• play show:

The Health Care "Table of Plenty": Who Gets a Chair?

This week, it's the ninth in our series, Conversations on the Common Good, a concept at the heart of the social teachings of faith traditions across the board.  

We devote our entire hour to a discussion of one of the most exasperating challenges facing the United States: universal health care.   At a time when at least 47 million Americans went uninsured last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the problem of health care just won't go away.  To shed some light on this issue, we brought in four guests with a medley of mindsets: an economist, a moral philosopher, a public health professor, and a minister. 

All four take a hard look at universal health care from an ethical, rather than policy-minded, point of view.

Join us as our round table of thinkers consider key questions, including:  Is health care a basic human right or something to be bought and sold?  An individual responsibility or a social concern?  How does the current system violate the common good?  And what needs to happen to change it? 

"Who should be allowed to sit at our health care table of plenty?" asks Dr. Len Nichols, the health care economist. "To me, that's a question of community."

Guests:

Dr. Ann Neale, Senior Research Scholar, Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University,

Dr. Ahmed Moen, Professor in Health Management Sciences, Howard University

Dr. Len Nichols, Director of the Health Policy Program, New America Foundation

Rev. Linda Walling, Executive Director of Faithful Reform in Health Care