When I first heard about the Network of Spiritual Progressives back in 2005 one of the things that most impressed and pleased me was a document in which they laid out their agenda and on each point contrasted their view with the typical liberal and conservative views. Here’s one of them. Pretty succinct, I think:

5. We will seek a single-payer national health care plan and also broaden the public’s understanding of health care. Our physical health cannot be divorced from environmental, social, spiritual, and psychological realities – and the entire medical system has to be reshaped in light of that understanding to focus on prevention, encourage alternative forms of health practice along with traditional Western forms, and insist that because human beings have many levels of reality, health care must reflect that rather than seek to reduce the human to the merely material.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA – Liberals seek the gradual addition of benefits for different sectors of the population but leave the whole system in the hands of the profiteers, thus guaranteeing that their proposed changes will be undermined by the insurance companies and drug companies who raise their costs to make huge profits and thus make these health care reforms unreasonably costly. The single-payer plan does not increase but, rather, will decrease the total amount spent on health care by the U.S.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA – Conservatives continually place private profit over public need when it comes to health care. They think of health care as something that needs to be earned rather than as a manifestation of the sacred obligation we have to care for each other.

For the rest, go here.