A parable come to life

I heard a story on the radio this morning about a non-profit hospital that is being investigated because it is suing some of its poorest patients. This is happening around the country and it involves hundreds of patients but the story concentrated on one family. In this case, the family had a low enough income that they should have been eligible for free medical care under the hospital's own charity guidelines. But instead, the hospital has had the family's pay docked for 10 years and they still owed $25,000.

Senator Grassley of Iowa has been working for years to make hospitals accountable for the tax breaks they receive as non-profits and he also made sure that language in the Affordable Care Act (sometimes called Obamacare) got hospitals to provide more charitable care. By the way, Senator Grassley is a Republican - there is room for both parties to work together for the common good). From the NPR story,

Grassley says the health care law may need to be strengthened in order to force nonprofit hospitals to offer financial assistance to poor patients. "If they don't get the message now, we'll have to work towards getting the ideal language in the legislation," Grassley told NPR and ProPublica.

Non-profit hospitals have been offered a gift of not having to pay federal income tax or local property tax. Yet some of them turn around and refuse to help those who owe them. This reminds me of one of Jesus' parable as told in Matthew 18. It's sometimes referred to as The Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor.

“Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.

“But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.
“But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

“His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

“When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’" Matthew 18:23-33 NLT

It's not exactly the same, of course. In the parable, Jesus is explaining how we have been forgiven so much and that we should, in turn, forgive those people in our lives who have done things to us. If we can't forgive them, we are no better than the unforgiving servant in the parable. But the similarity is the blindness of the hospital that is similar to the blindness of the unforgiving servant. We must be careful, though, to not look for revenge but we cannot just let it go, either. We must work to correct injustice and stop the Unforgiving Debtors of the world to continue their selfish behavior. Hats off to Senator Grassley for his attention to this.