The American Health Care Act’s Prosperity Gospel
a recent interview on the AHCA between Alabama’s Representative Mo Brooks and CNN’s Jake Tapper. “[The plan] will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool,” Brooks claimed. “That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
.. it’s exactly what Republicans aren’t supposed to say about their health-care bill. Most Republicans paint their support for the AHCA in terms of the deficiencies of Obamacare, the problems low-income people face obtaining affordable health-care, or a perceived inability of the country to pay for the broad benefits of the program.
.. Even provisions that are obviously more rooted in a moral background, like support for work requirements in Medicaid, are painted as pieces that will make the whole law better and benefit the lives of everyone involved.
.. Brooks’s explanation, and his close association of morality and health, with the idea that “good lives” produce good health, is just a recasting of the prosperity gospel.
What’s a religious philosophy mostly pioneered by wealthy televangelists and megachurches got to do with pre-existing conditions and Medicaid reform? The beliefs of some evangelicals connecting wealth to God’s favor became intertwined with faith healing, and both rose to new heights in the television era on the backs of men like Oral Roberts. .. faith healing was also undeniably a policy statement. It at least partially rejected the role of science in public health and encouraged a view that faith, virtue, and good works could be enough to secure healing.
.. Some proto-form of prosperity gospel animated the life and works of men like Andrew Carnegie, who neatly tied individualism, capitalism, and wealth accumulation together in his own Gospel of Wealth.
That book, a foundational defense of capitalism and income inequality based on the perceived intellectual differences and contributions of laborers and capital-owners, was also rooted in a certain form of muscular Christianity that placed health and wealth as the near-inevitable consequences of a life well-lived, and sickness as a curse for the damned.
.. one of the key indicators of a person’s lifetime health quality is that of their parents.