Healthcare Reform and Prayer

With healthcare reform moving ever closer to reality, supporters and opponents are scrambling to add and subtract provisions. The Senate may take longer to vote than its House of Representatives counterparts, but debate is still going strong. Majority Leader Harry Reid is mediating battles over the public option, cost, illegal immigrants, abortion coverage...and prayer? Yes, apparently there is a clause in the Senate Finance and Health committees' versions of the bill that would require health insurance plans to provide coverage for "religious or spiritual health care", including prayer services. Such a provision brings up multiple questions. Mandated coverage has the potential to drive up premiums for questionable results. If it passes, such care would be also included in the public option, possible opening the government up to legal problems.

Prayer treatment, such as that offered by Christian Scientists, consist of the arrangement of a large group of people to pray for a patient's speedy recovery. Some studies have indicated that it may have a positive effect on some people's conditions. However, that could be due to the patient feeling comfort and support as opposed to any spiritual intervention. A positive attitude, on the other hand, has been proven to help cancer patients and others. Knowing that others are praying for you (if you are religious) is no dobut reassuring. While someone could ask their own place of worship (if any) to pray for them, promoters of formal prayer treatment claim that they can provide a wider variety of prayers from religious practitioners for up to $40 per day. Most of this treatment supplements conventional medicine, making it unclear where improvements are coming from. In other cases, it serves to replace traditional treatments. It would be a large expense for private and public health insurance plans alike, without the evidence-based testing proposed by the Obama administration as a method of reducing healthcare costs.

Also, these types of religious treatments open the federal government up to potentially costly charges of religious discrimination. Although the requirement would only apply to those health insurance plans participating in the proposed insurance exchange, it is still risky. A public option that covers prayer may violate the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment, which states that the government cannot promote one religion or absence of religion over another. Even in the private health insurance market, consumers with other religions or no religion at all will resent that their health insurance plan is subsidizing another faith. Supporters of the separation between church and state, including atheists, would have a good chance at convincing the ACLU to take the case. The government, though, could argue that--since there is no religious preference for coverage and patients are allowed to choose what, if any, religion to recieve treatment under--it should pass legal muster. It would probably end up an issue for the Supreme Court to decide. Other critics believe that requiring reimbursement for such "pseudoscience" will result in greater waste in our health care system. It could also create a slippery slope for other religions to receive public funding. Initially, the money spent on spiritual treatment will be small because the Christian Science church has relatively few members. Later on, however, America's major religions could create various treatments for their tens of millions of adherents, which insurers will also be forced to cover.

So who is responsible for sneaking this provision into the Senate's health reform bill into the first place? It was a joint effort; Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, along with Democrats John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy, sponsored the amendment. Hatch's support is surprising, since there is virtually zero chance that he will vote for reform. Kennedy may have had his own personal reasons, but he and Kerry were/are representing Massachusetts--the state that's home to the Christian Science church lobbying for coverage of its treatment. However, Kerry denies that religious and spiritual care must be covered under his amendment; rather, it would only prevent discrimination by health insurance plans against legitimate medical expenses (as deemed by the IRS) if they also happen to be spiritually-based. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi removed similar proposals from two House of Representatives commitee bills, fearing that they are unconstitutional. On the other hand, Reid is noncommittal about the future of prayer coverage in his bill.

Yamileth Medina is an up-and-coming expert on Health Insurance industry and Healthcare Reform.