By Gary Gunderson
People of many faiths regard purple as a sacred color. We are in a dangerous political time with fundamental damage to long-standing public programs developed to prevent, manage, and heal the consequences of illness, contagion, and the wear and tear of life that affects every single family on the planet. Many of these programs reflect long partnership with faith networks that created the policies that helped us establish, grow, and maintain hospitals and health ministries of many kinds. Our faith-based health programs would simply not exist without the public support for accurate data, intellectual guidance, and research. There are no red or blue facts.
Health is the sacred journey of life that flows directly from the Creator as we know them by many names. All our faith traditions—from Adventist to AME-Zion, Catholic to UCC, Methodist to Muslim, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Sikh—know that the God who creates us also heals us; thus, the work we do to prevent illness or pain is sacred, not political.
This is why the largest number of hospitals in the United States were started by faith groups a century or more ago and why those hospitals partner closely with every governmental program, especially those that extend 21st century science to the most vulnerable and excluded. Faith does not permit us to look away from the long-standing, excruciatingly clear patterns of place, race, gender, and trauma that help us focus our work efficiently.
We people of faith and our hospitals’ work align especially closely with federal programs supporting primary care and even helped create the 3,000+ community health centers scattered in every tough neighborhood in the nation.
The people of Hold.Health tend to be raving moderates, deep purple both because of our faith and, in a very practical way, because health, not politics, is our highest priority. Our members regularly win the secular awards honoring efficiency, quality, and innovation because people of faith regard stewardship as a sacred virtue, waste as a sin, and diligent management as a spiritual discipline. This tends to make us boring at parties, but when the ambulance pulls up to the emergency room and opens its doors, people tend to be relieved to see a religious symbol nearby. They know we will be efficient but trust our care with their lives.
Nobody needs to tell anyone at Hold.Health that our systems of health have problems. Many are way too corporate and are bent in unhealthy ways to serve the wrong purposes. Those moral failures have pulled these systems to serve the gods of gain rather than the less remunerative science of prevention, early detection, and wrap-around compassion. These are management failures of too little compassion, not too much, which oddly end up costing everyone involved more, not less. Compassion is efficient when well managed proactively with clear moral intent.
This is all why we are soul-sick at indiscriminate cuts that violate every tenet of diligent stewardship and basic management. What kind of manager fires every single recent employee? That’s not even bad management; it is simply power exerted with no intention of making anything work, even those functions that are deep purple. We are especially troubled at the damage being done to the health structures closest to the community, the community health centers (many of which have explicit faith foundations), public health, and its crucial programs for disease detection, early prevention, and neighborhood-level care for children and mothers. Community Health Centers are purple, having long enjoyed broad bipartisan support.
Efficiencies in the highly complex systems of health are gained by diligence. This is not what we are seeing. Inside Health Policy reported about the roughly 5,200 employees who have been laid off (in Fed-speak: subject to a “reduction in force,” or “RIF”) across all the Health & Humas Services (HHS) agencies since Valentine’s Day: “A former probationary employee at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) told Inside Health Policy that impacted workers at that agency include 10 in the Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) Office of Policy and Program Development. They estimated that around 75 employees across HRSA’s BPHC have been laid off. BPHC is responsible for working with community health centers and provides funding for the centers along with technical assistance, data tracking and compliance functions.”
Every “probationary” employee within BPHC was let go within one week, reducing its total staff by 15% in the first round of RIFs. We know that this is only the beginning of the layoffs, as one of the executive orders instructed all department heads to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)”. (This is in addition to separating probationary employees.) Department heads also have 30 days to submit a reorganization plan that discusses “whether the agency or any of its subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated.”
Faith health institutions are glad to provide care with limited funds as a basic expression of our identity. And we know that we cannot be moral without facts, which depend on academic research networks to continually discover what God has made possible.
We regard the faithful pursuit of truth as being just as faithful as providing mercy to the poor. We participate in brave, diligent discernment, such as what the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) brings to so many vexing issues, such as how to advance the health of the whole population. The NAS Roundtable on Population Health has included a faith-related best practice in almost every single Roundtable workshop for years. The Roundtable bravely opened our eyes to the deadly way that entrenched economic privilege drives the patterns of expensive consequences of poor health. This intellectual clarity makes possible moral clarity, which helps us all do the next right thing.
Neither faith nor health science is solely American. Some of our most significant faith-based systems began as ministries from Lutheran or Catholic churches from Europe, which then flourished in a constitutional democracy that allowed all faiths the freedom to offer God’s love to all. All of our health institutions and denominations remain linked directly to faith-based hospitals and community health programs around the world, which involves intimate partnerships with public programs. The vast portion of funding of USAID flows through faith-based partners such as World Vision, Lutheran World Service, and Catholic Charities. Nearly all of those 13,000 AIDS workers abruptly released on February 6 in South Africa were people of faith working for faith-related organizations.
Hold.Health is purple. Some shades of red and some bright blue. We are together to help each other blend 21st century science with our ancient traditions of compassion for all the people God so loves. We will work with anyone who shares that hope.
The next several years will force us all to clarify what we value most and how to play our roles in our very complex society. For us, this goes way beyond politics, for we know that there will come a day when we face ultimate questions that will not be about how we voted:
“’For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me,
I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger
or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”*
May God have mercy on us.
*Matthew 25: 43-45
