In the debate over government-run healthcare, I’m pleased that the debate (if not necessarily the actions of the Democratic congress and the White House) is going in the right direction. Americans are largely saying, as my grandmother used to when voicing dissent, “nothin’ doin.’” It’s a fight we can still win.

There is, however, an element of the debate that is going all but completely ignored: secularization.

The two closest hospitals from my old neighborhood were called Resurrection and Lutheran General. Consider other hospital names across the country: First Methodist, Holy Family, Zion, Sinai, etc. Were the government to employ a system in which they pay the doctors and medical staff, they run in the tricky area in which taxpayers are funding religious organizations. The ACLU would be up in arms in a matter of minutes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. I am focusing on a very small part of an infinitely larger picture. However, in a country where First Amendment religious freedom is a bedrock element of our founding principles, I feel as though someone needs to talk about it. Secularization is dangerous, and the next salvo from the secularist left is going to be coming out of the Trojan horse of federal healthcare.

It goes without saying that the American left has taken a very extreme interpretation of “separation of church and state” in recent decades, and it seems that this would be a predictable extension of that viewpoint. Imagine: hospitals being forced to change their names, to fire chaplains, and to seal off chapels in order to accept patients under the government healthcare plans. Or worse: ambulances ordered to redirect patients only to secular hospitals. If a hospital called “Sacred Heart” is four miles away, and one called “County General” is ten miles away, it would make basic sense for the ambulance carrying the patient in cardiac arrest to go to Sacred Heart. But, pursuant to the logic of the Democratic Party’s directing of tax dollars, the ambulance would have to go to County General. And the patient could die in the process.

Now, I’ll cede that nobody on the left has made this call yet. To my knowledge, nobody calling for government healthcare is demanding a directing of funds away from religious-backed organizations, but I know liberal America, and I promise you that this battle is coming. And sooner than you think. Remember, this is the political ideology that has complaints with Christian crosses on sites of veterans’ monuments and memorials. Would these people really sit by quietly while tax dollars went to institutions named after religious figures, employers of workers whose jobs center on religion, and edifices that house religious monuments (such as chapels)?

When the government gets involved with something, that something will invariably break down and do more harm than good. Healthcare will be no exception. Should the DC Democrats get their way, religious America will suffer yet another blow from the same minds that brought you the removal of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse. 

President Obama and the Democrats, in hopes of passing a new version of the healthcare bill, have altered the “public option”—a government-run healthcare plan that would essentially decimate the insurance market—and replaced it with a “trigger option.”

The new “trigger option” would create a public option system only in those areas where one insurance company has a virtual monopoly over the local industry. For example, in a region of Alabama, there is more or less only one major health insurance company, so if people want insurance, they are all but forced to go through this company. Thus, the free market has failed in these regions and government interjection would appear to help with the quasi-monopoly situation. I like this idea, to a point.

Don’t get me wrong, government intervention is almost never the way to go, but, if this “trigger” plan were to set up government health care companies and provide them with some sort of path to privatization, then we could see the shot in the arm that the healthcare industry that Americans seem to want, without the possibility of a government takeover. More specifically, rather than Congress simply making a healthcare plan, Congress would launch a healthcare company, which, after a couple of years, would be allowed to enter the private market and to “cut the cord” from its mother, the Government.

This would, however, only be effective if, as yet another option, incentive-based, privately-owned health savings accounts were brought into the picture. Because, let’s face it, not everyone wants health insurance. John Stossel recently did a piece on ABC’s 20/20 that illustrated that people who do not buy health insurance actually save money over those who do buy insurance.

Now, here’s why the vision articulated above will not see the light of day anytime soon: first, the Democrats are split over whether or not to include a government option of any sort to begin with. While most, if not all Republicans are firmly in the “no” camp, there isn’t enough agreement to move forward. Second, the Democrats will never agree to a path to privatization because they fundamentally distrust the free market. Which is a shame, because what I have here is exactly the compromise that would save this debate.