Solving the Health Care Crisis

For the American experiment to work, George Washington said it needed a foundation set in religion and morality. Without these indispensable supports, he warned, it was destined to fail.

Other founders expressed similar sentiments. Washington’s successor as president, John Adams, said that for the principles of freedom to securely stand, it would rest on religion and morality alone. Even the religiously challenged Thomas Jefferson believed America’s liberties were firmly based in the reality that they came from God.

President James Madison summed it up best: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not on the power of government [but] upon the capacity of each and every one of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

Governing ourselves according to the Ten Commandments.

Listening to conservative pundits, one would think America has staked its future on the capacity of each and every voter to punish Democrats this November so that Republicans might quickly repeal President Obama’s health care bill.

The Republican Party now senses opportunity! Its base is energized! Pledge time, money and your vote to roll back health care reform, the party urges.

“There is no downside for Republicans,” their National Committee chairman candidly remarked in response to the new legislation.

“We’re going to try to repeal this,” Sen. John McCain promised. “We are going to have a very spirited campaign coming up between now and November. And there will be a heavy price to pay for it” (emphasis mine throughout).

Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, told Newsmax he thinks the whole election will be about repealing universal health care. Newsmax believes Republicans are already moving “beyond the legislative arena to position themselves for the upcoming elections” (March 24).

Just what the doctor ordered! A trillion-dollar health care package followed by billions more to fund a political power struggle in Washington.

Amid all the problems suffocating life out of the once-mighty American superpower—now this.

What must God think of America’s newest political debate? Never mind governing ourselves according to the Ten Commandments. Our survival as a nation now depends on who pays for your next mri.

This debate, ironically, comes at a time when most Americans have cashed in what little coverage they once had for their overall spiritual health. Our most serious crisis, Selwyn Duke wrote at American Thinker, is lack of health care—“the moral variety.” Given our spiritual decay, Duke correctly noted, “socialized medicine was inevitable” (March 24).

Universal health care is not the problem. It’s spiritual sickness that’s killing us. This is the brutal truth most people will not accept—that the cause of our ever increasing, insoluble problems is not one political party, religious bloc or ethnic group. It’s not even universal health care—or lack thereof.

It’s universal disobedience to God’s spiritual laws. And widespread evil, as we have explained so many times before, causes national sickness that eventually results in death.

Read God’s blunt assessment of our overall spiritual health in Isaiah 1:5-6. He likens our society to a disease-ridden body with open flesh wounds and putrefying sores! The entire bodyis sick, Isaiah said.

The Prophet Jeremiah identified the root cause of this terminal illness as being the human heart—or mind. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). As we explain in our booklet about Jeremiah’s prophecy, desperately wicked actually means “incurably sick” or “sick unto death.” This is why Jesus said we need a “physician”—because the human mind must be healed of its mortal wounds: self-love and vanity, lustful obsessions, greedy gain, competition and strife.

Why would we ever put our trust in the incurably sick mind of man? If 6,000 years of human rule, under the sway of Satan, have proven anything, it is that man is utterly incapable of directing his own steps without God’s lead (Jeremiah 10:23-24).

This is why the Founding Fathers believed America’s success as a nation depended entirely on the God-fearing morality of its people. They knew that unless religion and morality restricted evil, our democratic “freedoms” would cause sickness and lead to death.

Today, the nation those men founded, under God, is lying prostrate on its spiritual deathbed, gasping for its last breath. And the worst part of it is, we don’t even know we’re terminally sick—and that we desperately need intervention from a divine Healer.

This present evil world—even now—is gasping for its last breath before experiencing a sure death. As Herbert W. Armstrong wrote back in March 1982, “You live today in a time different—utterly different—from any past time on Earth! You are destined, as no past generation has been, to live in two worlds! Yes, this world is dying—that’s the real meaning of world chaos today—but there will be a resurrection” (Good News).

With God’s Word as your guide, you can make sense of this chaotic world. You can alter your course now and turn to God in repentance and love—choosing the way of real abundant living. And you can take heart in the fact that a better world is coming.

Bible prophecy informs us that we are very near to the resurrection of God’s world from out of the scorched surface of this present evil world. Very soon now, rising from the ashes of that ruinous, death-filled wasteland, will be an eternally living, messianic King, who, with the help and support of His saints, will establish a 1,000-year utopian rule on Earth!