a severe burn can easily reach half a million. Are you willing to cut off treatment when you reach your limit?
yes and this fact about what Ins Company’s cover;(which in good conscience, we should never accept for ourselves) is what many opponents of government health care programs use as a wedge in their fight against basic care for the very needy. The government has worked more to get rid of using our funds for abortion than the insurance companys have,in my opinion. Peace, Carlan
I think we have a couple huge problems in our society:I personally believe that if more people took this approach to health care the overall cost would come down.Wow, am I the only one who’s ever asked or been concerned about this issue?
In the three years our family has been without health insurance (except my dh who had it at a reasonable cost through his employer), neither I nor my children ever went to a doctor. There were many occasions when I suppose the “typical” family would have gone off to the doctor for what we treated at home.
- a sense of entitlement to health care beyond basic needs: the over-testing, over-treating and over-prescribing is the result of this demand
- medical expenses due to failure to care for one’s self: obesity, addictions, recklessness–all the the illnesses that result from these
- people think they should live forever: maybe chemotherapy isn’t the necessity we seem to think it is
Last April one of my son’s broke his arm. It was very interesting being a “self-pay” patient, and I learned just a little bit to identify with the poor in this country–one bonus of having no insurance right there.
Then he was mis-treated by the orthopaedist and ended up needing surgery. We do have thousands of dollars in medical bills to pay and are seeking a judgment against this doctor to recover the costs. I think that had we had insurance I wouldn’t have been so concerned to fight for justice against this doctor. But I think it is another way our family has been called to address the injustice, to bring about a change in that practice with a hope that others will not be harmed as my son has.
We have accepted no public monies so your pocketbooks are safe from us. I have negotiated with every doctor and hospital we have been at to pay the amount they would claim from insurance (about 40% of what they bill) and arranged payments for what we could not pay right away. If we don’t recover any of the money from the orthopaedist, we will be paying for several years.
When this issue came up about finding abortion coverage on our new health insurance I wondered if God might be calling us to further sacrifice, to forgo insurance and trust him to give us what we need. I wondered if we’re being called to say, “This is wrong and we will not be party to it in any way.”
Maybe I am just being foolish. I don’t know. That’s why I posed my question here.
Maybe you are! Did you hear that prudence is a cardinal virtue? You are supposed to trust in God but not to test him. Did you hear that you have free will and that you can refuse services that you consider immoral? As Catholics we are supposed to be obedient but obedience in the Church also implies use of reason. I think that you should talk to a spiritual adviser, because it seems to me that you are threading with scrupulosity. I understand your intention of not doing evil; however, there is not way to avoid indirect collaboration in evil at all times. Evil does exist because God allows for it, just remember that there is always a greater good coming out of every evil.Wow, am I the only one who’s ever asked or been concerned about this issue?
In the three years our family has been without health insurance (except my dh who had it at a reasonable cost through his employer), neither I nor my children ever went to a doctor. There were many occasions when I suppose the “typical” family would have gone off to the doctor for what we treated at home.
- a sense of entitlement to health care beyond basic needs: the over-testing, over-treating and over-prescribing is the result of this demand
- medical expenses due to failure to care for one’s self: obesity, addictions, recklessness–all the the illnesses that result from these
- people think they should live forever: maybe chemotherapy isn’t the necessity we seem to think it is
Last April one of my son’s broke his arm. It was very interesting being a “self-pay” patient, and I learned just a little bit to identify with the poor in this country–one bonus of having no insurance right there.
Then he was mis-treated by the orthopaedist and ended up needing surgery. We do have thousands of dollars in medical bills to pay and are seeking a judgment against this doctor to recover the costs. I think that had we had insurance I wouldn’t have been so concerned to fight for justice against this doctor. But I think it is another way our family has been called to address the injustice, to bring about a change in that practice with a hope that others will not be harmed as my son has.
We have accepted no public monies so your pocketbooks are safe from us. I have negotiated with every doctor and hospital we have been at to pay the amount they would claim from insurance (about 40% of what they bill) and arranged payments for what we could not pay right away. If we don’t recover any of the money from the orthopaedist, we will be paying for several years.
When this issue came up about finding abortion coverage on our new health insurance I wondered if God might be calling us to further sacrifice, to forgo insurance and trust him to give us what we need. I wondered if we’re being called to say, “This is wrong and we will not be party to it in any way.”
Maybe I am just being foolish. I don’t know. That’s why I posed my question here.
That’s good. Then you can sue for the morality of obtaining justice rather than money. Or if it requires money be obtained to insure justice you can donate it to a hospital to pay for indigent care right?
