Sister Carol Keehan

By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — The nation’s current economic crisis must not deter efforts to achieve health care coverage for the 47 million uninsured Americans, the president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association told a New York audience Oct. 20.

Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity, delivered the third annual lecture in Catholic health care ethics at St. Catherine of Siena Church in New York.
“We can continue to do bailouts, bridge loans, interest cuts and other prop-ups, but we will not have a renewed and vibrant economy without enacting health reform that covers everyone with a reasonable, basic package,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter whether your priority is the stock market or the poor or anywhere in between,” Sister Carol added. “We need effective and efficient health reform to help all of us.”

The Catholic leader said it is “utterly incompatible with our pro-life agenda” that 9 million U.S. children are among the uninsured. “What child doesn’t deserve health care?” she asked. “What could possibly justify not giving a child health care?”

Sister Carol said Americans “have bought into so many misconceptions that have crippled our will and creativity for solving” the health care crisis. Among these, she cited mistaken beliefs that:

• The U.S. has the best health care in the world, when its system lags behind that of many less affluent countries.

• Government-run health care would “destroy American life as we know it,” when the Medicare program for U.S. seniors is “the most popular and generous health plan” in the U.S., with administrative costs half that of commercially run health plans.

• People lack health care because they are too lazy to work, when more than 80 percent of the uninsured live in households where someone is working one or two jobs.

She cited a number of recent studies showing that only 7 percent of Americans “feel financially prepared for their future health needs” and that a quarter of cancer patients deplete all or most of their savings to pay for their care.

“If it is not enough that this system is inflicting so much pain and stress on individuals and families, think of what it is doing to our American economy,” Sister Carol said, decrying a “serious competitive disadvantage for U.S. businesses” that sometimes choose to outsource jobs rather than pay rising health care costs for their employees.

“Many expressed grave concerns that we will outsource every job that can be outsourced and be left with largely a service economy,” she said.

“We must, for the financial future of the country as a whole, as well as individuals, reverse this trend.”

Efforts to solve the problem of the uninsured have already brought together “coalitions of some of the strangest bedfellows we could imagine,” including unions and chambers of commerce and health care providers and insurers, Sister Carol said.

“We must not accept half-solutions and we cannot afford to fail in this,” she said.
“Not only for the poor, the disadvantaged, the middle class, but for the nation as a whole and for the economic future of this nation.

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