On May 4th, 2012, I was a guest on the Steve Clark radio program on Altoona's Big 1290
WFBG AM to discuss the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare"), the HHS
mandate, and the Catholic response. The
following transcript from the two hour interview has been slightly edited for clarity.
My entire radio interview with Steve Clark is available online at
Steve Clark (SC): So the first thing you're going to ask is,
OK, Dr. Brian Kopp, what are you going to be talking about today? Are you going
to be talking about foot care, since Dr. Kopp is a Podiatrist? Tell us a little
bit about who you are first.
Brian Kopp, DPM (BK): I am a
Podiatrist in private practice in Johnstown PA. I grew up about three blocks
from your studio here, so I could see...
SC: Get out of here! Did you
really?
BK: Yes, we could see the towers
from our front porch. So this is my "stomping ground."
SC: I can't imagine anybody from
here moving to Johnstown.
BK: I couldn't imagine it at the
time either.
SC: So I guess opportunity just
presented itself.
BK: Its where the Lord provided,
its where I ended up. But I love coming back to Hollidaysburg. Its home. We come in to Hollidaysburg every
Sunday, visiting my parents and brothers and sisters. So this is home.
SC: So you deal with peoples'
foot problems?
BK: Yes.
SC: All day long?
BK: Yes.
SC: God bless you. You know there
are certain specialties in the medical profession, and I'm not going to go into
them, but there are certain specialties that, if I had to be a doctor, I'm not
so sure this is an area I would go into ...
You got to have a calling.
BK: It's a good profession
because people come in to us with pain, and they leave feeling better. So there
is a lot of personal satisfaction in what we do.
SC: But that's not why you're
here today.
BK: No, that's not why I'm here
today. Actually what we do is a geriatric specialty so we have a lot of elderly
patients, a lot of retirees, and this health reform is a big issue for them.
SC: I would assume you're
dealing with a lot of diabetes and...
BK: A lot of diabetes,
peripheral vascular disease, a lot of real serious problems.
SC: And obviously, the whole
health care thing. You are a practicing Catholic. You have been sucked into
this group, is there a name? My buddies Mark Frederick and Mark Chuff's group.
Is it a group, an organization, do we have a name?
BK: They call the group,
"For Life and Liberty." If you log into Facebook you can put in
"For Life and Liberty."
SC: I never knew that!
BK: Yes, they are posting stuff
occasionally there, publishing their ads in the local papers, under that
headline "For Life and Liberty." They've run ads in the Altoona
and Johnstown papers and Pittsburgh
Tribune Review. So they're doing multimedia and so on. They're doing good work.
SC: Trying to spread the word,
not just about the Affordable Care Act but about what aspects of the act are
going to create some serious problem. Not just for Catholics, but for a number
of people of faith, who happen to be in various types of businesses, whether it
be a school of higher learning, whether it be a non-profit charity, a health
care organization, a local clinic or hospital or whatever, where they have
employees and they provide health care
coverage to their employees. ObamaCare is mandating that, in now less than a
year, you have got to provide, not have access to, but actually provide
contraceptive care, abortifacient procedures, the morning after pill,
sterilization procedures to those employees. And you've got to provide that
free of charge to the members of your health group. Even if those particular
procedures go against the tenets of your
faith. That's where the problem is.
BK: That is where the problem
is! This is the issue that is near and dear to our hearts as pro-life
Catholics. We are being coerced against our conscience to provide procedures,
to provide medications, to provide care that is diametrically opposed to what
we believe as Roman Catholics, as Christians. It really is an attack on
religious freedom. You'll notice that in the rhetoric this administration is
using, they've gone from calling it "freedom of religion" to
"freedom of worship.
They're essentially saying you
can go to church on Sunday, worship God in those four walls, but don't you dare
take it out of those four walls! There is really a war on religion going on. And
because that's not necessarily politically correct in the wider population,
they are hiding it by saying there is a war on women, and that we're preventing
women from accessing care they need.
Nobody is preventing women from
accessing care! The care is out there, its eminently affordable, its dirt cheap
and in many cases its free. So the idea that the Church is having, or
conservatives are having, a war on women is ridiculous.
SC: There are so many directions
we can go with this here. The first thing I want to do is establish the fact
that For Life and Liberty, Mark and Mark, you and the rest of the group (I
consider myself a de facto member of the group), we are not necessarily in the
majority. We are not necessarily even in the majority of the Catholic Church.
According to the poll numbers, and again, you take poll numbers with a certain
[skepticism], I have already seen ads that are in fact in rebuttal to the ads
you guys have run!
BK: Yes, I have seen one in
Johnstown that was just brutal.
SC: Yeah, there was one in
Johnstown, "Catholics For Contraception" They want to see the Church
change its policies on contraception. A lot of Catholics, a lot of Evangelicals
who don't necessarily believe the same thing as the Catholic Church...
BK: More and of them do every
day.
SC: Yes, but there are so many
out there. And of course the mainstream Protestant church, long ago, in the
1930s, you know, they believed the same thing [as the Catholic Church regarding
contraception]!
BK: Sure!
SC: You know, the Methodists
did, the Anglicans did, the Lutherans did, the Presbyterians did, back in the
1930s. There was a point when, all of a sudden, they changed their doctrine and
accepted artificial contraception as an acceptable practice.
BK: Not only did they believe in
it, they acted on it! The Protestant legislators in the late 1800s actually
passed laws forbidding the distribution of contraceptives. They were not
written by Catholics, they were written by Protestants. They were called the
Comstock laws. The Comstock laws were overturned in the 1960s by the Supreme
Court. Griswold Vs Connecticut laid the
groundwork for Roe Vs Wade because Griswold Vs Connecticut found that penumbra, that shadow of a right to
privacy. And ironically the legalization of abortion was based on the striking
down of the last remaining Protestant laws prohibiting the sale and
distribution of contraception.
SC: This is an uphill climb for
you, and the reason I brought all this up is because I've seen the poll
numbers, and in fact I have one here that is incredibly disturbing to me. We
were talking about abortion earlier in the week and I had mentioned the United
Nations effort right now. The UN
Secretary General is pushing very hard to have the member nations to provide
funds to provide more contraception, sterilization, and especially more
abortions to sub Saharan African countries where there is a lot of bad things
going on. Because of the AIDS outbreak, you have African men who are in many
cases raping young girls because they know they are HIV free. There are all
kinds of things going on, a terrible problem with rapes and pregnancies and the
United Nations is pushing very hard to have more money to provide for
abortions. So I went through and I got some numbers: 42 million abortions per
year world wide. 42 million souls are
extinguished world wide, 115,000 per day. The thing that jumped out at me, in
America, women who identified themselves as Protestants obtained 37.4% of all
abortions. Catholic women account for 31.3% of all abortions. Does that number
surprise you?
BK: It doesn't surprise me. What
you have to realize in polling, if somebody was born and baptized in the
Catholic Church, and hasn't set foot in a Catholic Church in the last 40 years
they still tend to self identify as Catholic. It's a cultural Catholicism, it's
not a religious Catholicism. When you do polling of people who actually go to
church every Sunday, these numbers change dramatically, but it also represents
a much smaller poll of Catholics. The number of people in this country who call
themselves Catholic comes up to around 60 million. When you look at the number
of people who actually go to church on Sunday, who actually believe the
teachings of the Church, "real Catholics" as we call them, not just
"Catholics in Name Only," that number shrinks to 30, 20, 15 million.
When you look at the number of people who actually believe and accept all the
teachings of the Church, we're down to 10-15 million.
SC: I saw numbers also when it
comes to contraception that sixty-some percent of Catholic women have or do
practice some form of artificial contraception.
BK: At some point in their life,
yes. And that's true. It's widely known. It's a failure on the part of many within the Church, both
within the body of the laity themselves to accept and understand the teachings
as well as our priests and bishops who have failed to teach it over the last 40
or 50 years. It's really intrinsically a failure of catechesis. It's a
wonderful teaching, it's an eminently defensible teaching, and it's something
that we need to get back to. Until we
do, we're going to keep failing on this issue. And it's really, maybe the
Obama administration saw this rupture
between the practice and the teachings, and said, "We can drive in a wedge
here." It's a really cynical approach.
SC: I'm bringing this up because this is not an
all encompassing position, the position that you, and Mark and Mark, and
"For Life and Liberty," and many of us who believe in the
unconstitutionality of this part of the ObamaCare mandate. I heard a priest in
a homily just several weeks ago say, "We've heard that there is a war on.
There's no war on the Church. People are making things up for their own
political thing." There are priests and bishops out there who don't feel
the way you do. There are people within
the Church, we mentioned the ad, "Catholics for Contraception," there
are people who want to see the Vatican say, "Well, OK, this is OK
now." This is an uphill climb that you're taking here.
BK: It is an uphill climb, but
it's something that has gone on since the very start of the Church. At one
time, one Apostle betrayed the Lord, one denied Him, and 10 ran away. During
the Reformation in England all the bishops except one betrayed the Church.
We've lived through times of betrayal and times of refusal to believe the
teachings of the Church since the beginning of the Church. This is nothing new.
We shouldn't be surprised when people fail because life is difficult. It's not
easy to accept all of the teachings of the Church. It's not an easy Faith. It
requires real courage and strength to stand up and believe what we believe. And
to not only believe it but to actually admit it and to actually defend it. We
are living in a time when God is raising up saints and raising up courageous
fighters for the culture wars, people that just are not going to back down,
because this is true and it is eminently defensible.
The reason we have to have
health care reform is because we have more elderly than we have young. We don't
have enough people paying into the system. We have a demographic inversion
where we have more old people than we have young people. You cannot prop up a
social welfare program when you don't have people coming in at the base to pay
into the system. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the reasons that neither
party has the willpower to close our borders. They don't want to stop illegal
immigration because they are hoping that the illegal immigrants will be
naturalized and will start paying into the system and prop up this failing
system. Ironically, right when we're desperately needing that - this ObamaCare
reform increases spending astronomically - this is the first time since the
Great Depression that more Mexicans are going back to Mexico than are coming
into the United States.
SC: But there are many who would
say that it's because of the economic situation right now in the United States,
it's because we don't have jobs.
BK: That's the superficial
explanation, that's part of it. But the other part of it is, even Mexico has a
decreasing fertility rate. They're just not having as many people as they used
to have, similar to the United States. Among western developed nations, only
the United States and Israel have an above replacement fertility level. To have
economic growth, you have to have kids. There's never been a case where you
have expanding economic growth with a contracting population base. It's not
economically possible. Orthodox economists will tell you, you have to have
people to have growing economies. When you have a contracting population base,
your economy always contracts. If you have a contracting economy the money you
have to spend on social services contracts, so you have to start rationing
care. You say to the Baby boomers, "Well, we're sorry, we don't have
people coming into the system to prop up what we've promised you, we're going
to take it away now. We don't have any choice."
So you get death panels, you get
rationing, you get all these elements of ObamaCare that we fear.
SC: OK, you've just used terms
that the opposition would take issue with, things like death panels and
rationing and so on. I want to get into some of the specifics, especially with
you being a doctor. I don't know whether
you've actually read the 2700 page health care bill or not. I've looked
at portions of it, summaries of it, we're finding new things all the time but I
want to get into the health care thing with you and what it will mean to the
average person, what it's going to mean to your patient. And from a Catholic
Church perspective, I want to hone in specifically on the mandate to provide what
they're calling women's health coverage.
Let's get into ObamaCare
specifically. You're a doctor. There's a lot of stuff here that people don't
know, they're not aware of, and there are changes that are happening right now
as a result of ObamaCare even though the Supreme Court may hopefully rule its
unconstitutionality come June.
BK: I think one of the first
things you need to look at it is that it changes the whole concept of medical
care and medical delivery. One of the concepts that people don't really realize
is that it changes the idea of your primary care physician, how you access
primary care and how the primary care physician controls...
SC: But I was told that I could
keep my doctor.
BK: You can keep a
doctor.
SC: No, he said that if I liked
my doctor I could keep my doctor.
BK: Uh, that's propaganda, which
is often employed to make something unpalatable palatable.
SC: You're saying there's a good
chance I can't keep my primary care physician?
BK: The primary care physician
might still be in the practice where you are seen for your primary care
physician, but what will happen is that more and more primary care decisions
will be made by lower level health care practitioners, nurse practitioners,
physician assistants. You might have a group practice where there is one
primary care physician that signs off on the
actions or the orders of the other personnel in the practice, but the
government is going to set up a matrix where you present to the office and they
type into the system what your symptoms are and what your age is, and they can
access your party affiliation because they have a big computer in the sky that
keeps track of all this stuff, and they will decide what health care you need
based on this matrix, this algorithm that the government health care has set
up.
There is something called the
Independent Payment Advisory Board. It's a non-elected board that determines
what health care will be delivered to who, on the basis of age and health and
so on. It's an unelected, unanswerable board. If you don't agree with the
decision of this independent board, you can appeal, but it's like appealing to
the IRS. The same people that run the IRS will be running your health care.
Everybody knows how difficult it
was back when we had the primary care system with managed care, the gatekeeper
and the whole frustration with referrals. It was very frustrating for us who
work in the specialties just trying to get referrals when the patient would
walk in the door and say, "Oh, I forgot to get my referral." So we had
to call the primary care physicians office, they're overwhelmed with these
requests, they don't want bothered. Its returning to the gatekeeper model, the
worst aspects of managed care, where they're going to try to control access to
specialists, to expensive tests.
SC: I want to get back to specifically some of
the things we started talking about, the gatekeeper concept, the decision
panels that will handle appeals...
BK: The "death
panels."
SC: Yeah, they call them death
panels. Whether or not you can actually get this treatment. Some faceless,
nameless appointed bureaucratic group who are going to decide whether or not,
because you are in your 70s or whatever, whether you are going to get this
cancer treatment or hip replacement or whether you are going to get this
particular treatment to take care of an issue with your foot.
BK: A perfect example is
dialysis. They've been trying for years to reverse this trend with dialysis
treatment for people past age 70 and more than likely under this system there will
be a cap. Once you are a certain age you just aren't going to get dialysis. If
you have kidney failure...
SC: Which means you die!
BK: ...you die. But they are so indignant when
people call these panels "death panels" but the concrete reality...
SC: But that's what they're
deciding!
BK: They're deciding life and
death, yes.
SC: It's like, OK, I have this
particular affliction, I need this drug or I need this therapy, to help me with
this affliction. You're going to tell me whether or not I'm allowed to have
this therapy.
BK: What they do is they use
window dressing to call it something it's not. They say, "Well, its futile
care, you're 78 years old, you're going to die anyways, its futile to keep
doing dialysis for the next 5 years. There's other people that are younger than
you, that voted a different party than you, that are more deserving of these
health care dollars..."
SC: OK, we have the gate keeper
concept, we have the death panels deciding what kind of care, what other little
neat kind of surprises are there in the Affordable Health Care Act that we just
absolutely don't know about and you as a physician who have been researching
this are finding out?
BK: One of the biggest aspects
of it is the sleight of hand they have been doing financially to pay for it.
This is a trillion dollar law, the most expensive law ...
SC: Actually the estimate now is
closer to three trillion. Let's face it, they're not going to take 550 billion
dollars from Medicare.
BK: Sure they are!
SC: No they're not, they're not
going to take it from that! You got to be kidding. Medicare is in trouble now,
they're not going to take that money from Medicare and put it over here,
they're just going to end up putting more money into the health care plan.
BK: Well this is true, but there
is also going to be rationing care. The way you save money from Medicare is you
ration care. If grandma has a stroke, you don't feed her, you just put her in
the palliative care unit and give her a little morphine, and she'll slip away
quietly. Obama said during his campaign, "We need to discourage people
from pursuing that expensive end of life care and encourage them to go into the
cost saving palliative care system." So he telegraphed, he told us what he
planned on doing with his health care reform. There is 500 billion dollars in
Medicare cuts in this plan. That's how he financed it. It costs a trillion
initially? He did it by saying we're going to cut 500 billion from Medicare.
And those things are not pie in the sky, they're real. This year cuts are being
made to inpatient psychiatric hospitals, the Medicare advantage program,
diagnostic imaging services, ambulance services.
SC: Now that's something that's
going away at the end of this year, the Medicare advantage program.
BK: That's being eliminated.
SC: Right now. So those folks
out there right now who have Medicare but also have a Medicare advantage
program from Highmark or UPMC or United or whatever it might be to augment what
they otherwise normally might not be covered for, that's going away. What are
they going to do?
BK: They're scrambling, they're
trying to find alternatives, they're going onto the other Medicare and Security
Blue and UPMC. They're scrambling, and a lot of them don't know what to do. The
people that can least afford these more expensive plans are really ending up
with a degraded level of care. I have patients that are on a limited, fixed
income. It used to be Medicare would pay for routine diabetic foot care 100%
because Medicare recognized that doing preventive care prevented amputations,
prevented complications. Now the HMOs have applied a specialist co pay for the
routine visits. Whereas they never paid anything out of pocket in the past now
they pay anywhere from a $20 to a $40 co pay every visit. If you're seen by
multiple specialists and you're on a fixed income a $40 co pay is a big chunk
of money when you have three physician visits a month. Those numbers add up
quick.
SC: Especially when you're
making a thousand dollars a month from Social Security and you got to buy food
and pay your bills and pay your utilities and everything else, $20 is pretty
significant.
BK: It's not a small amount of
money for people on a fixed income. It's affecting our practice, our
demographics are down, our practice load is down, because instead of coming
every two months for routine care, they're coming every 3, 6, 9, 12 months, and
we're seeing a lot more diabetic foot infections and ulcers because of the
neglect. They're just not getting the care they should be getting.
SC: We went over aspects of how
care is going to change, how managed care is going to be managed even more. Is
this, in your mind, being a doctor, having studied this, is what we're seeing
in ObamaCare a European model?
BK: Oh certainly it's a European
model . It's truly full bore socialism. People have said, "Oh, you can't
call Obama a socialist." Well, why not, when you're implementing policies
that are purely socialistic in nature?
SC: Yeah, see, you guys are all
sponsoring the ad, right there's your name, in fact you're at the top of the
list with Mark and Mark and the rest of the guys, not only are you buying these
ads saying "The Danger of ObamaCare," and explaining as best you can
in the space provided the problems of this health care plan but, down here, in
bold type, underlined, it says and I'm
going to quote, "We must defeat
President Obama in November."
You guys are being political!
BK: Darn right!
SC: You're not supposed to. No!
"The Church isn't supposed to be political."
BK: We're not
"Church." We're lay people. We're allowed to be political. We're
allowed to come right out and say what they should be saying from the pulpit,
which is, "You can't vote for a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual politician
and show up for communion tomorrow morning."
I'm a firm believer in, if what
it takes to preach the full Gospel is to give up your tax exempt status, then
by gosh give up the tax exempt status, stand up
and call a spade a spade. If that means we have to close every other
church, I'll pay for the gas to drive to the next church, just to get our
priests and our bishops and our cardinals to call a spade a spade. The days of
compromising just to keep a tax exempt status should be over. We need
courageous defiance. We need our leaders to stand up and say, "Enough is
enough!" People's lives are at stake here.
SC: Tell me, honestly, and don't
hold back, how big of a fan are you of [Cardinal] Tim Dolan?
BK: He's done a really good job
but, you know, I'm more radical than he is.
SC: Let me tell you, understand,
he's a cardinal, he is like the cardinal, the one who is looked upon in the
United States, so I can't ever remember someone of that high a stature who...
BK: I can. Cardinal O'Connor.
Cardinal O'Connor in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was trying to
coerce the Church to finance abortions, he stood up and he said, "JAIL ME!
We're not going to do it! JAIL ME!"
SC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that
was then, that was then, that was two decades ago.
BK: And we need it more than
ever now.
SC: Things have changed so
dramatically today, and all of a sudden there's Tim Dolan. I just think he is
so cool.
BK: He's great. We have to
recapture that militant witness.
SC: He's got fire and the US
Conference of Catholic Bishops are showing some spine here for a change, aren't
they.
BK: Praise God. Yes. Yes, we
need that leadership, we need courageous leaders who are willing to stand up
and say "Enough is enough."
SC: So as far as the health care
plan itself goes it's in the hands of the US Supreme Court right now. They're
going to decide a couple of things. First of all they're going to decide if the
individual mandate, which means you got to buy it, you have to buy health
insurance...
BK: Which is unconstitutional on
its face. If the US government can coerce us to buy health insurance, they can
coerce us to buy General Motors cars, which was bought out by the Obama
administration.
SC: Again, we've got 9 people in
black robes who are going to decide whether or not its constitutional.
BK: Frightening.
SC: And I had a lawyer tell me
one time, "I don't care how open and shut your case is, if you end up in a
court room, you run the risk of losing." I don't care what people have
read out of the questioning of the Supremes, I don't care if everybody is
saying, "Well it looks like it's going to be 5 to 4, Kennedy is probably
going to go with Roberts and Alito." I don't care. There is a chance that
it could be found constitutional.
BK: That's why we're running
these ads.
SC: Then, at that point, excuse
my French, we are screwed. We're done.
BK: Yes. Yes. Then our last
recourse is at the voting booth this November. And there is nothing wrong with
coming right out and saying, "Anybody that voted for this monstrosity
needs to be voted out. If you voted for ObamaCare, you do not deserve the vote
of any thinking American."
SC: Is it that bad though? Is
ObamaCare that bad?
BK: Certainly it is that bad.
Socialism is that bad. Socialism sees the human person as a unit. They don't
recognize the intrinsic value of a person made in the image and likeness of
God. They see them as someone who contributes to the state coffers and insofar
as you contribute, you get to receive. When you cease to contribute to the
state coffers, you cease to receive benefits. It's a cost benefit analysis. It
is utilitarian.
SC: But we've seen the Church
come out openly and support other government programs that provide welfare to
those who can't, they've supported all kinds of government programs.
BK: Yes, and just like they've
failed to teach the Church's teachings, they've failed in supporting socialism.
They should not be doing so. The concept of subsidiarity means that you do
things at the local level. You don't have the federal government impose things
from the top down. The Church has no business supporting socialistic agendas or
laws. This is not something that should be done at the federal level. This is
not a Church teaching. Socialism is not compatible with either Catholicism or
American history and tradition.
SC: So you're saying if I'm a
good Catholic, or if I'm a good Lutheran, or if I'm a good Episcopalian or
whatever the case may be, it's my responsibility as being a good Christian,
because we are all brothers in Christ, if I am a good Christian it is my
obligation to provide for that poor person, to provide for that young girl who
needs help, to provide for that family who needs help. It's my congregation, my
parish, my group, it's our responsibility to provide for them, it's not the
responsibility for us to give that responsibility to the government.
BK: The government has usurped
that responsibility but it is not proper to the government. its proper to the
people. The people should be taking care of each other.
SC: Do you think we can do it
better?
BK: Certainly, we always did.
The government didn't do it till 50 or 100 years ago. This idea that the
government has to provide everything is a modern construct that does not
comport with the history of this country or the history of the Christian
people. Bishop Jenky was 100% right when he said the overpowering state is very
jealous of its prerogatives. It doesn't like it when there is competition. It
will let us worship on Sunday, but don't you dare take its prerogative to
provide for the people because that is the state's role. And it is very
jealous. And when you have a totalitarian government, they don't tolerate
competition from the churches. They might let you worship on Sunday. They're
not going to let you compete in the political realm.
SC: Ok, I want to talk about the
HHS mandate. There was Kathleen Sebelius, and she said, "Oh by the way,
you Catholics, you Catholic people, we're going to give you an extra year to
sort of get your house in order, but you're going to have to provide
contraception, sterilization, all these women's' health procedures that everybody else is going to have to
provide." And then all hell sort of broke loose.
BK: Ain't gonna happen,
Kathleen, ain't gonna happen! The bishop have a choice. They can either close
down their institutions, they can either change them and make them secular...
SC: Show me one person,
honestly, with all due respect, show me one person out there who actually
thinks for a moment that you're going to see Catholic hospitals all across the
country close down. That you're going to see Catholic charities that do literally
billions of dollars worth of work, shut down.
BK: Why not?
SC: All just because their
health care, they have to provide a certain thing in their health care. Do you
honestly think for a moment that that would happen?
BK: I think eventually it could
happen, it just depends on how strongly the administration wants to push. What
has to happen is the bishops have to say, "We are not going to give in on
this." They need to be courageous, they need to be defiant, they need to
say in no uncertain terms, "No, we're not going to abide by your mandate.
No, we're not going to close down our institutions. No, we're not going to pay
your fines. Jail me."
SC: That would be a great video
clip on Fox News, watching a couple of nuns and a couple of priests being
walked off to prison in handcuffs.
BK: Not only that, not just nuns
and priests, the laity need to show up and stand there and put a ring around
these churches, these institutions, these schools, these hospitals, they need
to stand in solidarity with their bishops and say, "We'll go to jail with
you, bishop. Just lead us in this fight."
SC: People still don't
understand, and again I'm trying to be as courteous as I can to the average
person, people don't understand still
what the main crux of this issue is. They think, and because the opposition has
been very vocal, from the president to the HHS director to the news media to
those of us in the Catholic Church who think that contraception is OK, we're
trying to make this about contraception.
BK: It's not about contraception.
SC: It's not about
contraception, it's about the government telling a religious group that they
have to do something, they have to provide something, that is totally 100%
opposed to the tenets of their faith.
BK: It really is intrinsically
an attack on religion. It is an attack on faith.
SC: Then why are there priests
out there saying, "There is no war on religion. There's no problem. We're
making a mountain out of a mole hill?"
BK: Well, unfortunately, we have
a generation of priests who weren't properly catechized. They don't realize the
intrinsic evil of some of these things. Our Pope is trying to straighten that
out. He has said, there are many life issues, there are many cultural issues
that we need to talk about, but preeminent among those issues, over and above
all those issues, is abortion and euthanasia and the defense of marriage. Those
take precedent. They come above and beyond any other issue. Yes, you can be
opposed to capital punishment, we should be, there are better ways of punishing
the guilty, you can be opposed to unjust war, but, you must be opposed to
abortion, to euthanasia, to a perversion of traditional marriage. And this
seamless garment idea, that all these issues are equal, is an error that has
permeated many of the people in our priesthood, many of our seminaries, and it
needs to be rooted out, and I think our Holy Father is starting to do that.
SC: Where are we going from
here? Obviously, there is a certain amount of treading water waiting for June
to roll around and the Supremes and what they decide.
BK: My gut feeling is the
Supremes are at a minimum going to strike down the mandate.
SC: If the mandate gets struck down then the
whole thing falls like a house of cards though.
BK: Certainly it does, but that
doesn't mean the rest of the law. They didn't put in a severability clause.
They made it all or none.
SC: Well, they are going to
decide on severability.
BK: Yes, but constitutionally if
there is no severability clause the whole thing has to be struck down.
SC: But the Supreme Court will
decide whether they can sever that
particular thing from that.
BK: I think that is the only
variable that we can't predict, whether or not they're going to strike down the
mandate. The mandate is blatantly unconstitutional, they have to.
SC: Do you firmly believe that
it's going to be 5 - 4, 6 - 3 maybe?
BK: I do. I think the only
question is whether or not, when they strike down the mandate, they strike down
the whole law. I think is the only question that remains. If they strike down
the whole law we're still back at square one, health care is intrinsically
broken.
SC: Everybody agrees with that.
It would be nice to be able to start from scratch and start to build in a more
logical, in a more realistic fashion, don't you think?
BK: Oh certainly.
SC: But will that happen, or
will we just go back to what the status quo was?
BK: If we had a true
conservative to vote for, it might happen. Full disclosure, I'm not a Democrat
or a Republican, I'm an independent. I don't think either party represents my
interests and my beliefs . Unfortunately, the GOP has put forward a candidate
who wrote and passed the blueprint for ObamaCare. It's a very frustrating
situation for social conservatives.
SC: But he did that at the state
level.
BK: So socialism at the state
level is OK, but socialism at the federal level is not?
SC: If you're a firm believer in
the 10th Amendment I would say to a certain extent yes. Because of the whole
states' rights issue. That is something that the people of Massachusetts, the
people who vote for their legislators, if that's what they want, because of the
10th Amendment, because of states' rights,
that's their prerogative. But if we in Pennsylvania want to have
something different, that's our right and the biggest problem I have is the
federal government stepping in and telling the state, you don't basically have
any rights any more, we're making all of these decisions.
BK: And then passing unfunded
mandates. You have to expand Medicaid to cover all these uninsured people but
we're not going to give you the money to pay for it. Where is the money
supposed to come from? That's the biggest problem in this.
SC: You know, the whole abortion
question is and should be a states' rights issue.
BK: I disagree with that.
SC: That decision was based on
this cloudy right to privacy. There's even some question as far as what is the
right to privacy. That was the whole issue, you know, between the woman and her
doctor, and mandating it federally. The reason that's bad law is because it was
decided federally at a federal level. It's an issue that basically should be
left to the states.
BK: But I think our constitution
and our founding documents were very clear: "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Life is in the
womb as well as outside the womb, birth is just a change of address.
SC: I'm saying the decision
itself, if it was going to be made at all, should have been made at the state
level. I'm very big on states' rights, and using the Commerce Clause to say you
have to buy health insurance to me is an abomination and would make Madison and
Adams and Washington and Jefferson roll over in their graves.
BK: Or to use any justification
to say a church must do something that is diametrically opposed to her
foundational beliefs.
SC: And we're trying to make
these guys now, our founders, who to them God was everything, America was
founded on this Divine Principle of our rights were given to us by God, and now
to paint most of them as deists or whatever, it's not true. To say Thomas
Jefferson was an atheist is an idiotic statement.
BK: It's also part of the agenda
of the Socialists. By its very nature for the Socialist rights come from the
state and can be taken by the state. In the American tradition rights come from
God and are guaranteed or protected by the state. The two ideas are
diametrically opposed. Socialism is diametrically opposed to our American founding
and our American documents. Our rights don't come from the state, the state
can't take our rights. Our rights are given by God and protected by the state.
But you have to break down that understanding in order to impose upon the
people a socialistic worldview.
SC: This is very, uh, the
average person doesn't necessarily want to get into this kind of stuff.
BK: And they're not taught it in
the schools either.
SC: The average person, and I've
said this all along, and I don't mean this with any disrespect, but we have
evolved as an American society from where we were to where we are now basically
because we just want our stuff. Just give me my stuff.
BK: Bread and circuses.
SC: Yeah, ancient Rome, there
you go.
BK: Yeah, we've been there, done
that. We've seen where this goes. We can turn around, we can prevent the
collapse, or we can follow down the path and watch what happens.
SC: OK this question comes to
you from a person I've known for a long time. She, you talk about a
conservative, would make you look like a flamer. That's all I'm going to say.
BK: Careful now!
SC: She says, "Steve,
please ask Dr. Kopp about what he thinks of our own local dioceses' response to
the HHS mandate. Other than signing a statement on this with other Pennsylvania
bishops why is there silence on this in our own Catholic newspaper or anywhere?"
BK: Well, you had Bishop Mark
here in the studio. He spoke to these issues. So he actually is taking an upfront
role in addressing it. I think there is frustration in the pews when these
issues are not addressed. I remember patients saying to me how frustrated they
were in the 2008 election when one of their priests was saying from the pulpit
that you need to vote for this guy or you're a racist. I don't know how a
priest can stand in the pulpit and say to vote for a man who has a known voting
record for being pro-abortion and pro-homosexual. This guy is the most radical liberal
progressivist pro-abortion pro-homosexual politician who has ever occupied the
White House, bar none. I don't know how in good conscience a priest can stand
in the pulpit and say that kind of thing. It's very frustrating for those of us
who consider us orthodox or pro-life Catholics, real Catholics, to hear this
kind of stuff from the pulpit. And you can see how much it hurts the faithful,
both from their words as well as their actions.
SC: It can be very confusing too
because, as you said, let's face it, over the last few years, perhaps even the
last couple generations, the catechesis emphasis just hasn't been there. And
for those who do not take it upon themselves to study Church teachings, to read
the scriptures regularly, it can be so confusing when you're getting these
mixed messages and you're not up on your faith as much as you should be. Isn't
there a tendency to just go, "Oh, the heck with it, I'm just going to go to
Mass on Sunday, I'll have communion, and I'll go and I'm not going to worry
about this stuff. And I'm not going to get involved, because it just makes my
head hurt."
BK: It's certainly a tendency,
yes. But we're living in an age when you can't do that anymore. Catholics need
to stand up. They need to educate themselves in real Catholicism, not the watered
down spirit of whatever it is that we've been taught for the last 40 years.
There's hope for the future. We see really good things happening. We have a
good bishop who really is going to stand up and do what's right. I know that,
I've talked to him personally, he's a good man, he understands the issues. He
might do things diplomatically quietly behind the scenes but he's doing them.
SC: He does seem a really laid
back kind of guy. I talked to him. He doesn't appear to be like you or me, in
that he's not in your face.
BK: All of us have a different
role to play.
SC: He's not in your face.
BK: That's OK, as long as he's
orthodox I don't care if he's in my face or not. We live in a time where there
is a resurgence of orthodoxy. The people are learning the Faith. We have a Holy
Father who is personally reviewing every single candidate for bishop before
they are appointed bishop. He goes through every dossier that goes to Rome. He
is making sure that the guys that are put in positions of leadership know the
Faith and are going to teach the Faith. We have a lot of hope. There is a
popular priest blogger on the internet who says we have to rely on the
"biological solution." The old liberals don't reproduce. They're
dying out. They're being replaced by good orthodox conservative Catholics.
SC: That is an interesting philosophy
that I have not heard.
BK: It's the biological solution.
Liberalism is infecund by its very nature. It doesn't reproduce. God is the
author of life. Liberalism isn't fertile.
SC: Alright, the Supreme Court
rules in June, 5-4, 6-3, whatever, that the individual mandate is
unconstitutional.
BK: Then we're back at stage one.
We still have the best health care in the world. Everyone comes here for the
best health care.
SC: But what do we do?
BK: The first thing we do is we
stop this out of control tort system which is forcing doctors to practice
defensive medicine, order every test in the book, order every consult in the
book, because they're afraid of getting sued.
SC: But that genie is already
out of the bottle. How do you put that back in the bottle again.
BK: Do we want to reform the
system or not? If we do not reform the tort system, the system is broke and
cannot be fixed. Because that is the primary cause of the skyrocketing health
care costs. We're afraid of being sued. Every day we're afraid of being blamed
for something that we had no way of knowing was going to happen. If I was an
auto mechanic, and I changed your alternator, and I put the wrong alternator
on, you wouldn't sue me, I would just go back and put the right alternator on.
If you're a doctor and you do the wrong thing...
SC: You can't do that though as
a doctor, because if you do the wrong thing,
somebody ends up dead.
BK: Let's face it, doctors are
no different than mechanics, we're highly trained technicians. We do the best
we can do. But we're still human.
SC: But there's a big difference
between replacing my alternator and losing my arm.
BK: I agree. And the guys who
consistently make you lose your arm, they should be out of the system. They
shouldn't be protected. If there is true malpractice going on, there should be mechanisms
for getting rid of those bad eggs. They should not be in the system.
SC: But you've got the fox
guarding the hen house in the AMA and how the whole appeals process...
BK: I'm not a big fan of the
AMA, so I'm not going to defend that.
SC: There's so much, we could
sit here for the next several hours and point our fingers at health care things.
BK: You know one thing we could do
tomorrow? Do what England does. If you bring a frivolous lawsuit against
somebody and you lose, you pay their defense.
SC: I've always been a big fan
of that.
BK: Another thing you can do is
make a system that actually has incentive for the people to control their
health care costs and that reintroduces competition into the health care system.
Provide catastrophic health care coverage for everybody, but make everyone pay
10% out of pocket every year. If you make $100,000 per year, you have to pay
$10,000 out of pocket before the catastrophic federal coverage kicks in. With
that first $10,000 you can put it into a savings account. At the end of the
year, you can roll it into your 401k. In the meantime, get the hospitals and
the doctors competing for the out of pocket expenses.
SC: Gotcha. Understand. Make the
markets work.
BK: Make the markets work. There
are free market mechanisms to control the costs.
SC: Do you believe there is a
will there, on the part of legislators and the public? That's going to be tough
stuff to make happen.
BK: As a friend of mine says, I'm
not an optimist, I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. When people are addicted
to entitlements, it's very hard to break the addiction. When people have a
mentality that they're owed everything and that they don't have to work for it,
it's very hard to get them out of that mentality. A lot of times a system has
to collapse before you can rebuild a more equitable system. And I'm a cynic. I don't
know how this system is not going to collapse.
SC: Oh my gosh, I've got to tell
you, this has been one of the most fun days that I've had in a long long long
time, because I've found a kindred spirit here today, Dr. Brian Kopp. I can't
tell you how much fun I've had.
BK: Quickest two hours I've
spent in a long time.
SC: I'm sure there's a bunch of
stuff we could find that we disagree about, philosophically, ideology, maybe
even theologically, I don't know. But I'm with you, the effort by Mark and
Mark, we're with you. This is something honestly that regardless of what the
Supreme Court decides, I don't want to see a grassroots effort like this in the
Church in this area, I don't want to see it go away. I want to see it build.
BK: I don't think it will.
SC: I want to see us sort of
gather in more of the flock, and have these kinds of discussions, and have
educational meetings, and seminars, and things whereby we can all become not
just better Catholics but better people.
BK: This is what the Tea Party
should have been. The Tea Party lost its spiritual foundation. There were too
many disparate segments.
SC: Well, they wanted power.
They wanted to get this person elected or that person elected or whatever, it became
a power thing rather than, hear is our goal.
BK: And it's amazing how persecution
unifies. Glenn Beck said it best, "We're all Catholics now." I'm
seeing more openings among our Evangelical and Fundamental Christian brothers.
SC: Imagine that, coming from a
Mormon, for crying out loud, but it's true. Because once it happens to one, then
it happens to another, then it happens to another, and before you know it, that's
what happened in Germany, that's what happened in Italy, in the Soviet Union. I
don't want to see that happen here.
BK: I don't either, and I kind
of think this campaign, this election season is a test. We can either pass it
or fail it. It's a final chance. A lot of times in the Old Testament, God used
the enemies of Israel to test and to discipline Israel, and when they failed
the test, things were ugly for Israel. When they passed the test, blessings
flowed, and I think we're living in a time where we have a test, and we have to
rise to the occasion.
SC: There are those who are out
there listening saying, that's all well and good. But just let my stuff alone,
let me have my stuff, let me go to church, let me worship the way I want, let
me go about my life the way I want to go about it, and let me alone.
BK: When governments start down
this path, they don't let you alone. It's a false concept that they're going to
let us alone. They're not going to let us alone, they're going to etch and eat
away at our rights and our freedoms. From this point forward, it just gets ugly
if we don't stand up and fight.
SC: Well said, well said. Thank
you so much for coming in today. I really appreciate it and I hope maybe I can
get you back some time.
BK: I would love to come back.
SC: There's so much we can do, I
think.
BK: Let's do it.
SC: I'm excited. You've got me
fired up buddy. Again, my thanks to Dr. Brian Kopp.
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