NORMAN, Okla. (ABP) — Since the church has abdicated its responsibility for providing health care in America, Christians should help and not hinder the government as it seeks solutions to the nation's medical crisis, a physician with experience in public health told participants at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Oklahoma.
"We're talking about a system that is not working," Michael Pontious said during a seminar on health care and the local church.
Pontious, a member of CrossRoads Church in Enid, Okla., is director of family practice residency for the University of Oklahoma/Garfield Country Medical Society Rural Program and is editor of the Journal of the Oklahoma State Medical Association. He stressed his opinions are his own and not those of the university, the medical association or his church.
Major Jemison (left) senior pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, listens to a presentation alongside Jimmy Allen, an organizer of last year's New Baptist Covenant national meeting in Atlanta.
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Earlier in the seminar, a participant said the U.S. health-care system should be called a "sick care non-system."
Pontious affirmed that assessment, adding, "I'm so sick and tired of trying to figure out how to help people get taken care of."
He illustrated with two recent experiences.
First, a woman who was 20 weeks pregnant with a kidney infection took a prescription order to a pharmacy on a Friday. She does not speak English well and could not advocate for herself when the pharmacist said her insurance wouldn't cover the cost of the medicine — a misunderstanding and overstatement of the facts.
On Monday, she had to be admitted to the hospital "in a life-and-death situation," simply because she could not get her $4 prescription filled. So, she could have died, and the medical costs soared.
When Pontious called the insurance company to complain, the person on the end of the line responded, "Dr. Pontious, that's the rules."
Second, a woman was having excessive menstruation, losing a significant amount of blood and needed surgery after medications had failed to help. But she could not afford hospitalization.
When Pontious asked her doctor to help her get in the hospital, she replied, "I'd love to do this, but I work for a corporation."
"We've got a system that's broken," Pontious said.
Historically, churches and Christian organizations provided much of the infrastructure for American health care, he noted. But more recently, "we have abdicated our responsibility for a good part of the care in this country" to the government.
"Because we have abdicated, it's our responsibility to hold our government accountable for trying to fix this problem," he added. "When government comes up with a plan, it's immoral, it's two-faced to oppose doing the right thing."
Americans — led by Christians — need to affirm the right to affordable health care, Pontious stressed.
"We need a system in this country that allows access to health care, no matter what your station in life is," he said. "We need a system that allows choice … and that cannot allow a cotton-pickin' insurance company to deny access to reasonable care."
Opponents of health-care reform are manipulating people with fear, Pontious charged. "There are lots of mistruths out there, and where do they go?" he said. "To your fear. They manipulate you with your fear."
But America should have the capacity to improve its health-care system without realizing those fears, he insisted.
"A publicly available option is the only way to keep the insurance companies honest," he said. "Americans don't have the stomach for a Canadian or an English system (of socialized medicine). Individually, we don't want restrictions. But a public system is the only way to keep the business side of insurance honest.… Every other modern society has figured this out."
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Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.