Should private ensurers cover prayer? This article discusses the lobbyists who want prayer and faith healing to be recognized as a form of medical treatment.
'Why' isn't the question," Breuer said. It's "Why are we excluding it?"
A lifelong Christian Scientist, Breuer of San Mateo is a full-time practitioner, meaning she provides prayer professionally for the purposes of healing. Breuer was trained by a church-sanctioned teacher and is paid by those who come to her for healing.
With time running short for Congress to pass a health care bill by Christmas, Christian Scientists are lobbying lawmakers to include a provision that would ban discrimination against "religious and spiritual" health care and encourage private insurers to cover prayer as medical treatment.
Such a provision was passed by committees in both the House and the Senate this year, but was stripped from the House bill as well as the current version being debated in the Senate. But Christian Scientists are hoping they can still get the measure reinserted into the Senate bill, and ultimately locked into the final legislation.
The article states that the Christian Science lobbyists "acknowledge that prayer services don't always work, but said traditional medical treatments don't always work either."
Let's try, prayer doesn't ever work, ever. And when it fails....
Like in this example:
Attorneys for Jeff and Marci Beagley of Oregon City had argued state law allows children older than 15 to seek their own medical care and that state social workers had concluded 16-year-old Neil Beagley was not in danger.
Neil Beagley died less than three months later of a urinary tract blockage.
The Beagleys belonged to a religious sect that subscribes to faith healing and rejects mainstream medical treatment. The teen's parents face charges of negligent homicide.
The couple's daughter and her husband were acquitted of manslaughter this past summer in the death of their own 15-month-old daughter, Ava Worthington.
The (Portland) Oregonian reported Wednesday Clackamas County Judge Steven Maurer ruled it would be up to the jury to determine how much weight to place on the interaction between the Beagleys and the social workers.
Two children who did not have to die were allowed to because of religious faith. And since our laws recognize that leaving a grave illness up to prayer is a form of medical neglect--how would it make sense to legally put it on the same footing as actual science-based medecine?
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