Letters: Health care & the good sisters

MY FRIEND'S daughter is dying of cancer. She has a tumor on the brain and no medical insurance. For months, because of no insurance, she was denied certain medicines to relieve the pain of the tumor, as well as other types of treatment.

I don't understand the rules of the insurance business, or the ins and outs of who might be eligible for what, but there is no getting around the fact that this poor lady has no options. In a matter of a few days, the hospital that has temporarily admitted her will transfer her to Sacred Heart Free Home for Incurable Cancer in the Hunting Park area of North Philadelphia.

Those who go there are truly poor, having no money in the first place or whose money is now gone. They have nothing: No money, no insurance, no other place to go. The care the patients receive is palliative, meaning no aggressive steps will be taken to attack the disease. Instead, patients are afforded the comfort needed to die in a supportive and caring environment.

The nuns who provide this care have been doing so since the order's founding 109 years ago by Rose Hawthorne, daughter of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. The sisters receive no government aid nor do they accept Medicare or Medicaid. They will accept nothing in payment from any family member for care given to their loved one.

The sisters treat more than 1,000 patients a year at their three homes in the U.S. Their patients are those whom our health system has left behind or who have been impoverished by their medical bills.

While the witness of the sisters and their care of the dying is a testament to their faith in God, their care results from exactly what is wrong and untenable in health care today. I feel sure that even these noble nuns would agree that, except for the sake of religion and the special love that only religion can provide, the existence of a "Sacred Heart Free Home for Incurable Cancer" in 21st century America is a scandal.

Sadly, the people who are fighting health-care reform are impervious to the reality that "we're leaving people out." They don't know the likes of the patients who die at a Sacred Heart Free Home.

As a nation, we need to be made aware that we are denying proper medical care and insurance to thousands of fellow Americans not because it is a right due to them, but because it is due to them because it is right - due to them because of their humanity. That is what the Dominican Hawthorne Sisters exemplify, and that is what their witness of care to the poor, the uninsured and forgotten should remind us.

Rev. Stephen Persan, Philadelphia

Anti-war, or anti-GOP?

As I watch the news and see more and more soldiers losing their lives in Afghanistan, I was wondering where all the war protesters are. Do war protesters protest only when there's a Republican president in office? I guess it was never about soldiers losing their lives. What a shame.

Nicky Giorno

Hunlock Creek (Pa.) State prison