Health care and the Good Samaritan

The current debate regarding health care reform is highly partisan with strong emotion on both sides.

Our health care delivery system is flawed and inefficient. Physicians make choices based primarily on individual training rather than evidence based criteria.

Although much attention is paid to consensus guidelines, the vast majority of decisions made by individual physicians are due to idiosyncratic factors.

Physicians function within a health care delivery system that is driven by the demands of payers. These demands lead to flawed business decisions by the corporate managers running insurance companies, hospitals, medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

American ideas about health care are individualistic, impatient, with little incentive to utilize resources appropriately. We deny and procrastinate and we engage in dangerous behaviors and unhealthy lifestyles. If our health outcomes are not as we expect, we often use the legal system to seek compensation.

A key to healing is the strength of the therapeutic relationship. Belief is a powerful healing force. Our health care system does not encourage or facilitate healing relationships between physician and patient.

Health care systems, in the final analysis, are made up of people....people with strengths and talents as well as human flaws of arrogance, greed, and a desire for power, attention and control. True health reform should empower and nurture our healing qualities of love and forgiveness.

The parable of the Good Samaritan has much to say about spiritual obligations in health care. Jesus used the example of the despised Samaritan to drive home the message....namely, that we find spiritual life in the extent of our caring for those people who are not like us.

The Samaritan takes the injured man to a healer. He then pays for the cost of the care and returns later to check on his progress.

Good Samaritan=Good Insurance plan.

The ethical principle of beneficence combined with a spiritual journey of sacrifice has been the basis of transformative healing from Albert Schweitzer to Mother Teresa to Doctors Without Borders to free clinics in Appalachia.

In providing agape care for another human being, one finds an inner place of healing and spirit...the heart, the soul, the Source.
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It is no surprise that there are many hospitals named after the Good Samaritan. This ancient parable is the best kind of "strategic plan" for healing our wounded collective selves while also improving the healthcare system.

As we engage in this often bitter national discussion about health care reform, let's try to remember that our own soul is dependent on the privilege of caring for another person. Maybe we can truly find an answer if we treat our neighbor as lovingly as the Good Samaritan treated his neighbor so many years ago. Keeping this example of spiritual service in our minds and in the midst of our decisions will positively influence the outcome of this great national debate.

Peace and love
tony