Justice, with Humility, Gentleness, and Civility

[Editor's Note:  Washington's Red Mass, which journalists usually report from a political perspective because that's easier, took place earlier today.  I haven't seen any reports on it yet, but I'm willing to bet that for the vast majority of people trying to do human justice, Fr. Greg Kalscheur's homily at Detroit's Red Mass last weekend will provide more food for thought.  I post it here with Greg's permission. -- MAG]

Red Mass Homily
Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J.*

Each fall I begin my Civil Procedure course by encouraging my first-year students to keep a couple of questions alive in their hearts as they engage in their study of Civil Procedure.  I encourage them to imagine what sort of people they might become as they use the different procedural tools that we are studying, and I urge them to imagine how their use of those legal tools might shape the world in which we are living.  My hope really is to get all of us to remember one fundamental question; a question that I think is more important than any of the cases we read, or any of the doctrine we learn, or any of the particular legal issues any of us study in law school: who am I becoming as a person as I enter more deeply into the study of the law?[1]

We are all here today to ask the Holy Spirit to set our hearts on fire with a passion for the justice of God’s reign.  The readings we’ve just heard proclaimed[2] remind us to keep our hearts open to one crucial question: Who are we becoming as people as we live out our vocations as lawyers and judges and public servants?  As we live our lives in the law, are we being faithful to our more fundamental vocation to live out our identity as God’s beloved children, called to give flesh to God’s love in our world?

The Decline and Fall of the New York Times (Cont’d)

I often think the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto is too hard on the people he targets for criticism — an occupational hazard for someone who brandishes a poison pen as well as he does.

Not today.  Not when his target is the New York Times. Attaboy, James.

Found and Lost?

Forgive me if this is old news, but I’m just hearing about the legal dispute between Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. and the government of Spain.  In case anyone else has missed this story so far, the dispute is about who owns $500 million in gold and silver coins that Odyssey Marine retrieved from the bottom of the ocean.  I don’t know which side has the better legal argument, but if it’s Spain — backed by our own Department of Justice — then it seems like a real miscarriage of justice to me.

Here are the basic facts: 

No Such Thing as a Free Colonoscopy (Continued)

Ezra Klein’s  “analysis” piece in the Sunday Washington Post doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but it’s worth a read if you’re puzzled by the fact that so many people are clamoring for health care reform while insisting that nothing change.  Klein hits the nail on the head when he makes the point we’ve discussed here:  “The surest way to cut health-care spending would be to make people shoulder more of the burden directly, as opposed to hiding it in taxes and lost wages.”  If Congress passes anything that resembles the “plan” the President released last week, that’s exactly what won’t happen.

The Chief Cause of Excellence

This morning’s disturbing Washington Post op-ed by Colbert I. King describes a sexual assault that took place in one of D.C.’s public high schools — an assault committed by an adult whom the D.C. schools placed there as a “mentor” for the children. Mr. King is dissatisfied with the D.C. government’s response to the incident.

Horrific things happen even in good schools, so I do not bring this up in order to bash the D.C. schools or public schools in general. Indeed, these things happen in private schools as well, and Catholic institutions in particular have come in for more than their fair share of bad ink on the subject of adults imposing themselves sexually on adolescents.

But the incident does call to mind a quotation I’ve been meaning to share with Reasonable Minds since I first heard it last spring.

One More Thing that Won’t End Well

I don’t have time for a long discussion of President Obama’s speech on health care; I suspect many of you are grateful for that.  But enough people have e-mailed me for a reaction that I thought I might as well respond briefly here.

Fresh Air for Health Care (Third in a Series)

At the risk of wildly oversimplifying, my last two posts have argued that private health insurance stinks but it’s mostly the government’s fault. Because I hold these two opinions together, I am at odds both with those who favor a strong government intervention (including both “single payer” models and other highly prescriptive approaches to insurance regulation like “pay or play”) and with those who oppose government intervention on the dubious ground that our current health care system represents some sort of triumph of free enterprise. The truth is that our current health care system is dumb, but government can almost certainly make it dumber.

But what if Congress and the President cared more about promoting a sustainable long-term approach to health care expenditures than they care about the next election? If they really wanted to do something to help, could they? Maybe.

How Could the Private Sector Do This to Us? (More Observations on Why Health Insurance Stinks)

In my last post, I nominated my candidate for the Biggest Problem with Health Insurance, which is that in most cases it’s not insurance at all but rather a pre-paid medical services plan. This has had at least four extremely unfortunate consequences.

1. Because most plans now cover not just catastrophic expenses but also routine and even elective expenses, almost all health care transactions are marked up 30 to 50 percent to cover the “insurance” company’s administrative expenses.
2. Because health care services are almost entirely pre-paid, people have a tendency to think of them as cost-free and use them far more often than they would if price mattered to the patient.
3. Because we persist in calling this arrangement “insurance,” we delude ourselves into thinking that drawing the uninsured into the risk pool will somehow lower per capita costs.
4. Because the whole system runs almost entirely on the principle of cost-shifting rather than risk-spreading, people are now basically addicted to Other People’s Money.

In addition, another very serious problem arises from the fact that so many people receive their health care as a condition of employment.  This causes people to worry that losing their job will cause them to lose their access to health care.  And the worry is most acute for those who already have a chronic disease or other health condition that may be uninsurable under a new plan sponsored by a new employer.

Partisans on both sides of the current health care “reform” debate agree that the status quo is unacceptable.  Partisans on both sides also tend to agree that the status quo is more or less the result of private enterprise.  The debate is about the extent to which today’s free-market failures can or should be corrected by more government intervention.  The history of private health insurance, however, seems to me to cast serious doubt on the premise of free-market failure.

Why Health Insurance Stinks, and Why the Most Comprehensive Health Insurance Stinks Most Comprehensively

The extensive public discussion of what we persist in calling “health care reform” has united us to a remarkable degree. Americans from all walks of life now overwhelmingly agree that the public debate on this issue has been wretched. Indeed, there is even widespread agreement on the cause of the wretchedness, namely the other side’s meretricious pandering and sloganeering. Both other sides.

This strikes me as a very durable bipartisan consensus, and I am reluctant to upset it. However, my main gripe about the public debate so far has nothing to do with “death panels” or town hall theatrics. My main gripe is that we are talking about our system of health care delivery (both current and proposed) as if it is a system of insurance. Health “insurance,” as we’ve come to know it, is not insurance. In fact, that’s the fundamental problem with it. And until we get that straight, I think we will continue to be confused about the likely effects of expanding its availability.

Take Me When I’m Gone to Forest Lawn

News of Michael Jackson’s interment at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California immediately reminded me of this song.  I think I heard John Denver sing it, but Tom Paxton is the one who’s available on YouTube.