Physician says key to health care is morality

By Nicki Gorny
Toledo (Ohio) Blade, April 5, 2019

In a constantly churning national news cycle, it’s easy to look at health care from a policy perspective: Which prospective candidates are advocating universal coverage? Which legislators are cheering a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act?

Toledoan Johnathon Ross can keep up with the best versed of the policy wonks on the issue of health care for all. But Dr. Ross, who knows the limitations of the current system firsthand while trying to connect his own patients with adequate treatment, starts a little further back.

“It will end up being a policy issue eventually,” Dr. Ross said, “but I think it has to be a moral commitment before it’s a policy decision. Or at least those two walk hand-in-hand up the street in our protests, which we may have to do to get it done.”

The MultiFaith Council of Northwest Ohio also honors the 2019 Heroes of Compassion at the MultiFaith Banquet. This year’s honorees are Nazife Amrou, Sister Virginia Welsh, the Islamic Food Bank of Toledo and the YWCA of Northwest Ohio.

Dr. Ross will reflect on the moral underpinnings of health care for all in a keynote speech at the MultiFaith Banquet hosted by the MultiFaith Council of Northwest Ohio at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo on Sunday. This year marks the 18th annual banquet, which Judy Trautman, chairman of the MultiFaith Council, said is expected to welcome about 150 faith leaders and community members who reflect the region’s diverse religious traditions.

While Dr. Ross doesn’t see himself as traditionally religious, he credits a multitude of traditions in his family background and his upbringing with influencing his views. And in his nearly 30 years of advocacy for universal health care, including formally under Physicians for a National Health Program, he’s been a frequent speaker on the church-basement circuit.

That includes the Compassion Forum 2018: Poor People’s Campaign Teach-In at Monroe Street United Methodist Church in October. Co-sponsored by the MultiFaith Council, it was almost an “edgy” topic for an organization that generally skews away from the political, Ms. Trautman said.

Dr. Ross’ passionate advocacy there caught her attention.

“He’s so passionate and compassionate that he makes a good fit for us,” she said.

Dr. Ross recently retired from a wide-ranging career in medicine, including nearly 40 years as an internist at Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center. He has sat on the State Medical Board of Ohio and serves on the Lucas County Board of Health.

Rather than representing a traditional religious community at the MultiFaith Banquet, Dr. Ross jokes that his family tree touches on just about every religious tradition short of Druidry. Russian Jews account for his father’s side of the family, while his maternal family brings in German Protestants, Roman Catholics, and, he thinks, a few Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“When we would get together, religion was kind of taboo. We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “Although at one family party, after a few too many drinks, I can remember my uncle — he’s from the Jewish wing of the family — getting up and singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ ”

Childhood friends added another element to his religious education: When a neighbor struggled to learn his Catholic catechism, Dr. Ross, in an effort to help him study, essentially learned it alongside him. Another friend was devoutly Protestant, so, maybe once a month, Dr. Ross showed up at Sunday school with his friend’s family after a Saturday sleepover.

His exposure to a diverse set of traditions piqued his curiosity. He went on to enroll in religious courses in college and remains knowledgeable on a wide variety of them.

“What I’ve come to the conclusion is that I actually think I believe in all of it,” he said. “To me, existence is a miracle. I can see God just looking out my back window here.”

His advocacy is influenced by these myriad religions, but also, significantly, by first-hand experience. In his work he has crossed paths with the insurance industry and with the limitations it often imposes on patients in poverty. He ran up against rural poverty in New York, where he spent two years with the National Health Service Corps.; Toledo presented a first-hand look at urban poverty and its own set of challenges.

“One of the hardest things about dealing with a poverty population is their lack of access to the care that they need, that you know would be appropriate for them based on the science that you’ve studied for decades,” he said. “You can’t get it to them, because the system is unjust.”

“The world is not fair. I understand that,” he continued. “But it could be fairer than it is. To see decent people, rich and poor, afflicted with illness, and to tell me that for people who are poor, I can’t give them what they need when they’re just as good a person as anybody who is born with wealth or lucky enough to have a job that gives them wealth, just seems so unjust to me. It’s so frustrating.

“You can’t be a caregiver in this health care system and not know the system is unjust. Anybody who says it’s not is just not paying attention.”

While health care’s heated history stretches as far back as President Theodore Roosevelt, whom the doctor credits as the first to propose a national health-care plan, Dr. Ross first involved himself publicly under President Bill Clinton as one of the protesters who went to Little Rock to rally for the cause before Mr. Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993.

Dr. Ross has remained a vocal advocate on the issue since, both a national level, as a past president and current board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, and on a local level: At decades’ worth of rallies, protests and faith-based speakerships, he’s been laying out a moral and a pragmatic case for universal coverage in northwest Ohio.

His message tends to fall on receptive ears in faith communities. As Dr. Ross pointed out, several religious traditions have formally weighed in on the right to health care.

The United Methodist Church affirms health care as “a basic human right,” for example. In a letter to the U.S. Senate in 2017, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops emphasized that health-care reform efforts “must begin with the principle that health care is not a privilege, but a right in keeping with the life and dignity of every person.”

At the MultiFaith Banquet, Dr. Ross said he plans to explore this moral and religious side of what’s more often discussed in terms of politics and policy.

“Every single significant — and even some of the insignificant ones, to Americans at least — religious tradition has something that’s akin to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” he said. “All these religious traditions — you name it, it’s there: Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism. It’s everywhere.”

For Dr. Ross, this universal teaching becomes the moral impetus for universal health care.

“Will you stand up for your vulnerable neighbor?” he asks. “Will you stand up for your vulnerable family member? Will you stand up for your vulnerable friends?”

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