Owe No Man Anything Except to Love Him!

Thoughts on debt, borrowing and loving.

“Owe no man anything but to love one another.^[i] ”  Paul, a Jewish rabbi and early Christian apologist.

I think that it was Lord Polonius in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” who said,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”

What is it with our inability to use our common sense!  Most of us will have heard the saying about various financial schemes that we are presented with.  “If it is too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.”  I don’t mind how many Nobel Prizes for economics someone may have.  At the end of the day, history makes it clear that a day of reckoning will always come.  As another wise man said, “The borrower is the slave to the lender.”^[ii]

Recently this was brought home to me in the experience of a friend of mine.  My wife and I are quite involved in some local housing projects, and in helping some residents understand basic financial principals.  One young man that I have been helping with advice and counsel over the past couple of years has slowly pulled himself up by his bootstraps, by hard work and long hours, and by building some solid moral foundations into his life.  When you are poor, there are many ready and willing to take advantage of you.  Among the worst of these are money lenders and governments!  In this case it was the money lender.  “Just secure this payday loan with your car and the $400 you need for the unexpected medical bill can easily be taken care of.”

Easily, yes; permanently, no!  Because if you don’t pay this back (with 30% interest) within 25 days, you lose your car, and then your job (because you can’t get to it), and in time your shirt!  Someone needs to help this young man both read the small print and understand the consequences of defaulting.  Thankfully he had a friend to hand to help him understand the consequences of “easy” decision making.  As we look at health care reform as a country, we would do well to find some good friends who would speak the truth to us.

No wonder the same Paul, who was quoted in the title of this article, tells us that we need friends who will “speak the truth in love,. . .(to help us) grow up.”^[iii]   We cannot endlessly finance change through borrowing on the backs of our children.  This is not a Democrat or Republican issue, but a moral issue.  And both political parties have failed us badly.  We must take responsibility for our own expenses, and for our own failures.  And the healthcare industry has been a part of the failure.  We have failed when we charge the least able to pay their medical bills two and three times as much as we charge those who are most able to pay their bills (i.e. the uninsured v’s the well insured).  We have failed when we automatically send out dunning notices at 45 days to those who owe us money rather than figure out with them why they cannot pay their bills on time.  In my father’s medical practice in the ‘50’s, if a patient couldn’t pay, then he would help them find an alternate way to deal with their bills.  This is not just a matter of writing the bills off, but of providing the dignity of expressing love while providing a way to enable the patient to carry their personal responsibility.

And this is precisely where governments carry as much blame as the money lenders.  By providing an appalling example of borrow-borrow-and then borrow some more, and by consistently trapping people in the poverty of entitlement rather than the freedom of personal responsibility, a whole nation becomes ensnared in the “easy” answer rather than the appropriate answer.

As health care reform continues to unfold, all of us need to ask what we can do that will demonstrate the moral superiority of the timeless wisdom of Paul and Shakespeare?  This does come down to some seriously uncomfortable questions that most are unwilling to ask.  So don’t then blame Obama when government comes along and challenges our assumptions on medical loss ratios.  Don’t get me wrong.  Any of you who have read this monthly column will know that I am no lover of government as the answer to our ills.  But again, as Paul rightly said in another of his essays,“^[iv]For the authorities do not frighten people who are doing right, but they frighten those who do wrong.”  When was the last time that you heard of an insurance company choosing to deliberately cut profit margins to help provide a more readily accessible service, or of a TPA that always goes the extra mile to help patients understand their policy and coverage.

I suspect that the answers to health care reform do not really begin in the political arena, but rather in the realm of morals and philosophy.  I remember reading some research back in my medical days showing that the caring help of non-trained Moms was as much help as that coming from fully trained psychotherapists for most people with neuroses.  Maybe we need something similar now.  Middle America may lack the sophistication and academic qualifications of the political elite, but by tapping into their common sense wisdom and their willingness to apply classic American love and generosity to the problems that face us as a nation, we are more likely to get back on course than recklessly pursuing the current options being presented to us.  America is the land that came up with a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild her friends and her enemies after the Second World War.  With that sort of generosity at her core, this same great nation can come up with healthcare reform that will reward hard work, personal responsibility and risk, even while taking care of the needs of all of this country’s citizens. This would be a wonderful example of “owe no man anything accept to love Him.”

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[i]  Romans 13:8

[ii]  King Solomon in Proverbs 22:7

[iii]  Ephesians 4:15

[iv]  Romans 13:3