Politics USA: Economy: Christian healthcare co-op?, not as advocated in refWrite

Transcipt from CNN Newsroom (Aug17,2k9). Along with the teaser at the top of the transcript, I include a passage quoted from CNN's text:

Obama Administration Softens on Public Option; Health Insurance Co-Ops; Gays Tortured, Killed in Iraq; Blue Dog Democrat Town Hall; Christian Health Care Co-op; Your Electric Bill; Tracking Three Storms Simultaneously; Health Care For All?

HARRIS: Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter stepped back into the fray over health reform today. The senator held a town hall meeting earlier in Philadelphia. Specter says the anger he's seen at some of the meetings is directed at partisan bickering and he's not a part of that. After the meeting, Specter weighed in on the public insurance option. He supports it but says it's not the only option.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER, (D) PENNSYLVANIA: I have favored a public option. I believe that the president has to make the evaluation as a matter of leadership as to what the administration wants to do. But there is an alternative to the so-called public option by having co- ops. And I think these matters are subject to exploration. But I would not make a determination that the success of health care reform legislation turns on any one item.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARRIS: Co-ops. You heard the senator mention co-ops. Health insurance co-ops. We keep hearing them mentioned as a possible alternative to a public insurance option, but how do they work? CNN's Kate Bolduan explains how a Christian health care co-op is meeting one group's insurance needs.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: As the health care debate rages on in Washington, we decided to get outside the beltway. We're heading to Philadelphia to take a look at one alternative people are turning to.

BOLDUAN (voice-over): It's called bill sharing. In this case, a large group of Christians pool their money to cover each other's medical costs. It's not conventional insurance and it's not regulated. Christian activist Shane Claiborne is a member of one, Ohio-based Christian Healthcare Ministries.

SHANE CLAIBORNE, CHRISTIAN CO-OP MEMBER: One of the things I like about it is it's relational and I can see exactly where my money's going.

BOLDUAN: ... Claiborne ... moved in to this rough Philadelphia neighborhood to help clean it up, like this former drug den he took us to.

CLAIBORNE: We talk a lot about practicing resurrection. So, for us, this is a part of it. We bring abandoned spaces to life and try to make thing beautiful.

BOLDUAN: It is rough work. Claiborne was jumped a few years ago, landed in the hospital with a concussion and broken jaw. That's when his health care stepped in.

CLAIBORNE: You get this bill for $10,000 or $12,000 and then we ended up paying like $6,000 of it. And because I had, you know, thousands and thousands of people carrying that bill with me, I was able to just write -- you know, we just wrote a check for it.

BOLDUAN: The ministry negotiated directly with his doctors to lower the bill. Executive Director Howard Russell says the core of their success is the 20,000 members who have met conditions that include not smoking and being a practicing Christian.

HOWARD RUSSELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHRISTIAN HEALTHCARE MINISTRIES: If everybody in America had the provisions that our members have, there wouldn't be a health care crisis.

BOLDUAN (on camera): It's like a health care cooperative. A community-based, non-profit organization owned by its members. A group that uses its strength in numbers to negotiate competitive rates with health care providers. And that's an idea gaining traction on Capitol Hill.

BOLDUAN (voice-over): Robert Burns, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania, says the key to co-ops is size, 20,000 to 50,000 enrollees minimum needed.

A more reformational Christian approach, as I'd envision it, woud welcome non-Christians as members for insurance purposes, as long as they covenant to go with the leadership and policies voted by the confessing membership that devotes time and relationality as in the case of FaithLife in Canada (which is now open to members of a church in the Canadian Council of Churches and/or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada), as well as approving outside charities to which a small percentage of returns on a given coop's investments woud be directed.

I can't envision a self-titled healthcare coop that woud pay for abortions, and yet carry the name "Christ" or "Christian" (but there are a scattering of Christian hospitals that do perform abortions}. But I can evision, while an actuarial difference (reflected discriminately in the difference in premiums to be paid by a family of four with no smokers, and a family of four with two smokers, for instance), I woud not be so moralistic as to rule out coverage for smokers or drinkers (Liberty insurances when it was owned by the DeMoss family, operating out of Valley Forge, enticed oldsters and others to promise to abstain from alcoholic beverages).

It seems the question of ethos and healthcare insurance morals, medical moral rules that connect with a demographic segment and come to be determinative for a particular medical healthcare insurance-group as it forms around an original declaration of values to guide its policies, and then perdures (that may differ from coop to coop for healthcare insurance): the way mores appear in the various coops woud have to be faced separately by each Christian healthcare coop in the kind of healthcare policies each markets as its distinctive but competitive (in ideas and of course in dollars that result in a set of prices for premium charged to those who buy that coop's policies).

I'm not disdaining what these bill-sharers are doing, outside the sphere of govt regulation. Yet, the thawt sneaks into my mind that it all sounds like a heavily disguised pyramid scheme to me. Or, some pre-known religious-communal groupage who substitute a bill-sharing ethos for what seems to be more normative today when h+ly differentiated regulated insurance offerings where premiums are paid, say monthly. In the Christian Healthcare Co-Op I woud envision, there woud be no problem with atheists who bawt their policies. To vote in a CHC Co-op's policy-orientations (including moral questions) or staffing decisions, a closer connection than that of policyholder, people who woud become full members and participate in the articulation of the medical-insurance ethos and the ethics that thinks theoretically and modal-scientifically. Like the reformational ethics of profession brawt to the fore by the new wave of Reformational professors at public institutions in the Netherlands.

For instance Maarten Verkerk, who was introduced to refWrite readers already. ; Jan van der Stoep, Ede who "studied biology at Wageningen University and Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2005 he obtained his doctorate on "Pierre Bourdieu and the political philosophy of multiculturalism "(Kampen: Kok publishers); and Henk Jochemsen, who has considerable expertize that coud conceivably be focussed as well on an American nationwide Christian Healthcare Co-Operative Insurance Company that coud afford to get the best possible reformational advice worldwide. I woud have two recommendees:

Henk Jochemsen

Dr. Henk Jochemsen (1952) studied Molecular Biology at the Agricultural University in Wageningen. The work for his PhD thesis concerned a subject in pre-clinical cancer research at the State University in Leiden (1979). From 1980-1986 he and his family pioneered in studentwork in Paragu­ay with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In addition to the student work dr. Jochemsen held the chair in Molecular Biology at the National University in Asunción for five years, and taught Christian Ethics at a Bible College in Asunción for two years.

After his return to the Netherlands (1986) he got involved in the Prof.dr. G.A. Linde­boom Institute, a private centre for medical ethics that was being founded at that time. Since 1987 he is the director of this Institute. In this capacity he has written and (co)edited articles, reports and books, mainly in Dutch, but also in English, German and Spanish. He is a member of the ethics commission of the Federation of Associations of Patients with Congenital Diseases, and advisor of a few other organisations in health care in the Nether­lands . As an ethicist he was involved in the national debate on predictive genetics in the mid nineties and in the debate on cloning in the late nineties and he has been consulted on medical ethical matters both nationally and internationally.

Since the beginning of 1996 he is coordinating the research at another private ethical institute, the Institute for Culture Ethics, at Amers­foort , that is involved in research on ICT (in education and the media), sustainable development and business ethics.

Since January 1, 1998 he holds the Lindeboom chair for medical ethics at the Free University in Amsterdam .

Since September 1, 2002 he is part time lector/professor in the ethics of care at the Ede Christian University for higher professional education.

Currently he is an Advisory Board member of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (Trinity International Universi­ty , Bannockburn, IL ) and a member of the European Editorial Board of the journal'Ethics and Medicine'.

Even more recently Jochemsen was appointed to the special chair for Reformational philosophy, at Wageningen University.

My other recommendee for any broadly-based Christian Healthcare Co-operative Company6 is former Sen William Frist, for his leadership ability and for his global medical horizon. But ... later ...

-- Politicarp


Some publications of Prof Henk Jochemsen

H Jochemsen.
Gevaarlijke genen ?? Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar vanwege de Stichting Prof.dr. G.A. Lindeboom Instituut opde bij de faculteit der geneeskunde van de Vrije Universiteit gevestigde bijzondere leerstoel voor medische ethiek [Inaugural Address upon the launch of the office of reformational professor of the Lindeboom Institute's Foundation in consortium with VU's special professorship in medical ethics. Jun3,1998. (Amsterdam: VU publications, 1998.)


H. Jochemsen.
Bezinning op beelden in biotech en ICT. In: K. Boersema, J. van der Stoep, M. Verkerk, A. Vlot (red.). Aan Babels stromen. Bevrijdend perspectief op ethiek en techniek .
Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn 2002: 77-90.


H Jochemsen.
Hoe humaan is het humaan genoom project ?
Radix 26 (2000) nr. 3, p.137-158.


H Jochemsen.
Medical genetics: its presuppositions, possibilities and problems.
In: C. Romano, G. Grassani (red.). Bioetica. Turin:UTET 1995:291-308.


H Jochemsen.
The fallacy of reducing people to genetics, in: JF Kilner et al. (ed). Genetic ethics: do the ends justify the genes?
Grand Rapids : Eerdmans/Paternoster Press 1997.


H Jochemsen.
Is cloning compatible with human rights and human dignity? In: Wagner T, Carbone L. Fifty years after the declaration. The United Nations' record on human rights. (New York : University of America Press 2001, p.33-43.


H. Jochemsen (ed.) (with contributions of E Garcia, A Meir, R Harris and H Jochemsen).
Human stem cells: source of hope and controversy. A study of the ethics of stem cell research and the patenting of related inventions
Ede/Jerusalem: Prof.dr. G.A. Lindeboom Institute/ Business ethics center of Jerusalem , 2003.


H Jochemsen.
Biotech and public policy - the European debate. In: Charles Colson, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (eds). Human dignity in the biotech century (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press 2004: 200-220.)