the priest will charge you now

Hey, did you hear this one? So a priest walks into a hospital room and hands a patient an invoice for services rendered. What, you’re not laughing? Then you sure won’t be if a little known and rarely mentioned provision in the Senate version of the healthcare bill passes and your insurance premiums are going to have to cover patients who eschew doctors in favor of faith healing. Basically, this provision wants to force corporations that already don’t want to pay for numerous legitimate medical expenses and act as a review panel for doctors to protect their profit margins, to cough up the money to cover prayer like they would cover medical treatments.

If you think this is some random passage stuffed in by a special interest group, you’d be only half right since it was crafted by Sen. Orrin Hatch and was supported by the late Ed Kennedy. Also trying to lend his credentials is the man who spectacularly fumbled his way out of a potential presidency, Sen. John Kerry. Why would Kerry and Edwards support a bill forcing insurers to cover faith healing? Because their home state is also the HQ of the so-called Christian Science movement which thinks that prayer can be just efficient as actual medicine so an already tax exempt organization collecting $20 to $40 per prayer session and impromptu Bible study would also get checks from insurance companies. And that’s on top of the fact that the IRS will already allow patients of their squad of faith healers to deduct their expenses as medical in nature. Oh and here’s the punchline…

“We are making the case for [faith treatment], believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,” said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging [for] support on the measure.

“We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,” he said.

Fantastic! We’ll get to lower the costs of healthcare by strong-arming insurance companies into ignoring their guidelines and covering treatment methods that failed utterly against everything from the flu, to tuberculosis, to the Black Plague over the last 5,000 years. And then, when they have to pay for people getting real treatment in the next hospital room as well, guess who’s premiums they’ll raise? Yours. There’s a good reason insurers are loath to cover pseudoscientific and alt med woo unless they’re forced to by law. It doesn’t work and they end up paying for sick people turning themselves into medical experiments for quacks who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. In the end, they lose money and have to boost premiums to cover the added risk.

Also, pardon my dabbling in law here since I’m not an attorney (my education in law consists of AP Civics and an introductory course in college), but wouldn’t the federal government mandating faith healing run contrary to the Establishment Clause? The idea that prayer is as effective as medical treatment is purely a statement of faith and thus falls into the realm of religion. And according to the Constitution, lawmakers can’t make any law which gives a nod of approval to a religious institution. Unless of course they’re willing to unload a giant can of very nasty worms and let every faith healer, sleazy televangelist and profiteering witch doctor bill their patients’ insurance companies and raising our already out of control healthcare costs. Forget all that scaremongering about government death panels in the nation’s medical overhaul. I’d be far more scared of this and at the risk of sounding alarmist, I think you should be concerned as well.