Howard: Government funded faith healing neglects Constitutional restrictions

By Giles Howard / Columnist

published: Wed, 4 Nov, 2009

Believe it. There’s a version of the Senate health care bill that would elevate faith healing to the level of clinical medicine, the Los Angeles Times reported. The provision, inserted by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, with the support of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, is designed to reimburse individuals for Christian Science prayer treatments.

Based in Massachusetts, the Church of Christ, Scientist is a Christian denomination that eschews clinical medicine in favor of faith healing and specifically encourages the use of prayer to heal people. They charge between $20 and $50 per day for this prayer, and it is this charge that the Senate provision would reimburse.

This bi-partisan Senate provision is emblematic of the dangers of government involvement in health care. If the provision survives consolidation with the House bill, the U.S. government would recognize and pay for prayer as medicine.

Christian Science is a religion whose adherents deny their children medical care for chronic illnesses and life-threatening diseases. Certainly, these individuals are constitutionally free to practice their special brand of theological quackery, but denying children medical care and to risk sending them to early graves as a result should simply be criminal.

Or at least it was criminal until the 1970s and ’80s, when Christian Scientists successfully lobbied legislatures in 45 states to enact laws that protect parents who practice faith healing from prosecution for child abuse or neglect if they deny their children medical care, the The Wall Street Journal reported.
Children denied medical attention according to the tenets of Christian Science have died from diabetes, appendicitis, diphtheria, measles and many other preventable and treatable illnesses. Now, three senators would fund this theology and recognize it as medicine.

There is no absolute account of how many children have died as a result of Christian Science neglect, but a 1998 study in the journal Pediatrics reported that 172 children whose parents withheld medical treatment from them for religious reasons died between 1975 and 1995. Of these deaths, “140 fatalities were from conditions for which survival rates with medical care would have exceeded 90 percent” and only 43 of the 172 reported deaths were ever prosecuted.

Because Christian Scientists rarely report their children’s illness to doctors, hospitals or other authorities, these 172 documented deaths have to be understood as only a fraction of the number of children who have died as a result of not receiving medical treatment for religious reasons.
Not content to simply see state laws enacted that protect negligent parents from prosecution, lobbyists for the Church of Christ, Scientist approached universal health care laws as a way to further legitimize this theology and even have it funded by the state.

When Massachusetts enacted a statewide universal health care program in 2006, Christian Scientists successfully lobbied to include a provision in the bill that allowed people to opt-out of the plan for religious reasons. The Church lobbyists then secured reimbursements for faith healing similar to the provision in the current Senate bill.

As a result, taxes in the state of Massachusetts are used to pay for faith healing and other “medical” programs offered by Christian Scientists.
Although the developments in Massachusetts are troubling, the implications of such provisions being applied at the federal level could be disastrous.
First, the expenditure of federal tax dollars on religious services constitutes a clear breach of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause and the very spirit of the doctrine of separation of church and state. These Constitutional concerns effectively scuttled the Christian Science provisions in the House health care bill and currently represent the most effective argument to defeat similar provisions in the Senate.

Second, if the provision remains in the bill and the bill is passed, faith healing would be federally elevated to the level of clinical medicine. This could grant Christian Scientists and other similar sects greater legal legitimacy and give them a stronger legal claim to control their children’s medical care in the case of a life-threatening illness.

This provision in the Senate health bill is an example of just how dangerous government involvement can be in health care when fringe interest groups are able to exert sufficient pressure on legislators in order to have their quackery recognized as medicine and funded by the state.

Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, http://www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.