Values and Spirituality Within Health Care Policy

Religion and Public Policy
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Spiritual beliefs form the bulk of most of the people’s logical processes when relating to internal and external issues. One of the external aspects that have been largely affected by spiritual beliefs is political ideologies. This stems from the fact that political ideologies are belief systems and they are closely associated giving people perspective much like spiritual beliefs (Skene & Parker, 2002). Relative to the spiritual beliefs, people associate certain policies with prosperity and others with demise of the social benefits. It is also common among people with spiritual beliefs to associate with certain policies and the process of formulation. Spiritual beliefs affect the priority given to policies, the roles of the elected officials and how the society should be governed (Didonato, 2013). Aspects such as socialism, communism, nationalism, gender equality and even jihadist ideologies are all based largely on spiritual beliefs. Policies are largely evaluated on grounds of how they fit in with the larger spiritual beliefs in the society.
One of the major areas that can easily be used to illustrate the spiritual beliefs and the influence in the policies is the latest health care policies reforms that have been largely affected. At the center of spiritual beliefs is the aspect of faith. In the US, the aspect of spiritual beliefs has over the last few years shown its level of influence in the process of policy formulation and implementation as pertains to health care. In the recent show down, there has been an illustration of the different spiritual beliefs and their differing political ideologies (Kirkpatrick, 2013). On one hand the Faith for Health campaign has been championing for progressive ideologies while the Freedom Federation champions for the conservative view on the health care bills. While these may spiritually led groups, their views are wide spread and affect the general population and their beliefs as well as their political ideologies. In a poll that was conducted in the year 2009, by the Pew Research Center, indicated that more than 42% of the American population was in support of the health care proposals that were being debated by congress, while 44% were opposed to the issues and roughly 14% of the population did not have an opinion (Kirkpatrick, 2013). In 1993 when President Clinton had proposed to overhaul the health care systems with some radical provisions, he went to the religious leaders for support (Kirkpatrick, 2013). However, a campaign organized by opposing the reforms cited end of life decisions and funding for abortion and the reforms failed.
The relationship that exists between public policy and religious ethics elicits sharp opinions. For most people religion forms the backbone of moral codes...