Andrew Sullivan Responds

Last time Andrew Sullivan took note of something I wrote, he implied I was anti-Semitic for writing a favorable obit for RJ Rushdoony. Today, he noted my little piece on health care, published on the First Things web site, on his Daily Dish. I am supposed to have concluded that “the Christian injunction to heal and care for the sick is now to be abandoned.”

Not precisely what I said, of course. What I did say is that the current health care system is driven by assumptions about suffering, pain, health, life, and death that are not neutral but quite precisely secular and humanist. Since those assumptions are part of the reason for the current crisis of health care, if we really want health care reform, real reform, we might want to re-examine the assumptions that got us into trouble in the first place.