Present concerns about state control of health care and the health care industry offers the opportunity to focus on Catholic thought and state intervention in private activities.

Two governing principles come to mind: subsidiarity and socialization.

Subsidiarity is the Catholic idea that nothing should be done at a higher level if it can be done well or better at a lower level.  Subsidiarity supports the understanding that we are a community of God’s children (brothers and sisters) in relationship with one another and obligated to share with, and care for, one another.  Subsidiarity creates a presumption that local is better and places the burden to prove otherwise on the state.

Socialization understands that some benefits can be derived from carefully planned state intervention when local action cannot effectively attend to a complex problem.

These two proposition are intended, in Catholic thought, to be tension.  There is, of course, no presumption that state intervention is the default answer to all problems.

On the contrary the presumption is with subsidiarity and local action as a way to insure community, the articulation of faithful action, and freedom.  Indeed, Pope Pius XI identified that “it is an injustice … a grave evil and a disturbance of right order, to transfer to the larger and higher collectivity functions which can be performed and provided for by a lesser and subordinate bodies.”

When socialization justifies intervention, Catholic thought instructs that such intervention creates rights and duties on all individuals subject to the intervention.  The intervention, it is assumed, must advance the physical and social order that is necessary and proper for human development of all and the preservation of the human dignity of each.  The intrusion of state authority into individual life is, it follows, to be pursued with caution.

It is in this context that one might view state control of health care.  Does subsidiarity hold sway or is intervention justified?  If intervention is justified, has the intervention been carefully planned?  Does state action claim only that control which furthers its narrow objective and solves a complex issue which cannot be solved at the local level?  Does the state action advance the development and dignity of all humans or favor some over others, or limit freedom, and most importantly – does the intervention diminish the expression of faith and freedom of religious action and belief?

Be well.  Think carefully.