Ecclesiastical References for Health Care

My last post touched on the Ecclesiastical References used at BYU.

BYU is a university system with some 30,000 students and several thousand employees. Students are required to obtain and sustain their ecclesiastical references throughout their course of studies. If a student sours on the LDS Church, the student is summarily expelled.

I was summarily expelled from the education department of the University of Utah for supporting school choice. My sympathies fall to students who are expelled for well reasoned beliefs. Being flunked out of school for regressive ideological reasons is devastating.

Anyway, BYU has some 30,000 students. Maintaining ecclesiastical references for this many students implies that there is a system for ecclesiastical references.

The ecclesiastical reference system is a stasi-like system that sits on the peripheral of the public education system here in Utah that tracks the activities of members of the community.

The ecclesiastical reference system is also handy for things like employee references. The LDS Church has a well established employment system to help local businesses be assured that their new hires are members of the church in good standing.

I also encountered this system while working for a local insurance company.

A policyholder would file a claim with the company. The claims adjuster would call telephone numbers owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The conversation would not be recorded but appeared weigh heavily in the decision to approve or deny claims.

Management claimed that calling people with local knowledge of claimants was a good fraud prevention technique. I argued if that if ever a lawyer subpenaed the insurance company's phone records that the insurance company would be sued into submission.

(Yes, I tend to have rocky relationships with employers. Personally, I think I did the company a favor by telling them to stop making the calls on the company's phone records.)

Now, fraud is a big problem in insurance. Local knowledge is a great way to cut down on fraud.

As for the charitable aspects of health care, I have no objection to the church or politicians weighing in on who should receive charity or how much they receive.

If a person decides to leave the church and become an apostate, then that person has no claim on charity from the church.

Problems arise because insurance confuses the charitable and basic aspects of health care.

In our confused insurance company, people pay into crazy insurance pool.  If they are denied basic care because of the same system that would deny charitable care, then we are doing the people a disservice.

I don't care if a person is Mormon, Gentile or Jack-Mormon. (In Utah, the term "gentile" refers to anyone outside the LDS Faith. So, if you are say Jewish; you are a gentile). I want a health care system that first secures basic care for people, then starts providing advanced and charitable care for people.

Utahans are a regressive lot. I suspect that few members of the LDS Church have a problem with denying apostates and gentiles the basic care they paid for. But, to me a system where people are denied care because of a covert stasi-like monitoring system is a broken system.

But this might make for a interesting debate: Should the same system used to deny students education at BYU  be used to deny health care?