The Obamacare Scandal the Most of the Media Is Ignoring

Joel Osteen has the largest church in America. He also declined to speak about the coverage gap.

I make no secret about the fact that I hold most far right Christians - the Christofascists, if you will - and the Tea Party Neanderthals in little more than open contempt.  To me, most of these "godly folk" are falsely pious, self-righteous bigots and they make the biblical Pharisees look like very upstanding individuals.  One thing that underscores this rank hypocrisy is the GOP base opposition to the Affordable Health Care Act which they derisively call Obamacare.  These greed driven, self-centered folks don't give the slightest damn about the millions of Americans who lack access to decent healthcare .   A piece at CNN looks at the situation and the calls by a few decent Christians to not treat countless Americans (especially minorities and those of different faiths) as disposable human garbage.  Here are some highlights:

The Rev. Timothy McDonald gripped the pulpit with both hands, locked eyes with the shouting worshippers, and decided to speak the unspeakable.

The bespectacled Baptist minister was not confessing to a scandalous love affair or the theft of church funds. He brought up another taboo: the millions of poor Americans who won’t get health insurance beginning in January because their states refused to accept Obamacare.

McDonald cited a New Testament passage in which Jesus gathered the 5,000 and fed them with five loaves and two fishes. Members of his congregation bolted to their feet and yelled, “C’mon preacher” and “Yessir” as his voice rose in righteous anger.

“What I like about our God is that he doesn’t throw people away,” McDonald told First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta during a recent Sunday service. “There will be health care for every American. Don’t you worry when they try to cast you aside.  Just say I’m a leftover for God and leftovers just taste better the next day!”

McDonald’s congregation cheered, but his is a voice crying in the wilderness. He’s willing to condemn state leaders whose refusal to accept Obamacare has left nearly 5 million poor Americans without health coverage. But few of the most famous pastors in the Bible Belt will join him.


Joel Osteen? Bishop T.D. Jakes, and other prominent pastors throughout the South?  Like McDonald, they preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline yet the poor can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere. All declined to comment.
 
The coverage gap was created when 25 states refused to accept the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. The people who fall into this gap make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to qualify for Obamacare subsidies in their state insurance exchanges. If they lived elsewhere, they would probably get insurance. But because they live in a state that refused the new health care law, they likely will remain among the nation’s uninsured poor after Obamacare coverage kicks in come January.

The coverage gap has been treated as a political issue, but there is a religious irony to the gap that has been ignored.

Most of the people who fall into the coverage gap live in the Bible Belt, a 14-state region in the South stretching from North Carolina to Texas and Florida. The Bible Belt is the most overtly Christian region in the country, filled with megachurches and pastors who are treated like celebrities.  All but two Bible Belt states have refused to accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

Is it anti-Christian for state leaders to turn down help for the people Jesus called “the least of these"?  

When these questions were sent to many of the most popular pastors in the Bible Belt, they hit a wall of silence. Virtually no prominent pastor wanted to talk about the uninsured poor in their midst.

Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in the nation, declined to be interviewed about the subject. So did Bishop T.D. Jakes. Their megachurches are both in Texas, the state with the nation’s highest number of people without health insurance.

Max Lucado, the best-selling Christian author who is a minister at a church in Texas, declined to speak; Charles Stanley, the Southern Baptist pastor in Georgia whose In Touch Ministries reaches millions around the globe, declined to speak; Ed Young Sr. and Ed Young Jr., a father and son in Texas who pastor two of the fastest-growing churches in the nation, also declined to speak.

The silence is not hard to understand. Obamacare is a polarizing political issue in the Bible Belt. A pastor who publicly weighs in on the subject could divide his or her congregation or risk their job.

[T]his position is impractical and unbiblical, says Ronald Sider, a longtime advocate for the poor and author of “The Scandal of Evangelical Politics."  Churches and charities don’t have enough resources to take care of an estimated 48 million Americans who don’t have health care. The Bible is filled with examples of God's fury over economic oppression of the poor, which Christians should regard as scandalous, he says.

There's much more to the article, some of which involves mealy mouthed excuses from pastors for why they are not speaking out.   The Gospel message calls one to be divisive at times and to call out hypocrisy and to identify wrongs being done to others.  With most of these pastors it is all ultimately about money and the bottom line.  They don't want to rock the boat because then their bigoted and selfish parishioners might stop giving money.  Nasty prostitutes are more honest and have more integrity than these foul pastors.  With every passing day I find myself wanting less and less to do with Christianity.  Or at least the version practiced by the "godly folk." They are truly horrid people.