By LILAH LOHR
PHILADELPHIA — E.J. Dionne Jr. and Ramesh Ponnuru sat down with CHA's new chairman, Joseph Swedish, and engaged in a gentlemanly session of point-counterpoint during a Catholic Health Assembly keynote about politics.
"When do you expect health care finally to surface as a topic during the presidential campaign?" Swedish, president and chief executive of Trinity Health in Novi, Mich., wanted to know.
"It inevitably will come up," replied Dionne, author, liberal opinion writer for the Washington Post and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. During the June 4 session, he talked about the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's difficult position in taking a strong stance against it, having supported an individual mandate in a Massachusetts health care bill he signed into law during his term as governor.
Ponnuru, author, senior editor at the National Review and a frequent conservative commentator on television and radio, agreed. Neither Romney nor President Barack Obama is comfortable with the politics of health care in the election, but neither will be able to dodge it, he said.
But, Ponnuru continued in another exchange, whatever happens after the court's decision and after the election, examination of entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, is "a debate the country needs to have."
The speakers answered questions from Swedish and the audience, discussing aspects of the liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican positions on the federal budget, taxes, the deficit, the size of government and January 2013's looming "taxageddon," a $7 trillion collection of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to kick in after the end of 2012 unless Congress acts before then.
Then Sr. Rosemary Smith, SC, a canonical consultant and Assistant General Superior of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, stepped up to a microphone.
"I'd like to pursue a question about the intersection of church politics and U.S. politics," she said. "Specifically, how might the current focus by the U.S. bishops on religious freedom affect the outcome of health care reform in general, and the upcoming election in particular? Secondly, É perhaps feeding that, is the current tension between the sisters in the United States and the Vatican. Will there be any impact" from these two important issues? she wondered.
"In the nicest, kindest, warmest way, you just dropped the big bomb," said Dionne, to a roar of laughter from the audience.
"I'm very alarmed about what's happening in the church É what some of the bishops are up to," he said, adding that he fears the issue has become part of a highly partisan critique of the president. "We Catholics are committed to everyone getting health insurance," Dionne said. "That has been a uniform, broad decision across the church — now, to put that in the back of the bus and to have this fight over religious liberty (that) I worry will not be very well defined É this very much troubles me."
For his part, Ponnuru observed, "I am conservative, and I am Catholic, but I don't want to be a conservative Catholic. I don't want to define myself by opposition to my fellow brothers in Christ who have different political views than I do."
That said, he continued, "where you worry about what is going on with the bishops, I worry about what is going on in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services and hope they are going to do a rethinking.
"I am not sure how interested the administration is in accommodation," he said, calling the White House tone-deaf when it has come to issues of religious liberty.
The administration does need to make a choice, he said. "And I'm not sure where they are going to come down or what they are thinking, but it seems to me there are quite a few Democrats who think this is a winning political issue, that having a culture war where the bishops can be portrayed as simply wanting to keep people from access to contraception, is going to be something that will help them in November.
"If that is the view of Democrats, or the prevailing view of Democrats, I think it a serious political miscalculation — but it is not clear to me that that isn't their view," Ponnuru said, to applause.