Holding Medical Aid Hostage: Join a Religion or Die of Cancer

Last month, Republican state senator Mark Green of Tennessee explained his opposition to expanding Medicaid as follows:

[E]very person who came to Christ came to Christ with a physical need .… People go to God because of a physical need and they walk away with a spiritual need met. That’s the story of the Gospels. And so government has stepped in, at least in this country, and done all the work for the church. And so the person who’s in need — they look to the government for the answer. Not God. And I think, in that way, government has done an injustice that’s even bigger than just the entitlement — creation of an entitlement welfare state. I think it’s even bigger .… I think it interrupts the opportunity for people to come to a saving knowledge of who God is.

I have a question for Green: is the church ready to pay its parishioners medical bills? Because let’s be real, we’re not just talking about people who might come to the church if they had a medical need (more about that in a moment), we’re also talking about people who are already in the church who may have a medical need. Does Green’s church pay its parishioners’ medical bills?

How exactly is this supposed to work? If you can’t afford health insurance, are you supposed to walk into a church and tell them that and they’ll pay for it for you? Presumably, though, Green is referring not to inability to afford insurance but to inability to pay for a specific medical need.

Let’s say someone just discovered a lump in their breast and they’re worried it could be breast cancer, but they don’t have money to go to a doctor. How does this work? Do they walk into a church and say “hey, would you pay for me to go to the doctor to get this lump in my breast checked out?” I’m tempted to try that, perhaps at Green’s church, and record the results.

Belonging to a church does come with benefits, but being part of a church is a process. You can’t just walk into a church and access the benefits longtime, well loved members receive. Having access to the resources a church offers—say, having someone organize a meal train when you’re recovering from a surgery—frequently depends on your having built relationships there.

Even there, there are limitations. Let’s say that our fictional woman who has discovered a lump in her breast is already part of a church. She might be able to go to a few friends and ask for money to go to the doctor to have her lump checked for cancer. In fact, if she’s particularly well loved, the pastor might pass the plate for her during service. But what next? What if it is cancer?

Most churches—particularly small churches—do not have the ability to pay for their members’ longterm, severe medical needs. Churches can pass a plate for smaller needs—if a well-loved parishioner is affected—but medical costs have ballooned such that passing the plate won’t suffice.

So, what then? What if Sister Cindy has breast cancer and her church can’t help her with the full cost? Should she leave her church and go looking for a larger church that can? No good—she’d have to take the time to build relationships there all over from scratch, while her cancer grows.

Sure, there’s this church in Texas that payed off $10,000,000 worth of local families’ medical debt. That church also spends $30,000 a month advertising its Sunday services, so we’re back to my question about Sister Cindy switching churches. Besides, that was medical debt already accrued—the Medicaid expansion promises to cover expenses on the front end.

Some of you may be shaking your heads over this long discussion of whether churches can replace the services provided by the Medicaid expansion. Even if churches could provide everything that the Medicaid expansion does, after all, why should we rely on a system that forces individuals to join a religion if they want to survive cancer? For Green, the cancer is what gets a person in the door so that they can learn the “saving knowledge of who God is.”

The only reason I’m actually exploring how Green’s system would work is because his promises are also hollow. Churches are communities and as such can offer some cost sharing, but I’m not aware of any church that covers its parishioners’ medical expenses as a matter of course, as Green’s claims would suggest: Join a church, and your medical needs will be met, no need for Medicaid.

Um. No.

Government is simply an extension of humans’ penchant for building communities. Green’s objection to government-funded medical aid in the form of Medicaid appears to be that this aid does not come with religious strings attached. That is not a reasonable objection. “I don’t like that this program helps people without making them join my religion first” is a terrible argument.

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