Our Faith, Their Health

We read about about a man named Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-14.

Naaman was the general in charge of Syria’s army. He was important and powerful. He also had a disease.

Because Naaman was important and powerful, he had servants. One of them was a captured Israelite girl who told Naaman’s wife about a prophet in her home country who could cure Naaman.

Because Naaman was important and powerful, he had resources. Because he had resources, he was able to set out for Israel to visit Elisha, the prophet the servant was talking about. He took a lot of money and other valuables with him in case the prophet’s services required steep payment. Or maybe Naaman’s health insurance plan included a high deductible.

Let’s imagine a different scenario. Suppose the servant was sick. Suppose she mentioned to her masters that a prophet in her home country could help her. How likely is it that a servant with no privilege and no financial resources would be able to access the healthcare available through the prophet?

I had a conversation a while back with someone who had good health insurance and considerable personal wealth. He had recently traveled a long way to undergo a very specialized surgery for a life-threatening disease. He was telling me that his prescriptions cost him several thousand dollars out of pocket per month after his insurance paid what it would pay.

I asked him what people in his situation would do if they didn’t have a lot of money.

He shrugged.

It was a powerful shrug.

He probably meant it to say, “I don’t know what they’d do,” but it really said, “They’d die.” They would die because they aren’t privileged and wealthy enough to have access to the kind of care he received.

Many reports inform us of problems associated with a lack of access to healthcare or the cost of healthcare in the United States. For example, about 530,000 families file for bankruptcy each year, mainly due to medical bills (that’s 66.5% of all bankruptcies). About 27 million nonelderly individuals are uninsured, and one in five of them will not seek medical care because of concerns about cost. Women and people of color experience harmful disparities in receiving healthcare.

Some of us are like Naaman in that we have the resources to get whatever treatment we need. Some of us are like the servant in that we don’t have such resources. And others of us are somewhere in the middle—we have insurance and access to healthcare, but a serious illness might still cause us considerable financial strain.

Some of you may be thinking, “Now wait a minute. This unit is on ‘Prophetic Reminders: Keeping God at the Center,’ and this lesson is titled ‘God Is Present.’ Why are you talking about healthcare? Don’t the unit and the lesson focus on what God does? Shouldn’t you be writing about how God healed Naaman? Shouldn’t you be emphasizing what God did and does?”

Those are good questions.

God healed Naaman, but God worked through the servant and through Elisha to create the opportunity for healing. The servant and the prophet were both God’s people, and as God’s people they contributed to Naaman’s healing.

Access to and payment for healthcare are complicated issues, and I don’t pretend to know the solutions.

But as God’s people living in the United States in 2019, shouldn’t we be asking how God might want to work through us to make the opportunity for healing more available to everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic standing?

Shouldn’t we want Naaman’s employee to have the same access to healthcare that Naaman had?

(This article first appeared on Coracle, the blog of Next Sunday Resources.)