Health Care Reform, my perspectve s a Christian

I was going to write a big, long post about how if people who call themselves Pro-Life aren't phonies, they'll get behind the health care reform bill the House just passed, now that the Stupak Amendment has been adopted. But I deleted that post and I'm starting new one about why I support the current HCR bill as the Pro-Life thing to do. One of my character flaws is in judging people. I do it a lot, and it's not right. I can't know what's in others' hearts, and I shouldn't judge them for what I think they believe.

"Pro-Life" is so much more than just anti-abortion. It means respecting all life. That means the unborn, convicted criminals, the elderly and infirm and the poor. If I have a responsibility to protect life from abortion, if I believe that this is the job of the government (that abortion should be outlawed), then I also have a responsibility to protect the lives of people who do not have access to affordable health care, and to use the government to that end as well (if necessary).

From a pragmatic perspective, I've heard people from the Right telling me all the other ways that the goal of affordable health care for all Americans could be accomplished without "Socialism," but they don't seem to have been terribly interested in fixing those problems before the Left was on the verge of passing their own reforms without their help. If you oppose something until you're no longer needed, why should you expect cooperation? What kind of sense is that?

As a Christian, I'm unaware of any evidence that Christ was a Capitalist. I'm not going to say he was a Socialist, but the argument there is stronger. But he believed in paying taxes. He said "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's," in reference to the Jew's paying taxes to their Roman government. If Christ instructed us, his followers and supposed imitators, to pay taxes to a conquering, occupying, foreign government (that was to eventually murder him), why wouldn't he want us to pay taxes to provide health care to the poor? Health care that protects the life that he has given us and them, which we want the government to protect from abortion and euthanasia.

And this is why I feel that Universal Health Care is the Christian, Pro-Life thing to do.