It seems that healthcare has grown so big and so expensive that it has lost its fundamental principles.
As a child I remember walking to the front of our church chapel one by one and our Sunday School teacher measuring our height in inches. We were then given the challenge to donate that many pennies to our local children’s hospital. They called it “Pennies by the Inch”. My parents along with other parents would not give their children the pennies outright, rather they helped their children earn the money themselves. That way we felt like we had made the contribution ourselves. All of our donations added up with other donations in our community to build that hospital and run it.
I remember going with the other children in our congregation to that hospital to give our pennies to help the children there. It was before we had polio vaccine and we were suffering a terrible polio epidemic. I remember a polio ward where I saw children lying in artificial lung machines. I remember so vividly those large cold stainless steel cylinders lined up in a row, slowly pumping in and out, helping the children breath. We could see only the children’s heads sticking out of one end. I felt so sorry for those children lying there unable to move, but I also felt so good that I was able to help them.
We still have that children’s hospital in our community, but now it is part of a large hospital network. They still have fundraising campaigns but the personal involvement and ownership is gone especially for congregations helping families helping children helping other children.
From the start of our country, healthcare was intimately supported by religious congregations banding together to provide the medical necessities in their areas. Those charitable efforts not only helped the hospital but improved their communities by giving charitable opportunities to everyone. Everyone felt twice blessed, once by the better health care available to them and second by their participation in it.
That is how healthcare should work! But because non-religious values have taken over and swamped the healthcare system, there are few opportunities for that to happen today.
We at Ability Found have tried to bring back these ideals, bringing medical equipment to those who are disabled. We are dependent on good charitable partners, families and individuals to support us. Likewise we stay close to the community we serve and the donors that support us. We are only a small part of the health care solution, but we are doing it the right way. Since we have began helping people, we have received hundreds upon hundreds of letters from people telling us how our equipment has helped them, saved their health (and in some cases literally saved their life), opened new opportunities, kept their families intact… and… in various other ways…, improved their lives immensely.
In doing so we are giving opportunities and helping the donors that support us.