Just before details began to emerge from the Obama administration and congressional committees about their proposals for reforming the nation’s health care system, Florida’s bishops helped the U.S. bishops urge the faithful to participate in the debate.

The Florida Catholic Conference, which represents the state’s bishops on public policy matters, sent out an e-mail action alert June 8 to members of its Advocacy Network noting that U.S. Senate and House committees were likely to begin discussing specific legislative proposals the following week. The bishops encouraged Catholic Floridians to contact Sens. Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez as well as their congressional representative to ask them “to support health care reform that respects human life and dignity, from its earliest beginnings to its natural end.”

“In our Catholic tradition, health care is a basic human right. Access to health care should not depend on where a person works, how much a family earns or where a person lives. Instead, every person, created in the image and likeness of God, has a right to life and to those things necessary to sustain life, including affordable, quality health care,” the e-mail read in part.

Michael Sheedy, the Florida Catholic Conference’s associate director for health, said June 15 that the state organization was helping to spread the word at the request of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“Health care reform has been a long priority of the Florida bishops as well as the U.S. Catholic bishops,” Sheedy said.

The Florida e-mail included a link to a June 2 action alert posted by USCCB’s Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development on the organization’s Web site. The posting laid out four principles the U.S. bishops say should guide the writing of health reform legislation.