Robert Scheer: Racism and Cruelty Drive GOP Health Care Agenda

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Racism and Cruelty Drive GOP Health Care Agenda

Posted on Oct 8, 2013
By Robert Scheer


Before he was disgraced into resigning his presidency over the Watergate burglary scandal, Richard Nixon had successfully engineered an even more odious plot known as his Southern Strategy. The trick was devilishly simple: Appeal to the persistent racist inclination of Southern whites by abandoning the Republican Party’s historic association with civil rights and demonizing the black victims of the South’s history of segregation.

That same divisive strategy is at work in the Republican rejection of the Affordable Care Act. GOP governors are largely in control of the 26 states, including all but Arkansas in the South, that have refused to implement the act’s provision for an expansion of Medicaid to cover the millions of American working poor who earn too much to qualify for the program now. A New York Times analysis of census data concludes that as a result of the Republican governors’ resistance, “A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help. ...”

Why anyone who claims to be pro-life would want to deny health care to single mothers is an enduring mystery in the morally mischievous ethos of the Republican Party. But the exclusion of a working poor population that skews disproportionately black in the South is simply a continuation of the divide-and-conquer politics that have informed Republican strategy since Nixon.

The game plan of gutting the Affordable Care Act despite its passage into law and before its positive outcomes are demonstrated can be traced to a “blueprint to defunding Obamacare” initialed by the GOP conservative leadership under the aegis of Heritage Action for America. Ironically that is the political front of the Heritage Foundation, the leading GOP think tank that is credited by some architects of Obamacare as the initial inspiration of their health care program. The difference is that whereas the Heritage Foundation was pushing a mild health care reform based on increased profit for private insurers, as in the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts, the Republicans object to the provisions in this president’s program that broaden access for the needy. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/racism_and_cruelty_drive_gop_health_care_agenda_20131008

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Last sentence of this piece says it all . . .

For those who lose out, there’s what the Republican die-hards call tough love. That’s not love. It’s hate.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. What the loons don't realize is

that blacks are still only 13% of the population. And as much as the pundits like mixing "% of a population" versus "total numbers" to try to obfuscate who is actually also getting hit, the article notes the following -

As the Times study noted: “In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid. In Mississippi, 56 percent of all poor and uninsured adults are black, though they account for just 38 percent of the population.”

But that also means that almost 44 percent of the poor and uninsured in Mississippi are white, and the gutting of this program that hurts them is evidence of the false consciousness that informs racist appeals. As the Times points out, someone, black or white, making $11,000 a year frying chicken in a convenience store falls into the gap of making too much to qualify for the state’s existing Medicaid program but not enough to be subsidized under the new health care plan as the state defines it. For those who lose out, there’s what the Republican die-hards call tough love. That’s not love. It’s hate.

MS is your extreme generally recognized annually as 1st or 2nd in terms of poverty and a state with most likely the highest percentage of blacks.

But elsewhere like WV, where the black population is only ~3.4% , the poverty rate is 21% for whites and 37% of blacks. So just by sheer numbers (WV total pop = 1.86 million in 2010) -

White pop. = 1.86 million x 93.2% = 1.73 million and then 21% in poverty = ~364,000
Black pop. = 1.86 million x 3.4 % = 63,200 and then 37% in poverty = ~24,000

So you have HIGHER NUMBERS of whites in poverty than blacks (this is generally the case nationally) because there are just MORE OF THEM, and THEY are the ones who are getting hit as collateral damage to the racism in legislation that sadly many of them support against their own interests.

So distorting the % of a population in poverty (which is sad enough) as a way to demonize and paint a face of poverty as being "black" does a complete disservice to all who are impacted - most notably whites, whose numbers in poverty far outnumber blacks in poverty.