Ambulance bills subsidize ambulance chasers

I linked last Saturday to John Mackey's piece on eight free-market health-care reforms that would actually work and not balloon the deficit. One of the necessary steps he laid out was “Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.” This morning, Sarah Palin elaborated on that point in a note she posted on her Facebook page:

President Obama’s health care “reform” plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind—change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.

We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care.

As Governor of Alaska, I learned a little bit about being a target for frivolous suits and complaints (Please, do I really need to footnote that?). I went my whole life without needing a lawyer on speed-dial, but all that changes when you become a target for opportunists and people with no scruples. Our nation’s health care providers have been the targets of similar opportunists for years, and they too have found themselves subjected to false, frivolous, and baseless claims. To quote a former president, “I feel your pain.”

So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

Dr. Stuart Weinstein, with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, recently explained the problem:

The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.

Access is affected as physicians move their practices to states with lower liability rates and change their practice patterns to reduce or eliminate high-risk services. When one considers that half of all neurosurgeons—as well as one third of all orthopedic surgeons, one third of all emergency physicians, and one third of all trauma surgeons—are sued each year, is it any wonder that 70 percent of emergency departments are at risk because they lack available on-call specialist coverage? [2]

Dr. Weinstein makes good points, points completely ignored by President Obama. Dr. Weinstein details the costs that our out-of-control tort system are causing the health care industry and notes research that “found that liability reforms could reduce defensive medicine practices, leading to a 5 percent to 9 percent reduction in medical expenditures without any effect on mortality or medical complications.” Dr. Weinstein writes:

If the Kessler and McClellan estimates were applied to total U.S. healthcare spending in 2005, the defensive medicine costs would total between $100 billion and $178 billion per year. Add to this the cost of defending malpractice cases, paying compensation, and covering additional administrative costs (a total of $29.4 billion). Thus, the average American family pays an additional $1,700 to $2,000 per year in healthcare costs simply to cover the costs of defensive medicine.

Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases healthcare spending in the United States by $124 billion. How does this translate to individuals? The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.” [3]

You would think that any effort to reform our health care system would include tort reform, especially if the stated purpose for Obama’s plan to nationalize our health care industry is the current high costs.

So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed. [4] That’s one step in health care reform. Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry noted that, after his state enacted tort reform measures, the number of doctors applying to practice medicine in Texas “skyrocketed by 57 percent” and that the tort reforms “brought critical specialties to underserved areas.” These are real reforms that actually improve access to health care. [5]

Dr. Weinstein’s research shows that around $200 billion per year could be saved with legal reform. That’s real savings. That’s money that could be used to build roads, schools, or hospitals.

If you want to save health care, let’s listen to our doctors too. There should be no health care reform without legal reform. There can be no true health care reform without legal reform.

—Sarah Palin

[1] See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350370729883030.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
[2] See http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/nov08/managing7.asp
[3] Id.
[4] See http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/new_laws_and_med_mal_damage_caps_devastate_plaintiff_and_defense_firms_alik/print/
[5] See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Tort-reform-must-be-part-of-health-care-reform-8096175.html

"That limitless horizon"

Last week, I posted the video of Neil Gaiman reading his wonderful poem "Instructions," noting inter alia that the poem will before long become a picture book (an event I await with happy anticipation). Last night, I linked to Eric Ortlund's blog to cite his excellent post on the necessity of grace, and the fatal thing that is moral exhortation apart from the gospel message. As such, I cannot fail to note the linkage of the two: Dr. Ortlund has also posted Gaiman's video, and along with it some comments on Gaiman which, quite frankly, say it better than I ever have.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors because . . . well, aside from his knowledge of ancient religion, reading him feels like I'm dreaming. There is a surfeit of meaning in his books; he's able to evoke that limitless horizon against which we all live, and the deep, deep ocean (miles deep, dark, impenetrable) over which we walk. He makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, although I can never quite say why. Something opens in the back of my mind, and something big starts to hum back there. Don't know how else to say it.

Beautifully put.

(Follow the link for some of Dr. Ortlund's recommendations; and bear in mind that Gaiman has a very broad range. If you like urban fantasy, read Neverwhere; if you love fairytales, it's hard to beat Stardust; the sequel to American Gods, Anansi Boys, is also excellent; and of course his latest, The Graveyard Book, won a well-deserved Newbery.)

Calling the administration to account

During and (especially) after last year's presidential campaign, there was much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth on the Republican side of the aisle about how the Democrats were so much more hip to social media and Web 2.0 and texting and so on, and how far behind the Republicans were and how much of a disadvantage they were at as a consequence, and how hard the party would have to work to catch up. I'm not sure anyone went quite so far as to claim that this was the only reason Barack Obama won, but there were a few folks who seemed to be thinking that (as there are always people looking to blame the unexpected on something they consider to be a gimmick).

Now, I think we can safely say that at least one prominent Republican gets it: Sarah Palin. As governor of Alaska, she used Twitter to keep Alaskans up on what she was doing and what was going on—as well as giving quick, incisive comments on broader political issues—and won a large number of followers in so doing. Now that she's left office, she's turned from the scalpel to the sword, using her Facebook account to go to war with the current administration in Washington, DC, primarily over their efforts to deform the American health-care system; and though she's wielded Facebook like a rapier, her blows have fallen on the administration's efforts like great strokes from a claymore, depriving them of momentum and putting them on the defensive. For those of us who think Obamacare is the wrong approach at the wrong time and will only make matters worse, this is a very good thing, a nice change from politics as usual, and reason for real hope.

Just because her focus of late has been on health care (which is, after all, the domestic political issue at the moment), though, doesn't mean she has nothing else to talk about; energy is still a signature issue for her as well, and so when the Obama administration used the Export-Import Bank to commit $2 billion in loans to fund offshore drilling—in Brazil—she was quick to offer the following comment:

Today's Wall Street Journal contains some puzzling news for all Americans who are impacted by high energy prices and who share the goal of moving us toward energy independence.

For years, states rich with an abundance of oil and natural gas have been begging Washington, DC politicians for the right to develop their own natural resources on federal lands and off shore. Such development would mean good paying jobs here in the United States (with health benefits) and the resulting royalties and taxes would provide money for federal coffers that would potentially off-set the need for higher income taxes, reduce the federal debt and deficits, or even help fund a trillion dollar health care plan if one were so inclined to support such a plan.

So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That's all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.

I'll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: "Drill, baby, drill." Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a "win" for some states just to play to the left with our money.

The new Gulf of Mexico lease sales tomorrow sound promising and perhaps will move some states in the right direction, but we all know that the extreme environmentalists who serve to block progress elsewhere, including in Alaska, continue to block opportunities. These environmentalists are putting our nation in peril and forcing us to rely on unstable and hostile foreign countries. Mr. Obama can stop the extreme tactics and exert proper government authority to encourage resource development and create jobs and health benefits in the U.S.; instead, he chooses to use American dollars in Brazil that will help to pay the salaries and benefits for Brazilians to drill for resources when the need and desire is great in America.

Buy American is a wonderful slogan, but you can't say in one breath that you want to strengthen our economy and stimulate it, and then in another ship our much-needed dollars to a nation desperate to drill while depriving us of the same opportunity.

—Sarah Palin

Now, this is not to say that this is a bad deal; in fact, though the Ex-Im Bank doesn't have a great record, there are some very strong reasons to be very glad the administration made this move. They probably have other reasons as well (such as the fact that it will pump a lot of money into George Soros' pocket), but those don't invalidate the deal by any means. It is to say, though, that this deal calls into question the administration's stance against energy development in the US, because there is simply no coherent way to support offshore drilling in Brazil and at the same time oppose new drilling off the Gulf Coast, in the Chukchi Sea, or in ANWR.

At least, there's no coherent economic or environmental argument for doing so; which suggests that those aren't the arguments that really matter to the White House.

It's not enough to be against sin

Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth.
And when I’m old, fistless, footless and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory
and it goes home to perdition.

—Billy Sunday

I live in the home of Billy Sunday. Not literally in his house (that's a museum), but in his hometown, and his hometown church. People don't usually associate traveling evangelists with Presbyterianism, yet he was indeed a Presbyterian minister, ordained in 1903; as he explained it, it was because of his wife Nell, a formidable figure in her own right who's still remembered around here as Ma Sunday. (In fact, in our church's row of photos of past ministers, hers is first in line.) Billy said of his wife, "She was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic—because I was hot on the trail of Nell." They were instrumental in the construction of our church building, and there are photos from his ministry in various places around the church; more than that, when his tabernacle by the shores of Winona Lake was torn down in the early 1990s, members of the congregation rescued some of the benches, and they sit in the entrance area of our building.

I'll be honest, before I came here, I had more of an awareness of Billy Sunday the baseball player (a dangerous baserunner but a poor hitter, he was the man who first occasioned the observation, "You can't steal first base") than Billy Sunday the revivalist; I have a strong interest in the history of revivals, but I've mostly studied earlier ones, so I hadn't really read much on his career. Obviously, that has changed, and is changing; even this late on, it's important to understand the Sundays and their ministry to understand this community. The quote at the top of this post, for instance, is one which I first read on the front of one of the local tourist brochures (when I said his house is a museum, I meant that literally); and I've been interested to find some of his messages on YouTube.

In checking out some of his sermons, it's clear that that quote is completely accurate: Billy Sunday was against sin. He was powerfully and insistently against sin; he painted it in stark colors, described it in no uncertain terms, and called his hearers to repentance, firmly and uncompromisingly. This is not to say he was a Hellfire-and-brimstone preacher—he recognized that trying to scare people into salvation is unbiblical and ineffective—but he didn't stint talk of Hell, either, and he strove hard to make his hearers feel the badness of their sin and their need to repent.

The thing is, while I hear Sunday preaching hard against sin (most famously, against alcohol; the man preached Prohibition)—while I hear the bad news that tells us of our need for Christ—I don't hear much of the good news. I don't hear the gospel of grace. I don't hear anything about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. All I hear is works righteousness, with repentance held up as the chief work. It could be that this is from an unrepresentative sample of his messages, to be sure, but somehow I don't think so; and even if that's the case, it certainly suggests that his preaching wasn't driven by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather by something else. It suggests that he didn't really preach grace, he preached moralism and teetotalism.

That's too bad, for reasons Ray Ortlund's son Eric laid out well in a recent post titled "Grace or Moralism":

Except that's not the right title for this. It's not this one or that one. It's grace or nothing; grace or death. What I mean is, I was thinking about a great video I saw recently which talked about how important young men are for churches, and how feckless and wandering most young men are—and it's true for me too. . . .

But then I thought, What if I were a pastor and I had a 20-something male who was into video games and porn and not much else, and I started to pound him and tell him to get his act together, and become a noble and valorous warrior? (I say that last phrase without any irony whatsoever.) If I were to morally exhort him that way, two results are possible: (1) He would fail to change and improve. (2) He would succeed to change and improve. Both options lead to death.

If #1 happens, shame would be added to sin, and he probably would be inclined to hide from further contact with the church.

If #2 happens, he would turn into a Pharisee. Moral exhortation made outside of the larger controlling context of grace and the gospel, if heeded and acted upon by its audience, produces Pharisees.

Read the whole thing—it's great—and think about it. This is why Paul says that human rules and regulations "have an appearance of wisdom . . . but . . . lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence"; the most they can do is redirect that indulgence into other channels, which may well be even worse in the end. It's important to be against sin—too many these days who consider themselves Christians aren't, and that's scandalous—but it isn't enough by itself; we need to be against sin because we're for Jesus Christ.

Links on Obamacare

"Essential Reading" Department:

David Goldhill, "How American Health Care Killed My Father"
Yes, it's 10,000 words. It's also the most important thing you're likely to read about the state of our health care system. I'll be posting on this article in some detail when I have the time.

John Schwenkler, "Maybe the Best Thing I’ve Read on Health Care Reform"
Consider this the SparkNotes/CliffNotes version of Goldhill's article.

Sally Pipes, "Top Ten Myths of American Health Care"
Good debunking of the current CW. Warning: it's a PDF.

Megan McArdle, "Why I Oppose National Health Care"
"Once we've got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government's incentives? I think they're bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I'm afraid that instead of Security Theater, we'll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we're getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it."

"Where Did You Get Your Medical Degree" Department:

Scott Gottlieb, "Obama and the Practice of Medicine"
Are bureaucrats really more qualified than doctors to make these decisions?

"Can't Anybody Here Play this Game?" Department:

Caroline Baum: "Obama Goes Postal, Lands in Dead-Letter Office"
So comparing the "public option" to the Postal Service is supposed to make us like the idea?

Jay Cost: "Obama Misread His Mandate"
One of our few great political analysts says the administration doesn't have the mandate it seems to think it has . . .

Dorothy Rabinowitz: "Obama's Tone-Deaf Health Campaign"
. . . but the ineptitude of its salesmanship so far isn't helping its case any, either.

"Sarah Palin Was Right" Department:

Mark Steyn: "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels"
"Government 'panels' making 'rulings' over your body: Acceptance of that concept is what counts."

Andy McCarthy: The right interpretive framework
"Raising these issues hit the right notes: they gave people a prism for understanding the big picture of Obamacare."

Thomas Sowell: Whose Medical Decisions?
Daniel Terrapin summarized this one nicely: "Call it what you like, 'death panels' will be the end result."

Mark Steyn: You've Had a Good Innings
"Ultimately, government health care represents the nationalization of your body."

Pundette: "Sen. Diaz doesn't like euthanasia vibes he gets from House bill"
Just a reminder that Gov. Palin didn't make this up.

Robert D. Novak, RIP

Robert Novak, longtime reporter, columnist, and commentator, died this morning at the age of 78 after a year-long battle with brain cancer; our country is the poorer for the loss of his voice. Like Tim Russert, Novak was one of the rare media figures who made a real difference in the politics of this country; like Russert's fellow Buffalonian (or whatever would be the proper term for someone from Buffalo, NY) Jack Kemp, an old friend of Novak's and one of the few politicians he liked and respected, it's hard to imagine the Reagan Revolution happening without him. As Kenneth Tomlinson points out in his Human Events piece on Novak,

Novak was the journalistic godfather of the supply-side movement, and his columns gave political legitimacy to Kemp’s 30% tax-rate cut proposal that would, at the 11th hour, make it into Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign offerings.

And like both Russert and Kemp, Novak was a good man who remained uncorrupted by Washington, DC and its ways.

Novak was a conservative icon, but he was much more than that; as Tomlinson says,

Novak worked political sources like no other reporter. That is why so many people would be astonished when his political sources would become known. . . . Who would have imagined that Novak’s source for the Valerie Plame CIA column was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s No.2 and certainly no friend of the Bush White House. . . .

Bob Novak was first and always a reporter, and that is what made the politics of his column so appealing for conservatives and liberals alike.

The Chicago Sun-Times bears witness to this as well in the statement from its editorial board:

Bob was a relentless reporter. His political columns were marked by his determination to dig out new information, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and Washington secrets to tell us something we didn’t know. He combined that with sharp analysis, insightful commentary and passion about the issues facing the nation to emerge as a brawling contestant in the great national debates of his era. . . .

But more than that, his contributions to the great debates of the day demonstrated that Bob was someone who thought deeply about his country, its system of government and the challenges both faced. . . .

Bob most definitely was a conservative, though he never let his political inclinations blind him to what he saw as the realities of the world, even when it angered his natural allies. . . .

We at the Sun-Times will remember Bob as a generous friend and colleague, a tireless workhorse, an innovator in journalism and an example of how to practice our profession. His most enduring legacy, though, may well be his work to pass down generation to generation his love of this country, its traditions and its values that guided his life and work.

There is, as always, more that could be said, and folks like Michael Barone and Mark Tapscott have good things to say. The most important thing, though, is that Novak (a late-in-life convert to Catholicism) was all about finding the truth, and would go wherever he believed it led. Tapscott relays this anecdote from Mal Kline that captures it all:

When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Novak did not become a pushover for the new GOP majority. "Bob, your problem is that you've been on defense so long that you don't know what to do when your team is on offense," a Republican congressman told Novak at the time. Novak smiled and said, "I'm not on your team."

Given how that majority ended up, one can only wish that more conservatives had taken that attitude.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Update: I had to add this from Larry Kudlow:

Bob had a lot of opinions—conservative opinions; Reaganesque opinions. But his pursuit of journalistic detail, facts, scoops, and stories that no one else got was remarkable. He was "old school" in this respect, which is why he was so esteemed by political allies and critics alike.

Shoe leather is a term that comes to mind, and doggedness, and very hard work. Bob had a deep distrust of government. But even during the Reagan years, when I confess to being a source, Bob would write tough stories about the administration he supported. That was the thing about Bob: He was both a conservative icon in terms of his unswerving political beliefs, and a journalistic icon in terms of his unyielding tradecraft. . . .

Over the past twelve years Bob became a strong and devout traditional Catholic. He converted at the age of 66 as he came to grips with faith and embraced Jesus Christ. He did so on very personal terms, without any drama, but his belief was strong and deep. He came to believe that Christ died for us and our sins and for our salvation. As he looked back on his own life, and his several brushes with death, he came to understand that Jesus saved him and had a purpose for him.

Requiescat in pace, Robert Novak.

This is what happens with a mind set on "shuffle"

My dear wife, knowing that I was stopping by the store on the way home from work to pick up some more distilled water for the church, asked me to pick up a few things for her as well—including ice cream for the brownies she was making for dessert (courtesy of a good friend down the street). My brain started spinning this out to a familiar tune, and before long had produced this:

Brownies and ice cream and water in kettles,
Jewel-eyed reptiles made of precious metals,
Clockwork automatons trying their wings:
These are a few of my favorite things.

I suppose it says something about the contents of my brain that it moved so quickly from my shopping list to a sort of steampunk-fantasy thing; I have to admit I find the juxtaposition of that with Rodgers and Hammerstein amusing, but your mileage may vary. I may keep playing around with this for my own amusement; if anyone wants to try a verse, feel free to post it in the comments.

Note on the cultural history of Islam

In defending Islam to the West, it's common to hold up early Islamic culture as far superior to the Christian cultures of the time for its advances, its supposed tolerance, and so on; the usual implied message is, "Islam isn't as bad as you think it is, or else it couldn't have produced all these great things!" The principle is sound—it's basically the same one articulated by Jesus when he told his disciples, "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Thus you will know them by their fruits."

The only problem is that the picture we're usually given is significantly askew from the historical reality. As Robert Spencer put it in Jihad Watch,

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate—not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia—by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

Health care, Whole Foods style

John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, lays out eight reforms that would significantly reduce the cost of health care without ballooning the federal debt.

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).

• Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.

• Enact Medicare reform.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

I think he's spot-on with this (and of course, in the piece, he goes into each in more detail); these reforms would remove most of the things that are currently driving up the cost of health care. Mackey goes beyond these as well to offer some additional thoughts and comments; most interesting to me are these, rooted in Whole Foods' experience.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Spot-on. Read the whole thing.

One starfish at a time

Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That's not a complaint; it's probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it's a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.

The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.

Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.

If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven't, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, "Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you're doing can't possibly matter." The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, "It matters to this one"—and threw it in.

We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.

And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that's enough to justify all our efforts; that's enough to make it worthwhile.

What to do if you find yourself inside a fairytale

That's the question Neil Gaiman answers in his poem "Instructions," which I love; since I found out today that YouTube has a video of him reading it, I had to post it.

Interestingly, the artist Charles Vess is working to turn it into a picture book. Follow the link for a sample illustration, and links to more. That ought to be wonderful.

Dispatches from the health-care front

As the ABC News website tells the story (HT: C4P commenter William Collins),

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

"It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won't give you the medication to live."

Barbara Wagner is not alone in this experience.

"It's been tough," said her daughter, Susie May, who burst into tears while talking to ABCNews.com. "I was the first person my mom called when she got the letter," said May, 42. "While I was telling her, 'Mom, it will be ok,' I was crying, but trying to stay brave for her."

"I've talked to so many people who have gone through the same problems with the Oregon Health Plan," she said.

Indeed, Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old Dexter resident with terminal prostate cancer, learned recently that his doctor's request for the drug mitoxantrone had been rejected. The treatment, while not a cure, could ease Stroup's pain and extend his life by six months.

"What is six months of life worth?" he asked in a report in the Eugene Register-Guard. "To me it's worth a lot. This is my life they're playing with."

The thing is, though, to the state of Oregon, six months of these people's lives isn't worth much of anything—and it's the state of Oregon that's paying the bills. The inevitable result of this, as Sarah Palin has been pointing out, is that a dollar value is placed on human life; if the cost of keeping someone alive is higher than that dollar value, then their life is judged "not worth living." The logical thing to do in that case is to maximize savings and simplify the situation by encouraging the patient to accept euthanasia. This time, euthanasia advocates apologized for this in the case of Barbara Wagner—not because they believed they were wrong, but because the encouragement was offered with "insensitivity," without "the human touch." Next time? Who knows?

There's a reason that in her first Facebook note on this subject, Gov. Palin's thoughts went immediately to her son Trig: this sort of attitude is already dominant in the medical response to Down Syndrome babies. There's a reason why over 90% of such babies are aborted, and it isn't all about what the parents think or want, let me tell you. Or, better, let Gretchen tell you, from her post "Remembering" on the group blog Beautiful Work (HT: Jared Wilson):

It was 2 years ago this month that I was sitting in a chair looking at my unborn baby in 4D. She was precious! We had previously found out that our baby had several “markers” for down syndrome and had enlarged kidneys which may have required surgery upon birth. Thus we were monitored more carefully and had a ton more ultrasound shots at a hospital. This was the first level 3 ultrasound with this pregnancy (I had had one with my 3rd with no problems). I got to gaze upon my baby for almost a full hour—it was wonderful! I was there alone as my husband was out of town. The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.

Read the whole post—it's well worth it. Like the Palins, Gretchen and her husband opted to have the baby. The irony of their story is that their baby was born two years ago . . . without Down Syndrome, and in fact with no medical issues whatsoever. The automatic reflex of the medical system would have aborted a perfectly healthy little girl.

In all this, I think the reactions of Wagner's ex-husband Dennis, on the one hand, and euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry, on the other (both quoted in the ABC News article), are telling. Here's Humphry:

People cling to life and look for every sort of crazy cure to keep alive and usually they are better off not to have done it.

In other words, Humphry believes, people are better off dying than fighting to live. By contrast, here's Dennis Wagner:

My reaction is pretty typical. I am sick and tired of the dollar being the bottom line of everything. We need to put human life above the dollar.

As it happens, I do believe his reaction is pretty typical among most folks; and in my experience, Humphry's attitude is usually lurking in there among advocates of euthanasia, even if most of them can't afford to be as blunt about it as the founder of the Hemlock Society, a man who has already "assisted" one wife into the grave. This really is the line between the sides here.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking that this doesn't affect you all that much, because the concept of euthanasia doesn't really bother you that much. What you need to understand, though, is that assigning dollar values to human lives corrupts the whole system—the extent to which that already happens with our private insurance bureaucracy is part of the problem with our health care system—and that when it's the government doing the assigning, there's no way to counterbalance that corruption, so it spreads unchecked. As is always the way with consequences propagating through a complex system, that produces changes beyond those which we have already thought to expect.

For instance, in that same first Facebook note, Gov. Palin pointed out a very important point made by Thomas Sowell: "Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost." She went on from there, as most critics have, to point out that this will inevitably result in the rationing of health care—and so it will, as it always does. But that will not be the only effect of this new reality if Obamacare goes into effect. C4P's Doug Brady has also pointed out that the US health care system drives most of the world's medical innovation, including the creation of new drugs, and that government price controls will bring an end to most of that innovation. This too is true, and important; but it too is only part of the cost of price controls. It's not merely that price controls will limit who receives medical care, or that they will depress the future potential of that care; they will also, over time, reduce the present value of that care.

To illustrate this, I want to take you inside a world which I hope is unfamiliar to most of you: that of the neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU (pronounced "nick-you"). Specifically, I want to tell you a couple stories from the Canadian NICU experience. One, highlighted by Mark Steyn a couple months ago, comes from Hamilton, Ontario:

Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.

Steyn comments,

Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada's largest city (Greater Toronto Area, 5.5 million) in the most densely populated part of Canada's most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half a century.

Unfortunately, as Steyn goes on to point out, whenever the Canadian government starts outsourcing its health care to the US, that creates additional complications:

When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border "security" bureaucracy, you'll be getting a birth experience you'll treasure forever:

Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn't follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They're having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?

The other story I want to tell you is my own. Our oldest daughter has dual US/Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Vancouver, BC; I was a student in the country at the time, so we spent five years as net beneficiaries of the Canadian health care system. I'm not going to demonize it or try to deny its virtues; combined with the medical benefits my wife received for her job, she was without question our cheapest baby despite spending the first two weeks of her life in the NICU. Yet, as I wrote last summer, there were some enormous downsides to the system as well.

We had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children's Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.

The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it's been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn't good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking "reduced activity days," or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul's in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.

I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who'd been waiting when we got there.

Nor was our experience unusual, or even extreme; we prayed for people's friends or family members dealing with serious illness, not just that they would get better, but simply that they would get treatment before they died. Sometimes they didn't. That's why (as I noted in that post) there's an increasing movement against national health care in Canada and elsewhere (though not, as far as I understand, in Britain). That's the kind of thing that happens when the dollar, not human life, is the bottom line of the health care system. We already have too much of that in our country as it is; what Sarah Palin understands, and why she's leading the charge against Obamacare, is that letting the government run the system will only make it worse, not better. Yes, we need change; but for that change to bring actual hope, it needs to be change for the better. Obamacare is the wrong prescription.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

We are systematically sinful

Our sins are connected deep inside us, more than we see. We compartmentalize. We tell ourselves we can sin in one area and it will stay contained in that area. It's easier to rationalize that way. But the reality of what we are and how we work is more subtle, more interrelated, more inevitable.

Ray Ortlund is right on with this. As a colleague of mine whom I greatly respect was noting the other day, we tend to have a very superficial view of sin that doesn't go any deeper than "Well, I did this thing this afternoon and that was wrong"; we think of sin only in terms of discrete acts that are bad in themselves, and we miss the deeper attitudes of our hearts that are opposed to God.

In so doing, we miss the ways that that thing we did this afternoon affects all the rest of life, and the attitudes that corrupt even the "good" things that we do, and the fundamental orientation of our hearts toward self rather than toward God . . . we focus on individual acts and ignore the part of ourselves that has to die if we are to be faithful followers of Christ. In medical terms, we focus on the symptoms and miss the disease.

Divine self-restraint

Here's another gem from Tyler Dawn I wanted to share:

Sometimes kids open doors to great spiritual truths.

Matt and Andy were in the living room doing, whatever, I can't remember. Just a normal afternoon, when Matt says something out of the blue, "God can do anything He wants to do, COOL!"

"Yes, but He doesn't."

"Huh?"

"God can do anything He wants, He has unlimited power—but He doesn't just go around doing whatever he wants. Only toddlers do that!"

And, I thought ruefully, many of us grownups too. How many of us use our desires as an excuse to satisfy the whim of the moment? . . .

How many times did God want to kill off the Israelites? Probably more times than Moses recorded. But He didn't, because He does not live to satisfy His whims. Such is not the province of one worthy either of being worshipped or of being followed. . . .

The power of God is so unlimited and overwhelming, that if His love was not fully in control of it that we would just cease to exist without His even having to give it much of a thought.

That's all too true. All of life, even the fact that we continue to live, is only by God's grace and patient forbearance, only because he doesn't want anyone to perish, but desires that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Without that, we'd all be long time gone.

The sad irony of racism

"This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again, who has a deep seated hatred for . . . white people? Or the white culture?" [Glenn] Beck asked. "I don't know what it is, but you can't sit in a pew with [former Obama pastor] Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, have it wash over." . . .

"I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people," Beck said. "I'm saying he has a problem. This guy, I believe, is a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by."

Predictably, Beck’s off hand remarks created a storm of controversy in the leftwing blogosphere, the same group that had been apologists for the Rev. Wright’s statements of hate against whites and Jews.

Color of Change, which claims to be the largest African-American political organization online with 600,000 members, has seized on Beck's comment to mount a campaign to discourage companies from advertising on the program.

Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker spoke with Newsmax, and made clear his organization's goal is for Beck's voice to be silenced.

"It's preposterous and absurd," Rucker says of Beck's opinion. "It's insulting to black Americans; and it corrupts honest debate. Anyone who uses such a platform to spew such vitriol, whether Glenn Beck or anyone else, has no place on the air, and we at Color Of Change would use every resource available to us to remove corporate sponsorship from their platform."

Newsmax, in reporting on this, is most interested in the possibility that the Obama administration is behind this attack, since a former head of Color of Change (one of its co-founders) is a member of the administration; certainly, that possibility is completely consonant with Barack Obama's typical approach to dissent, and that of his followers. It's worrisome, no question, especially because it fits a building pattern of behavior.

For my part, though, I'm more interested in the truly invidious double standard here. For Glenn Beck to call the president a racist is a horrible, terrible, intolerable thing; indeed, his attackers seem to be saying, to suggest that any black person is a racist is insulting to black people. For his attackers to suggest that he's a racist, and to do so at length and in quite loaded terms, however, is perfectly acceptable. There's no need to consider whether Beck has any justification for his assertion—whether Barack Obama's 20 years of comfortable acceptance of high-voltage racist preaching might be meaningful, for example, or whether the president's knee-jerk assumption that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. must have been racist is in fact significant in understanding his mindset; they feel they can simply dismiss and denounce it as "insulting" "vitriol" without ever even having to disprove it.

Why? Because Glenn Beck is white and Barack Obama is black? I don't see any other justification here (unless it's the fact that Barack Obama is the President and Glenn Beck isn't); and if that's it, then aren't they basing their conclusion solely on the respective colors of these men's skins?

And isn't that a textbook example of racism?

On this blog in history: March 18-31, 2008

The heart of the matter
Not that I know God, but that he knows me.

Meditation on Holy Saturday and Easter
On the light of resurrection in a dead-grey world.

Bumper-sticker philosophy
Do people who say "question everything" really mean it?

Speaking prophetically
Critiquing the idea that the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. is a prophet of God.

Further thoughts on prophecy and Jeremiah Wright
On tests for a true prophet: risk, humility, and aim.

The fallacy of diagnosis
On why it's wrong to identify other people as the problem.

Taking a look around

I wasn't out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the 'Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn't exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I've been busy and occupied with other things, so it's only been today that I've started to catch up a bit with the political news.

It's interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she's taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration's fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she's winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin's leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration's legislative agenda.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House's decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn't surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behavior shown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.

As a result of all this, the polls aren't being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president's approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).

On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation's financial sector, it's still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Nice job, guys. That's definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government's left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn't see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).

On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I'm not confident we'll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama's insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al'Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)

All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren't for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.

When we say God works in mysterious ways . . .

. . . this is the kind of thing we mean. I tend to think that there are folks out there through whom God decides to work in absolutely atypical ways, both because of who he's made them to be and so that their lives would serve as reminders to the rest of us that he is in no wise limited to our conventional expectations or conventional wisdom; Tyler Dawn, I think, is one of those people. From my contact with her (all electronic, alas), I can say that she's a remarkable woman of God with a remarkable faith who doesn't fit any pattern any church I've ever run across would consider to be normal; that's just her, and that's just God. In this case, she has an amazing testimony of how God used her—through a series of hard and unpleasant and painful things—to expose a child molester and set a child free.

Go read it, and marvel at the hand of God; and after you've marveled a while, remember that what God's on about in our lives is often something very different from what we're on about, and in many cases something we can't even see, because we don't see the whole picture. What we think is the "A" plot of our lives right now might only really be a minor sub-plot, while God is at work telling a completely different story—and what is abject defeat in one might well be glorious victory in the other. Just as it was, as Tyler Dawn points out, for Joseph.

Fortunate defeat

I was there when they crucified my Lord;
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
I threw the dice when they pierced his side,
But I've seen love conquer the great divide.

—U2/B. B. King, "When Love Comes to Town"

OK, so I was on a bit of a U2 kick this trip. I still think this is a great lyric, and something every Christian ought to be able to sing full-throated, with a full heart.

For those not familiar with this video, it's not primarily a music video of the song—it's as much about Bono, B. B., the rest of the band, and the making of the song itself as it is about the song—but it's interesting anyway.

God rocks

Since this is sort of Jared Wilson Day around these parts, it seems like a good time to note a superb little post of his from this past Monday. In dealing with the silly question "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" he said something very interesting, taking the question from an angle that had never occurred to me before and producing a truly profound response.

The truth is that God did make a weight so heavy he couldn't lift it. He did so not by building an immovable force—we did that with our sin—but by incarnating the frailty of humanity and willingly subjecting himself to the force. As one of us, yet still himself, he created the conundrum of the incarnate God, bearing a cross he both ordained yet could not carry by himself, becoming condemned in death and also victorious. And God was crushed according to the plan he himself projected from the foundation of the world.

So, can God make a rock so heavy even he can't lift it?

Yes. And he did. For three days only. And then he drop kicked it out of the mouth of the tomb.

Brilliant.

What I still haven't found

I believe in the Kingdom Come,
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one;
But yes, I'm still running.
You broke the bonds,
You loosed the chains,
You carried the cross and
All my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

—U2, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"

I don't want to get into the argument about what U2 themselves mean by this song. According to the Wikipedia article, "both Bono and Edge have . . . called it a gospel song on numerous occasions," and I have no reason to doubt that; I've seen other sites assert that they have repeatedly called it a song of "spiritual yearning," which seems obvious enough, though I've never seen any original source for either of these attributions. At the same time, reading around the 'Net, it's clear that a lot of U2 fans don't want to believe that the song's about anything of the sort, and they're entitled to their own opinions.

My interest at the moment, though, is rather different; if you wanted to be technical, I suppose you could say that I'm setting aside questions of authorial intent and opting for a bit of reader-response criticism. To wit, it occurred to me as I was listening to this song on the way home Monday that whatever U2 means by this song, it serves quite well as an apt expression of our experience of the process of sanctification (or of mine, at least). I believe all those things, too—and yet I would have to confess that in some ways, at least, I too am still running. There are still areas where I resist what God desires to do in my life, and areas in which I follow him determinedly until the temptation gets too tempting, at which point I run off like any other dumb sheep convinced that the grass over there really must be tastier. (Only to find out when I get there, as always, that the "grass" is really only extra-long Astroturf.)

I believe it all, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for—not in God, but in me, and in my own life. I haven't found the trust, the submission, the willingness to follow faithfully; I've found the peace of God, but not the contentment to rest in it, and the joy of God, but not the single-mindedness to stay in it, instead of jumping off to go check out other things to see if they might be better. I've found the beauty of the gospel and the glorious blessing of the grace of God, but not the ability to wholeheartedly trust that they are for me. I preach it, I preach it constantly, but I do so as much as anything because I know I need to hear it, because I haven't found it in me to fully believe it. Not yet.

But by the grace of God, I know I will—not by my efforts, but by his gift. His grace doesn't depend on me, one way or the other; and whether I can always fully believe it or not, I know he who promised is faithful, and will do it. And for that I give thanks.

Your Jesus is too safe

It's a great pleasure to participate in the blog tour for Jared Wilson's book Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior—though I must confess that the term "blog tour" gives me an image of a truly strange-looking trolley rolling along the infobahn, dinging merrily away, with a disembodied voice gravely intoning, "Next stop . . ." None of which, of course, has anything to do with the book.

Full disclosure: I've known Jared Wilson as a blogger and blog correspondent (for lack of a better term) for a couple years now, I had the privilege of meeting him in person and spending a little time with him at GCNC this past April, and I consider him a friend. I like and respect him a great deal.

Truth behind full disclosure: none of that affects my review of his book. If anything, it's the other way around—this book captures much of the reason why I like and respect Jared. When Ed Stetzer begins the foreword by declaring, "The pages you are about to read are an antidote," he's right; and it's an antidote that far too much of the American church badly needs.

An antidote to what? To the legalistic no-gospel that fills so much of the American church—conservative as well as liberal; some of the worst offenders consider themselves "evangelical"—and our convenient, comfortable, sanitized, commoditized caricatures of Jesus, all precisely designed to meet our felt needs. As Jared says, our culture is plenty familiar with Postcard Jesus, Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Buddy Jesus, ATM Jesus, Role Model Jesus, and Therapeutic Jesus, and many Christians are thrilled when some famous person or other gives thanks to Grammy Award Speech Jesus; but the real Jesus, the Jesus we find in Scripture, is an altogether unfamiliar figure, because all too many churches aren't preaching him. After all, he makes us uncomfortable, and he makes the world uncomfortable, and that's no way to grow a church, now, is it?

To this kind of thinking, Jared offers his book as an antidote, driven by the love of Christ and the provocation of the Spirit of God. As he writes (239-40),

The passion of my life is the scandalous gospel of God's amazing grace in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit cultivated this passion in me through the Scriptures, in which I see Jesus chastised and criticized for proclaiming the gospel by eating with sinners and giving himself to sinners. My encouragement to you—my call to you—is to partake of that gospel, to acknowledge and confess and believe that you are a sinner in need of God's grace, and that Jesus Christ died and rose to manifest that grace to you, and that you can't live without Jesus. You cannot do it.

That is the sort of thing that ought to be the lifeblood of every Christian and the heartbeat of every church . . . and it isn't. It isn't because we don't take our sin seriously enough, and we don't take Jesus seriously enough. The purpose of this book is to change that, for those who have ears to hear.

To do this, Jared presents what he calls twelve portraits of Jesus, looking at Christ from twelve different angles, through a dozen different lenses. He considers:

• Jesus the Promise

• Jesus the Prophet

• Jesus the Forgiver

• Jesus the Man

• Jesus the Shepherd

• Jesus the Judge

• Jesus the Redeemer

• Jesus the King

• Jesus the Sacrifice

• Jesus the Provision

• Jesus the Lord

• Jesus the Savior

Some of these sound familiar to American ears, while others are quite strange (I can imagine readers asking "Jesus the Provision? What does he mean by that?"); but the truth is that even the familiar ones have been trimmed and tamed, made safe and non-threatening and altogether nice, in the teaching of far too much of the church in this culture. Not to put too fine a point on it, far too many of us in this country aren't Christians at all but idolators, worshiping a Jesus of our own invention who is nicely tuned to tell us just what we want to hear. In response, Jared sets out to open our eyes to what it really means that Jesus was a fully human adult male, or that he is the King of Kings. In so doing, he will no doubt make a lot of folks very, very uncomfortable—but it's a holy discomfort, the evidence of the Spirit of God at work.

In painting his portraits of Jesus, Jared draws heavily on Scripture, as he should; this is a book filled with biblical quotations, and not just single verses, but whole passages. Of course, there are plenty of books out there which quote a lot of Scripture and then proceed to misuse it, but that isn't a problem here; one of the chief qualities of the book is its careful attention to what Scripture is actually saying, and its author's clear determination to follow wherever the word of God leads and let the chips fall where they may. Rather than using the Bible to make his points, he has sought to place himself under the Bible and its authority, and thus to say only what it says.

This is not to say, however, that he has produced a book which is disconnected from life as we know it; quite the contrary. The academic foundation is clearly there, but this is no theoretical discussion; it is, rather, a profoundly practical book—or perhaps we might say, following G. K. Chesterton, that it is a profoundly unpractical book in all the right ways. Chesterton has one of his characters, the poet and painter Gabriel Gale, offer to help a man who has attempted suicide, explaining his offer with these words:

I am no good at practical things, and you have got beyond practical things.

What you want is an unpractical man. . . . What can practical men do here? Waste their practical time in running after the poor fellow and cutting him down from one pub sign after another? Waste their practical lives watching him day and night, to see that he doesn't get hold of a rope or a razor? Do you call that practical? You can only forbid him to die. Can you persuade him to live? Believe me, that is where we come in. A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that.

Chesterton was right: the practical counsels of this world can only forbid people to die (or, more ominously, order them to die); they cannot persuade people to live, much less tell them how. That is for unpractical people, for those who have given their lives over to the unpractical mendicant teacher from Nazareth, and in so doing have learned how to live; and to illustrate that, Jared offers a number of stories of just what that unpractical life looks like. Some, like the story of the Amish of Quarryville, PA who forgave the man who murdered their daughters, are widely known; others, like the story of his cousins Steve and LaVonne Jones and their son Colton (which, as a father of three, wrenched at my heart), are not. All bear witness to the truth that it's only in the real Jesus Christ, not any of the more "practical" or "useful" versions of him that we invent, that we find real life.

The tone of this book is informal and conversational, at times snarky and sarcastic (though the bulk of that is to be found among its copious and entertaining footnotes), and occasionally slangy; some, at least of older generations, may find that off-putting at points. In general, however, I don't think any but the most formal of readers will find it a true problem, while younger folks in particular will likely find the tone attractive and appealing. Taken as a whole, I believe the conversational tone is a benefit to the book, for a couple reasons.

One, it suits the author; I don't have any way of knowing if attempting to write in a more formal style would have made him sound stuffy and pedantic, but writing in this vein makes it clear that he is anything but. That's disarming, which is a good thing; given that he's calling his readers to set aside our comfortable Jesuses for one who will challenge us and make us very uncomfortable with ourselves, the natural response from many will be to look for a reason to reject that call. Many will no doubt find reasons, but branding Jared as stuffy and out of touch won't be one of them.

Two, the book's tone serves to reinforce the point that its message is for all of us, and all of life. Following Christ isn't just about doing formal things for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but it's about how we're supposed to live all the rest of the time, too; it has to do with cracks about old teen movies and popular fiction just as much as with the sorts of things we think of as "spiritual."

The great risk Jared took with this book—one which he himself acknowledges—is that in looking at Jesus from twelve different perspectives, he might have "inadvertently propose[d] twelve different Jesuses, creating intellectual confusion where the purpose has been to enhance clarity." I think, though, that he has avoided that quite successfully by tracing one strong theme through all twelve chapters: "the great unifying presence of the gospel." This is the hub of which the twelve perspectives are spokes, as he lays out in the conclusion of the twelfth chapter (280):

The good news is that Jesus Christ is not just God with us, but he's also God for us. For us, he is the promise of fulfillment, the prophet of truth, the forgiver of sins, the man of sorrows, the good shepherd, the righteous judge, the redeemer, the reigning king, the atoning sacrifice, the all-sufficient provision, the almighty God, and the rescuer of the lost. He is all these things and more, but none of this is good news if he is not also the Lord and the Savior of sinners in need of grace.

Today is the day of salvation. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe.

If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jared Wilson has written a book that is full of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that shines the light of that gospel from every page, and that I believe will call many in this country to that gospel for the first time. It is a book for the reconversion of the church, and for the conversion of many who are outside the church because they've rejected our false Jesuses, not knowing that the real Jesus is someone altogether different. It's a book we need to read, not because Jared is wonderful, but because Jesus is wonderful, and Jared is talking about Jesus. It is, in short, a book for which we can honestly say, "Thank you, God."

Seen on a billboard

along US 30 in rural Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh—two-panel, comic-strip style, a slice of a conversation between two characters. One says to the other, "What do you mean, I can't take a joke? I took you." (The quote may not be completely exact in the first few words, but the rest stuck firmly in my brain.)

I wasn't in a position to stop and look closely at the billboard, and the way the road was winding, I didn't get a long look at it, so I have no idea who put it up, or why, or what their purpose was; whatever their reason, that's an extraordinarily cruel line, in my humble opinion. It appears that what I saw is part of a larger campaign, because I saw a different two-panel comic-strip billboard in my rear-view mirror later on—I have no idea what it said, though, so it doesn't bring me any closer to knowing what these billboards are about.

All of this has left me curious. I tried Googling the first billboard I saw, but with no result. Does anybody know anything about these billboards and their purpose?

Oh, now this would give my children ideas

New adventures with Slip'n'Slides . . .

As Bill says, I don't know if this is real or faked, but if it's real, it's amazing.

Note on the past week

If anyone wondered about the radio silence around here the last several days, you may be assured that I haven't run out of things to say (not that anyone who knows me would consider that likely); rather, we were on vacation in Pennsylvania and found ourselves unexpectedly without Internet access for most of the week. I had the chance to spend time with dear friends, see Gettysburg for the first time, and go to the wedding of one good friend from college—and even, unexpectedly, to participate: the minister, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, invited all pastors present to come up and lay hands on the couple for the prayer of blessing. It was a wonderful moment in perhaps the best wedding I've ever seen. (I can't speak for my own, though I love the pastors who married us dearly—I was too busy getting married to absorb much of what was going on.) Leaving my own wedding aside, I don't think I've ever seen a more joyful bride, or felt happier for a wedding couple.

I have to say, too, if there's a template for what a truly gospel-driven wedding ceremony looks like, that had to be it, or pretty close. If you happen to be looking for a gospel-driven church in Pittsburgh, I can recommend Bellefield Presbyterian without question or hesitation; just from the wedding ceremony, I can say with complete assurance that the pastor there, the Rev. Dr. R. Geoffrey Brown, is a man of God who glories, delights, exults, revels in the gospel of Jesus Christ and proclaims it with deep joy and humility. He and his wife are also wonderful people—of that much I have no doubt, even from my brief contact with them. It was a true joy and blessing to be a part of that worshipping community this past Saturday.

The underlying problem

Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.

Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God's Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated. . . .

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: "I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this."

It's a pretty predictable story, really; Clarke appears to have been surprised by what happened, but that only shows her to be severely naive. She's quoted as saying, "I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art," but that was never going to be the universal response, for reasons which the response I quoted above shows.

Most people, when they read the comment written on the first page of that Bible, will focus on sexuality; but the truth is, whatever you think of homosexuality and the biblical teaching about it, that's not the most significant issue here. Whether this woman's homosexual practices are sinful or not, her comment shows her to be guilty of a greater sin—indeed, the greatest of all sins—that of idolatry. She's made it very clear what her real god is: her sexuality. All other claims on her allegiance are measured against that one; she's willing to worship other gods as well, to add other deities to her personal pantheon, but only if they are content to serve her chief god.

And the Lord of creation, the God of the universe, won't do that. He will never do that. He claims our absolute obedience and allegiance, and he will not share his glory with another—and that's why so many people resist him. That's the root of our objections to God, that he insists on being our only god, calling us to give up all competing loyalties and affections; and there are many who are unwilling to do so. If the church is going to reach out in any intelligent way, it has to start by realizing that fact. As Tim Keller says, we cannot effectively preach the gospel without naming and addressing the idols of our culture and our people.

HT: the Rev. Wayne Paul Barrett, who referenced this in his sermon yesterday at Delmont Presbyterian Church. (My apologies for initially failing to note this.)

Sin and pleasure

One of the biggest lies the Devil sells us is that sinning brings pleasure. To be sure, it’s an effective lie, because it’s true in the short term—but the long term is a different story. The Devil’s aim isn’t to give us good things, but to deprive us of good things, or rather to talk us into depriving ourselves of good things. That might seem like a strange thing to say, when so many people’s idea of Christian living is “thou shalt not do anything fun”—but it’s the truth. Despite what some might think, God is the one who created pleasure, and he’s the one who wants you to live a really good life; Satan, by contrast, might use pleasure to get you hooked, but his ultimate goal is to deprive you of everything worth having. Just look at drug addiction—the real pleasure, the real fun, is all in the beginning; after a while, all that’s left is desperation, craving and need.

That’s the pattern of sin, and the pattern Satan wants to get people into—the minimum pleasure necessary for the maximum slavery; and whatever they might think themselves to be doing, even if they proclaim themselves agents of liberation, that’s ultimately the end that all the false teachers of this world serve. By contrast, the Christian faith calls us back to see the true goodness of God, and the true goodness of all that he made, through the deception and confusion of all this world’s counterfeit versions. He calls us to see the true goodness of marriage through the counterfeits of free love, hooking up, and whatever else this world can spin out there; to see the true goodness of food through all the ways we misuse it; to see the true goodness of all the things God has made through all the ways we abuse them. When we treat this as anything less than his good creation—whether by rejecting it, by worshiping it, or by treating it as merely something to exploit—we dishonor God, we distort his truth, and we do ourselves grievous harm.

(Adapted from “Led Astray”)

Accepted on a journey

Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you;
go, and from now on sin no more.”

—John 8:10-11 (ESV)

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:57-62 (ESV)

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

—Luke 18:22-23 (ESV)

People like to talk about Christ accepting everybody and forget that the acceptance of Christ is not a thing that says to us, “I'm fine with you just the way you are; you just keep doing what you're doing.” The acceptance of Christ, rather, says to us, “Go and sin no more.”

He says to us, “I love you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.”

He says to us, “You're all messed up, but I love you anyway; that's why I'm going to change you from the inside out.”

He says to us, “Give up your life—give up your plans, your desires, your ideas of how things should be—and I'll give you something better.”

Jesus doesn't call us to stay where and what we are because he's not much of one for staying in one place; he calls us to follow. He calls us to a journey, and a relationship, and like any journey and any meaningful relationship, that means change. It means leaving things behind, and getting new things in return.

And yes, that includes the things of which we say, “God couldn't possibly want me to give that up; he can't possibly mean that I'm not allowed to do that.” In fact, it especially includes those things, because those—whether sinful in and of themselves or not—are the things in our lives that most interfere with his lordship: they are our idols. They are the things which which we must give over to him if we're to follow him; clinging to them is nothing less than idolatry.

And yes, that includes our sexuality—and that means for all of us. He may give it back to us in pretty much the same form, or he may not; he's been calling people to celibacy for a very long time, after all, for a great many reasons. But whether straight or gay, married or single, our sexuality absolutely must be surrendered to his lordship in our lives if we're to follow Jesus faithfully; and that may very well mean accepting that we cannot do that which we most want to do, and which we're most accustomed to doing.

And yes, that includes our money, and our careers, and our other family relationships, and our gifts and talents and aspirations, and all the other things that matter to us. He calls us to surrender to him everything of significance in our lives, to do with as he will. This is not the price of his acceptance, but its consequence; it's what it means to be accepted by Jesus, because to be accepted by him is to be invited to go with him, to go where he's going and do what he's doing, instead of going where we want to go and doing what we want to do.

xkcd on the Gates situation

just because it's funny: