A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the centerpiece of President Barack Obama\’s signature healthcare overhaul law that requires that most Americans get insurance by 2014 or pay a financial penalty.
The Orthodox Union formally commented on pending Obama administration regulations mandating employer-sponsored health plans for contraceptives and sterilization.
In the always lively Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes in a cover essay that \”support for universal health care is an imperative in Jewish law.\” Is it now? On health care reform, Rabbi Dorff has his classical sources all lined up — most having to do with obligations on the community to rescue its needy, the captive, and those otherwise endangered. The communal court system can compel a person to give charity in support of the poor. Proper medical services are a necessity in a Jewish community. And so on. Whether through socialized medicine or government health insurance, something must be done: the fact of there being 40 million uninsured Americans is \”intolerable.\”
Whether or not we are believers in the Obama plan, or any of the particular plans for universal health care currently winding their way through Congress, support for universal health care is an imperative in Jewish law. Although what is available in medicine and its cost have changed radically, particularly over the past century, the fundamental right to receive good care — and to be compensated for giving it — goes very far back in our heritage, though perhaps, ironically, not all the way to the Torah or even the Mishnah.
“Why aren’t you talking about Michael Jackson more?”
It happens over and over again: A planned trip to Israel induces gasps of worry from friends who have never visited the country. Every suicide bombing or mortar attack on television reinforces the vision of Israel as a vast raging war zone.
Last week I was driving to a family celebration at Leisure World in Laguna Hills when I noticed something very odd about the weather: Fall was in the air.
New York state legislators are trying to prevent insurance companies from blacklisting travelers to Israel so that they cannot obtain life insurance coverage.
Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York Assembly, and Assemblyman Peter Grannis unveiled a bill Jan. 15 that would bar state insurance firms from denying life insurance to anyone who has traveled to Israel.
An undeniable physical reminder of a man\’s connection to Judaism, circumcision has been an important focus of the first days of a boy\’s life since before we received the Torah. However, for almost as long, there have been people who question the act of circumcision and those who have rallied for eliminating the practice.
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