During the fall months when flu is easily spread, it is good to remember some rules of charity:

? Washing hands thoroughly with soap and water or using hand sanitizer diminishes the chance to catch or spread the flu virus.
? If you are sick, stay home. It is never a sin to miss Mass due to illness.
? If your children are sick keep them home from Mass and Religious Education.

Health Care Reform

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Priorities for Health Care Reform:

Opposes any efforts to expand abortion funding, mandate abortion coverage, or endanger the conscience rights of health care providers and religious institutions:

Longstanding and widely supported current policies on these issues must be preserved. We urge members of the House and Senate to take all steps necessary to oppose abortion funding, mandated abortion coverage or weakening of conscience rights.

Abortion Coverage and Funding:

· The Hyde Amendment in 1976 in Congress has barred the federal funding of abortion in all major programs for over 3 decades. Such funding is forbidden except when a mother’s life is endangered  or in cases of rape or incest.

· Federal funds may not be used for abortion or for any health benefits package that includes abortion.

· Military hospitals and the Children’s Health Insurance Program have their own permanent bans on abortion funding.

· Not one of the benefits packages offered to federal employees in this program may include abortion.

· Congress has respected the  right, for decades, of health care providers to decline involvement in abortion or abortion referrals, without exception.

· The Weldon Amendment, 2004, has forbidden any federal agency or program (or state or local government receiving federal funds under the act) to discriminate against individual or institutional health care providers and insurers because they decline to perform, provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortion.

· Other laws respect conscience rights on sterilization and other procedures to which providers may have a moral or religious objection.

 · Most states follow the federal policy against abortion funding. Texas is one of those states.

· Health care reform whose goal is to advance health coverage, not advance an agenda on abortion, will take care to be “abortion neutral.”

· It will preserve current policies that bar the use of taxpayer funds, respect conscience rights, and generally encourage childbirth over abortion; it will not mandate abortion as part of any “basic” or minimum benefit package.

Catholic Social Teaching:

· The human person is central, the clearest reflection of God among us.

· Each person possesses a basic dignity that comes from God.

· Dignity does not come from any human quality or accomplishment, not from race, gender, age or economic status.

· The test of every institution  or policy is whether it enhances or threatens human life and dignity.

· It is necessary to “consider every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity.”

Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities (USCCB)

Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

Principles, Prophecy, and a Pastoral Response (USCCB)

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Priorities for Health Care Reform:

Supports effective measures to safeguard the health of immigrants, their children and all of society by expanding eligibility for public programs, such as Medicaid, to all low-income families and vulnerable people and by offering adequate subsidies for cost-sharing of insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses.

• The Catholic bishops renew their appeal to provide equity for legal immigrants in access to health care.
• Advocating for the repealing the five-year ban for legal immigrants to access Medicaid
• Ensuring that pregnant women in the United States, who will be giving birth to U.S. citizens, are eligible along with their unborn children for health care regardless of their immigration status.
• Legal immigrants pay the same taxes as U.S. citizens and their health care needs cannot be ignored.
• 1991 Bishops paper on Health care states: special attention must be given to ensuring that those who have suffered from inaccessible and inadequate health care are first brought back into an effective system of quality care.
• This debate can be advanced by a continuing focus on the common good and a healthy respect for genuine pluralism.

Jesus Christ modeled the healing ministry that all people of Christian faith are called to support. To promote the common good, Catholics are called by Church teaching, our recent popes and the USCCB to respect the right to health care and support health care reform.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states(#2211), the “state has a duty” to ensure the “right to medical care.”

Archbishop Tomasi, Vatican Observer to the UN, states: “access to primary health care everywhere is vital to improving global health...sickness and viruses have no boundaries.”

www.usccb.org    www.educationforjustice.org

Health Care Reform

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Priorities for Health Care Reform:

Supports universal health coverage which protects the life and dignity of all, especially those who are poor and vulnerable:

·             Catholic teaching insists that basic health care is a right and is essential to protect human life and dignity.

·             Genuine health care reform which protects human life and advances universal coverage is a moral imperative and an vital national obligation.

·             Health care reform should be genuinely affordable.

·             Medicaid cost-sharing protections should be maintained and the lowest income enrollees should be protected against burdensome cost sharing.

·             The U.S. bishops urge increases in eligibility levels.

·             For Catholics, universal coverage should be truly universal, assuring decent health care for all from conception to natural death.

Catholic Social Teaching : Option for and with the poor and vulnerable:

·             A basic moral test of society is how its most vulnerable members are faring.

·             It is the lesson of the parable of the Last Judgment (Mt 25).

·             Our tradition calls us to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable first.

·             We are called to respond to the needs of all, but those with the greatest needs require the greatest response.

Pacem In Terris by Pope John XXIII says:

·             Man has a right to live. He has a right to bodily integrity and the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest and necessary social services.

·             He has a right to be looked after in the event of ill health, disability stemming from his work, old age, enforced unemployment, or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood. (8)

www.usccb.org  Papal Enclyclical Pacem in Terris 1963