Teaser | “McAllen [Texas] …is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.” What is going on here?

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Read about it | The New Yorker article, “The Cost Conundrum, What a Texas town can teach us about health care,” by Dr. Atul Gawande in the June 1 issue

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Reflect | Which of the people interviewed in the article is most like you? Where, if at all, do you see the dynamics described in this article at play?

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Weigh In | With five clicks, let us know what you think.  After you weigh in, see the results so far.

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Culture Shift invites consideration of deep cultural issues we need to face in order to build a sustainable and just U.S. health system. Read, reflect, weigh in, and converse with others. Through this process of public conscience work, you contribute to reshaping health care for the next generation.

What kind of world do we want to leave the children in our lives and communities? Help your faith community explore this by using the Prayer Tent for Children’s Health Care. The resource includes a six-sided prayer tent as well as six accompanying inserts in both English and Spanish. The tent is also available in Vietnamese.

You can use this over six weeks or as a focused reflection for a week. Created in 2006, faith communities continue to find this resource useful.

| Prayer Tent and Inserts (English): PDF |

| Prayer Tent and Inserts (Spanish): PDF |

| Prayer Tent (Vietnamese): PDF |

Center founder Jack Glaser notes that “covering the uninsured is a flawed moral frame.” At the same time, this annual focus on U.S. health care offers a valuable opportunity to engage people in conversations and action to build a better U.S. healthcare system.

Within St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), we invite colleagues to explore “Reshaping Health Care for the 21st Century” and to consider using these resources throughout the year.

Click here for resources offered to SJHS ministries. Feel free to download and edit these for use in your setting.

Click here for resources offered by Catholic Health Association, USA.

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U.S. Health Care as Chronic Social Sin

Author: Jack W. Glaser, STD

Jack Glaser posits that U.S. health care is an instance of chronic social sin–how child labor was in 1850–an inherited moral pathology, deeply anchored in societies and individuals, needing radical, systemic transformation, but so colossal that it intimidates rather than animates energy for reform.

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Author: Jack. W. Glaser, STD

The author maintains that reforming our health care system is a huge challenge, as great in magnitude and as difficult to achieve as abolishing slavery or winning women the right to vote. He argues that we need to begin by stepping back to question what values underpin our nation’s health care system.

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Covering a Nation

Author: Jack W. Glaser, STD

A moral frame is the crisp, pointed presentation of a complex issue that goes to the heart of the matter. In this article, working with this definition, I will argue that:

• “Covering the Uninsured” (CTU), or some variation of that slogan, is the dominant but unexamined moral frame for those of us who seek health care reform in the United States.
• Unfortunately, however, the CTU frame leads us down the wrong path and does significant disservice to the health care reform movement.
• I propose that we frame reform in terms of system, not symptom, along these lines: “Create the system we never built.”

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The 80/20 Law of Organizational Ethics

Author: Jack W. Glaser, STD

In this article I want to explore the interdependent relationship between the ethics of a society and the ethics of organizations that flourish within that society. Specifically, my focus is on how the ethics of U.S. health care shapes and limits the ethics of Catholic health care institutions. My conclusion: long-term, Catholic health ministry will be an empty shell, absent radical reform of U.S. health care.

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Tools for Ethical Discernment: The Ministry Needs Help in Analyzing Health Care Reform Proposals

Author: Jack W. Glaser, STD

“Ethical wisdom is the gift not of ethical experts, but rather, as I have argued in a previous Health Progress article, the gift of the right community—the ‘community of concern.’”

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