Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Health Care Reform Begins at Home
Health Care Reform Begins at Home
Apr 26, 2025 1:00 AM

This is the Acton Commentary for January 12.

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” wrote French observer Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. “If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.” Could this organizing spirit hold the potential to transform the nation’s health care?

With the House in Republican hands, it appears that the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be at least in part modified. Undoing the most ill-considered pieces of the bill would be good, but the need for reform remains. Americans’ dissatisfaction with the existing system gave impetus to change in the first place; going back to the status quo ante is not advisable.

As is often the case, a crucial aspect of health policy reform is recognition that government policy, no matter how brilliant, cannot solve all of our problems. For example, one vital step on the path toward a healthier America is reigniting a sense of personal responsibility for health-affecting decisions. Policymakers can promote but not ensure progress toward this goal. The recent successes of some small town initiatives demonstrate how voluntary associations can play an important role.

Nevada City, Calif., resident Carole Carson created the Nevada County Meltdown to encourage and assist people in munity who wished to lose weight. Working from her own experience of the necessity of support from family and friends, Carson and fellow organizer Mike Carville set up a contest where peted to shed pounds.

The munity backed the effort. Health professionals offered services such as blood pressure checks. Restaurants implemented low-calorie menus. Groups organized walks and other fitness activities. Healthy living became mon goal, its benefits extending beyond physical wellbeing. “The most important thing about it,” observed one participant, “was that it was such a munity thing.”

Other towns that imitated Nevada City’s program achieved similarly edifying results. In Fossil, Ore., some weight loss contestants’ health improved so dramatically that they were able to avoid pending orthopedic surgery and discontinue insulin shots for diabetes.

The medical costs of obesity amounted to $147 billion in 2008, according to one study. Chronic illnesses such as diabetes consume 75 percent of the more than $2 trillion that Americans spend on health care. Many of these diseases, writes Dr. Donald Condit in A Prescription for Health Care Reform, are “influenced by modifiable risk factors.” Lifestyle changes that prevent or reverse such conditions are critical to reining in health care spending, not to mention improving the quality of life for those who are affected. The trick is motivating people to change.

Some government programs might help, but the more effective approach is the one taken by munities, because it is based on a realistic understanding of human nature. “We’re social animals,” Carson says. “We have a profound impact on each other—for good or ill.”

This impact is most profound when it does not occur pulsion of one sort or another (as government programs usually do) but when it employs a subtler array of social influences. When family members, friends, co-workers, munity leaders promote a cause or, better yet, demonstrate in their own lives the benefits of living a certain way, we are encouraged and potentially persuaded to emulate their actions. When we pelled to do something, our natural reaction is to seek ways to circumvent requirements. When we are persuaded, we view the decision, the effort—and the plishment—as our own.

The experience of one man in the town of Albert Lea, Minn., confirms the range of benefits possible when munity unifies around the mission of health. After he joined a neighborhood walking team, he pulled out of depression, lost weight, and went off his diabetes medication. “It wasn’t just the walking,” a town official says. “It was the caring.”

This kind of health care reform can’t be orchestrated by policy experts in Washington. Yet it would go a long way toward solving the systemic problems that have proved so nettlesome to lawmakers, whose search for solutions usually overlooks the potential inherent in every village and neighborhood in America.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved